Legal System

Cities that ration water use are punishing consumers for a failure of the system of distribution.

At last, the chief executive must deal with regulations that daily vex the private sector. 

On the Internet, a war between government-backed trademark holders and small web entrepreneurs is heating up. Thanks to the current managers of the Internet and a little-known agency of the United Nations, the trademark holders are winning.

Fifty years ago, the court broke the movie industry into two parts. The result was disastrous for consumers.

The Microsoft and WorldCom-Sprint cases show the need to distinguish legal from economic barriers. 

For two years, the White House has been haranguing owners of large websites, telling them not to violate their visitors' supposed right to privacy. Now, just on the face of it, this is absurd. The proper way to think about websites is as private property. When you go to a website, you are a visitor on someone else's property; the owner has the right to record what interests you. If you don't like it, you shouldn't visit. It's that simple.

In The Constitution of Liberty Friedrich Hayek warned that the rule of law could evolve into the rule of despotism unless the rules that are enforced by the state are known, certain, and prospective rather than retrospective. Throughout history, a hallmark of governmental tyranny has been the opposite kind of behavior: random arrests and incarceration for breaking "laws" that the alleged lawbreakers had no way of knowing about; constantly shifting definitions of what is legal and what is not; and sudden announcements that behavior which was thought for years to be legal and proper was illegal.

Clinton's antitrust man calls for the creation of a global antitrust authority. But antitrust is never legitimate, says D.T. Armentano, especially not on a global level.  

The system has never worked but less now than ever. Gene Callahan calls for eliminating patent protection.

The jury verdicts looting tobacco companies and exonerating the federal government at Waco are both contrary to the rule of law.