Legal System

Bruno Leoni (1913–1967), an Italian classical-liberal political philosopher and attorney, was a professor at the University of Pavia, president of the Mont Pèlerin Society, and author of Freedom and the Law, expanded 3d ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991 [1961]). This paper was originally published in English, under the same title in Il Politico 31, no. 3 (1966), pp. 535–38, and has been only lightly edited for publication here. Carlo Lottieri, editor of the recently published Bruno Leoni book Law, Liberty, and the Competitive Market, Gian Turci & Anne MacDiarmid, trans. (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2009), assisted with providing this piece and obtaining necessary permissions.]

"When something becomes illegal, consumer demand does not vanish."

"It is vain, however, to call simply for clearer statutory definitions of monopolistic practice. For the vagueness of the law results from the impossibility of laying down a cogent definition of monopoly on the market."

That will give the FTC far greater power to block mergers than the statutory text or Supreme Court precedents permit.

She seems to me dubiously to assimilate international law to domestic law.Scarry has in any case given us in her excellent and provocative book an indictment of recent American policy difficult to answer.

He offers a Kantian justification for political economy in the style of Buchanan; and he maintains that this view of things is at the root of the American Republic. Readers of a libertarian bent will not be fully satisfied; but Roth's carefully argued book deserves, and rewards, close study.

The abstraction called the "ecosystem" — which never seems to include mankind or civilization — has done far less for us than the oil industry, and the factories, planes, trains, and automobiles it fuels.

"I contend that Professor King is a utilitarian rather than a natural-rights theorist."

The constitutional arrangement is far from perfect. But, at least if its provisions are obeyed, there is a barrier imposed on arbitrary and secret rule by one person.

"The essence of 'immediate convertibility' is the difference between what Austrians call a claim transaction or warehouse receipt, like a demand deposit, and a credit transaction, like a time deposit."