Everyone is freaking out about the Lindsay Clancy trial and the hung jury. 1 Clancy, who had been having serious mental problems, strangled and killed her three children—Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months—in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on January 24, 2023, and was on trial for first-degree murder. She did not dispute that she killed them. Her defense was lack of criminal responsibility, commonly called an insanity defense. The jury, consisting of 9 women (all white) and 3 men, two white and one black, heard about five weeks of trial and then deliberated for seven days—roughly 38 to 40 hours—and could not reach a verdict. According to later interviews with jurors in the majority, 11 jurors would have voted to acquit on the basis of insanity, while the black male juror, the only non-white member of the panel, would have voted guilty. 2A mistrial was declared on September 4, 2026. Because a hung jury is not an acquittal, prosecutors may retry the case.
The left basically defended Clancy, some on the grounds of postpartum psychosis, but some on ridiculous grounds—e.g., that she didn’t actually commit the murders, or that it was excused because of abuse by her husband or “the Patriarchy.” (She has admitted the killings; her own lawyer has rejected the online theories blaming her ex-husband. See NBC News.) The right, partly in response to these ridiculous left/feminist takes, started blaming women in general for siding with Clancy, saying this shows women should not have the right to vote, and so on. Many on the right and many libertarians celebrated the lone juror who refused to acquit even though, according to interviews with other jurors, he admitted that the prosecution had not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. (The holdout himself has not spoken publicly; that account comes from other jurors.) [continue reading…]
See, e.g., Facebook posts by Rob Wicks; Mark Edge; Mark Edge 2; this tweet. I haven’t followed it and am only using it here, as is my wont, to illustrate and discuss more general libertarian and related principles. [↩]
I was raised in Ascension Parish, in Galvez/Prairieville, Louisiana, which is next to Gonzales, the soi-disant JambalayaCapital of the World—it has held its annual Jambalaya Festival annually since 1968. And yes, we specialize there in Cajun, or brown, jambalaya—similar to African/Nigerian jollof rice—not the Creole or “red” jambalaya made with tomato paste and more popular in New Orleans and other parts. 1
As I noted in my little biography, 2 I attended private Catholic schools in East Baton Rouge Parish—St. George Elementary and Catholic High School—from first grade through high school, unlike my brother and sister and all the local kids, who attended the local public schools, such as Galvez Elementary and St. Amant High School. [continue reading…]
I spoke for 4 minutes, then Brian, and then we had an exchange and audience questions for the remaining time. It was very civil unlike some other debates I’ve participated in. 1 One thing I liked is that Brian started off admitting, first, that he has some sympathy for my anti-IP position, and, second, that he acknowledged that opposition to IP is the libertarian position–unlike other libertarian IP proponents who claim that IP rights are compatible with libertarianism, if not the “heart and core” (Ayn Rand) of property rights 2 or, perhaps even worse, or maybe just stupider sounding, “primary property” (Galambos). 3[continue reading…]
I know you’re probably a busy guy, but if you have a minute or two, I’d like to get your thoughts on, or established articles about, property rights as it pertains to data as physical matter. I have started writing an article about this matter, but before I get too far along, I’d like to see if there have been others who have already tackled this. My essential consideration is how to apply a property-rights framework to the physical matter in which data is contained (EM waves, light pulses, radio, etc.). I initially came up with a simple analogy of driving your personal car along a roadway owned by Others (private or govt as the case may be) and someone physically barricading your car to be able to search it for whatever purpose (without voluntary consent). Similarly, the data we send on our phones which is transformed (homesteaded) by our labor by the use of software on our phone that digitizes the data and packages it into whatever physical EM signal is used to transmit. The data signal is the car on the road, but once that data packet is distributed by the wireless router through fiber-optic cables owned by some private entity, it has now gone onto the street and so becomes subject to some agreement between the owner of the signal and the transport media (fiber cable). Maybe what I am wondering is simply what the “fine print” user agreements amount to when agreeing to use an app. Anyway, I would appreciate any feedback at all regarding this concept, even if just a few quick points of reference or critique.
