In this article, Professor Walter Block discusses the legalities of black mail as well as the Libertarian perspective.

Volume 15, Number 2 (2001)

The United States Constitution guarantees the right to trial by jury in both civil and criminal cases. This article will discuss the history of trial by jury as an aid to revealing what the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution meant when they guaranteed that right. In the process, it will also address the following questions: 1. Did the Constitution give juries the right to judge the law as well as the facts?

2. If so, to what extent is this right still recognized?

3. What is the constitutional basis of judicial decisions nullifying that right?

Classical liberalism arose at a time when Christian orthodoxy was still vibrant. Liberalism and Christian orthodoxy, sharing a number of fundamental ideas about the nature of man and of interpersonal relations, presuppose the same moral ontology of natural law. The high tide of Christian orthodoxy and classical liberalism belongs to the era when natural law was the fundamental concept of all serious thought about the human world.

Volume 15, Number 3 (2001)

James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock are widely credited with creating the Public Choice School. Its main elements include constitutional political economy, an analysis of different voting-rights regimes, and the insight that human beings do not suddenly sprout angel’s wings when they become government bureaucrats (hence, there is government failure as well as market failure). The latter is devoted to an investigation of the premises upon which a legitimate government is predicated, and to an understanding of human and property rights in a constitutional democratic order.

In 1792, Thomas Paine sounded a cautionary note about the economics of empire:

The most unprofitable of all commerce is that connected with foreign dominion. To a few individuals it may be beneficial, merely because it is commerce; but to the nation it is a loss. The expense of maintaining dominion more than absorbs the profit of any trade.

Had Americans consistently heeded Paine’s advice, the United States might have avoided much of the overseas bloodshed, as well as domestic bureaucratization, which have accompanied the creation of the American empire.

David Beito did a great service for the scholarship of liberty and American history with his rediscovery of the Great Depression-era tax resistance movement. He uncovered evidence of widespread opposition to property taxes across America. However, the anti-tax rebellion declined as quickly as it started, a demise that he attributes to a lack of a “focused ideological program” that could capture the popular anti-tax sentiment of the time. Thus, Beito concludes, this tax resistance movement was a failure.

In this article, Frank van Dun discusses the differences between The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD) versus Natural Rights .

Volume 15, Number 4 (2001)

Author’s Introduction: I originally completed this article in 1986, but it appeared only in an obscure, now-defunct (I believe) libertarian publication, Rampart Individualist (Summer 1988). I have long intended to revise it for some more prominent forum, but have never found the time. I offer it again, with only slight stylistic revision, because of the recent public action of Michael A.

Patents and copyrights are forms of immaterial “property” that grant to their owners exclusive control over the production and sale of a specified product—a literary or artistic work in the case of copyrights, an invention or productive process in the case of patents. Though these concepts are subsumed under the broader heading of “intellectual property,” they are not completely analogous and cannot always be justified with the same arguments.

Volume 15, Number 4 (2001)

In this article, Professor Thomas E. Woods Jr. offers a review of Ronald Steel’s Walter Lippmann and the American Century.

Volume 15, Number 4 (2001)