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Legal Foundations of a Free Society

Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), www.stephankinsella.com/lffs.

Legal Foundations of a Free Society (LFFS) is an edited selection of articles published over a 29 year period (1994 to 2023), dealing with a variety of issues in libertarian rights and legal theory. The chapters have been significantly revised and updated and integrated with each other with extensive cross-references. LFFS has been professionally typeset, by Susi Clark, of Creative Blueprint Design, and proofed, by Susan Bruck, who also prepared the bibliography and index.

LFFS was first published (Sept. 21, 2023) in a limited inaugural print run for presentation at the Property and Freedom Society Annual Meeting, Bodrum, Turkey, September 2023. Hardcover, softcover, and ebook versions will be available Nov. 1 on Amazon and other retailers. The Foreword, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and my Preface, are available here.

I will also post online PDF, epub, and the InDesign files, in due course, and, yes, anyone is free to copy or use this book as they like, as I am publishing it under a Creative Commons 0 (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication (No Copyright). I may do a free audio version at some point as well (or anyone else is free to make one as well, without my permission, since I have freed it of copyright).

As I note in the Preface, for those who want to skip the more extraneous material and focus on the core libertarian theory chapters, I recommend chapters 2–12, 14–15, and 18.

For those who just want a taste of what the book is about, I recommend the Foreword by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, my Preface, and chapters 1 (“How I Became A Libertarian”) and 2 (“What Libertarianism Is”).

Content by chapter, and links to supplementary material and readings are provided below. Errata may be found here.

Content

Legal Foundations of a Free Society

FRONT MATTER [pdf]

  • Dedication
  • Epigraph
  • Table of Contents
  • Foreword, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
  • Preface
  • Acknowledgments

PART I: LIBERTARIANISM

  1. How I Became A Libertarian (2002)
  2. What Libertarianism Is (2009)
  3. What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist (2004)

PART II: RIGHTS

  1. How We Come To Own Ourselves (2006)
  2. A Libertarian Theory of Punishment and Rights (1997)
  3. Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights (1996/2019)
  4. Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan (2002)

PART III: LIBERTARIAN LEGAL THEORY

  1. Causation and Aggression (2004)
  2. A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability (2003)
  3. Inalienability and Punishment: A Reply to George Smith (1998–99)
  4. Selling Does Not Imply Ownership, and Vice-Versa: A Dissection (2022)
  5. Reply to Van Dun: Non-Aggression and Title Transfer (2004)
  6. Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society (1995)

PART IV: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY [pdf]

  1. Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society (2013)
  2. Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward (2023)
  3. Introduction to Origitent (2018)
  4. Conversation with Schulman about Logorights and Media-Carried Property (2018)
  5. Goods, Scarce and Nonscarce (2010)

PART V: REVIEWS

  1. Knowledge, Calculation, Conflict, and Law (1999)
  2. Review of Anthony de Jasay, Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order (1998)
  3. Taking the Ninth Amendment Seriously: A Review of Calvin R. Massey’s Silent Rights: The Ninth Amendment and the Constitution’s Unenumerated Rights (1997)
  4. The Undeniable Morality of Capitalism (1994)

PART VI: INTERVIEWS & SPEECHES

  1. On Libertarian Legal Theory, Self-Ownership and Drug Laws (2014)
  2. Stephan Kinsella on the Logic of Libertarianism and Why Intellectual Property Doesn’t Exist (2012) [pdf]
  3. Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned? (2014)

END MATTER [pdf]

  • Bibliography
  • Index
  • About the Author

Selected Supplementary Material

Introductory Works

Websites/Other

Media

Books and Articles

Blog Posts & Articles

© 2012-2023 StephanKinsella.com CC0 To the extent possible under law, Stephan Kinsella has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to material on this Site, unless indicated otherwise. In the event the CC0 license is unenforceable a  Creative Commons License Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License is hereby granted.

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