My father was born in 1934 in the East Prussian city of Königsberg. In January 1945, he escaped on one of the last ships from his besieged and later fatally destroyed hometown. He was an East Prussian through and through, and in his library he had the collected works of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the Königsberg philosopher of the Enlightenment. I still remember well that my father pointed out to me–with a smile–that Kant’s original works were not entirely easy to read, but he nevertheless encouraged me to work through them; fortunately, he also helped me with references to more comprehensible secondary literature. This is how I gained a certain preformation or even a preference for the great philosopher of the Enlightenment. [continue reading…]
As an adjunct law professor, I taught Computer Law at South Texas College of Law Houston (Computer Law, 1998-99), which covered on issues such as online contracts, e-commerce, privacy, intellectual property/copyright, computer trespass, liability of ISPs for defamation or copyright infringement by users, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Y2K, antitrust, and so on. 1 Related courses taught at the time in law schools included intellectual property law and “Internet law.” (See Syllabus below.)
One topic we covered concerned state aggregations of data—when the collection of data by the state violates constitutional rights (e.g. Fourth Amendment concerns), and when it may or must or must not release data e.g. in response to FOIA requests. Two of the main cases we covered in this regard were United States Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 489 U.S. 749 (1989) and Whalen v. Roe, 429 U.S. 589 (1977). These are still apparently two key cases that factor into the current controversy about Flock cameras. [continue reading…]
Just as some critics of today’s version of “capitalism” equate it with what we libertarians or advocates of “true capitalism” would call crony capitalism—or, as Gene Epstein calls it, “crapitalism” 1 —some also criticize private property rights as a type of “theft” 2 because of “capitalist” versions of “private property rights” such as those stemming from the English Enclosure movement.
Yet as Hoppe has pointed out, there can be “partial” homesteading of land—homesteading of easements or rights-of-way, by usage—and this can be done by individuals or by groups who have been using the land—a path or street—and anyone who seeks to privatize the remainder of the land takes it subject to the pre-existing group-owned easement. After all, the key act that constitutes original appropriation is occupation (occupātiō) or use 3—using, possessing, employing a previously unused and unowned resource, according to its nature, 4 to serve as a causally efficacious means of action. Writes Hoppe: [continue reading…]
In law school I was bored and so I wrote a text-based multiple-choice adventure game based on my law school, LSU Law. I wrote it in Turbo Pascal and it at the time generated a .EXE file. Greg Morin helped me convert it to python then HTML using Claude. I was still in my Randian phase (soon to be Rothbardian anarchist) and interweaved LSU Law insider jokes with libertarian/Objectivist material and sarcasm.
Years later, when I was practicing law in Philadelphia, Nathaniel Branden somehow heard about the game and wrote me a letter asking me to send him a diskette with a copy, since it mentions Ayn Rand (the new law school Chancellor) (see one of our letters below). The snarky trans-sexual comments referred to one of our classmates who was cross-dressing in his final year to prepare for gender reassignment surgery.
The setup:
Welcome to LSU LAW–The Game.
You are a male in this game.
Here’s the hypo: a new chancellor [Ayn Rand] has taken over the LSU Law School, and she is not pleased. She is a 100% free market capitalist. Thus, she is very upset with the ultra-liberal education the students have been receiving. She has already begun eliminating the non-tenured non-capitalist professors.
Since there are too many students enrolled, Chancellor Rand has decided to expel all liberal students. Her spies are everywhere. The object of this game is to make it through a day of classes without revealing any non-capitalist views that you may hold.
Ryan McMaken, in “Why the French Revolution Was Not a Libertarian Revolution,” Mises Wire (08/20/2026), quotes Ralph Raico’s The Struggle for Liberty (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2025) to persuasively argue that the French Libertarian was not “some sort of classical liberal or libertarian revolution.” McMaken writes: it is a mistake
when modern libertarians attempt to rehabilitate the French Revolution to portray is as pro-freedom phenomenon. For example, in an essay titled “Thinking about the French Revolution,” David Boaz—a libertarian, although of the ultra-milquetoast regime-libertarian variety—lists the French Revolution among [the triumphs of liberalism.”
As Raico writes,
We further see the lack of liberalism among the revolutionaries in the fact that the French revolutionaries’ Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” is in no way as unequivocal as the American Bill of Rights. The French declaration says, for instance, there shall be freedom of thought, even for religion, “within the limits of the law.” They never got to the American point [as shown by the American Bill of Rights], which was that Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 498
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