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.
Often the question is asked as to what types of acts constitute or are sufficient for homesteading (or “embordering” as Hoppe sometimes refers to it); what type of “labor” must be “mixed with” a thing; and to what property does the homesteading extend? What “counts” as “sufficient” homesteading? We can see that the answer to these questions is related to the issue of what is the thing in dispute. In other words, if B claims ownership of a thing possessed (or formerly possessed) by A, then the very framing of the dispute helps to identify what the thing is in dispute, and what counts as possession of it. If B claims ownership of a given resource, he wants the right to control it, to a certain extent, and according to its nature. Then the question becomes, did someone else previously control “it” (whatever is in dispute), according to its nature; i.e., did someone else already homestead it, so that B is only a latecomer? This ties in with de Jasay’s “let exclusion stand” principle, which rests on the idea that if someone is actually able to control a resource such that others are excluded, then this exclusion should “stand.” Of course, the physical nature of a given scarce resource and the way in which humans use such resources will determine the nature of actions needed to “control” it and exclude others.
Lecture, “Rothbard’s Revolutionary Contract Theory,” “Liberté Tribute to Rothbard on his Centenary: Rothbard 100: A Legacy for Future Generations,” Sociedad de la Libertad Latam (SdL) (a Latin American think tank based in Lima, Peru) and the 5th American Youth for Liberty Forum (Aug. 12, 2026, International Youth Day; via Youtube). Attendees included young people with a background in libertarian thought from Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico.
The speech was my English language talk interspersed with a Spanish translation by the moderator, Rosa María Apaza, Presidente SDL LATAM.
Hope you’re doing great, and I wish you a great trip to Portugal! When you have a moment, I would greatly appreciate your guidance on how to think about doxing (the public disclosure online of private or personally identifiable information about someone without their consent). I have tried finding if you have talked about it somewhere, seeing as you have pretty much mentioned everything there is to say regarding property rights and IP, but I cannot seem to find your take specifically on this. [continue reading…]
I found this unfinished draft article in a file. Not sure why I abandoned it. I would no doubt change the references now, but enclose it below in its unfinished state.
Attention Minarchists: Mind Your Manners
[incomplete draft, July 2008]
by Stephan Kinsella
For some time now, we anarcho-libertarians have put up with a great deal of abuse from some of our minarchist brethren and other fellow travelers—classical liberals, constitutionalists, paleoconservatives.
We anarchists, say some of our purported allies, oppose law and order. According to others, we are “pacifists.” They say we are not “serious,” since our ideas are too radical, too principled, too “unrealistic,” or too difficult to achieve. When we oppose increasing the power and jurisdiction of the federal government to overturn unlibertarian state laws, it must be because we are in favor of these laws. If we criticize the tyrannical, murderous and unlibertarian Abraham Lincoln and his illegal, unconstitutional Civil War, why, we must be paleoconservative, neoconfederate apologists for slavery. Some even condescendingly intone that we anarchists are not “real libertarians.” [continue reading…]
Since I got my first car with a cassette deck (a Ford Futura in 1979 or so) and bought my first two cassette albums, on the advice of my music-loving best friend, John Wax—Queen, Greatest Hits and Rush, Permanent Waves—Rush has been my favorite band (my two favorite albums being Moving Pictures and Permanent Waves). Well maybe Pink Floyd at some point edged them out for me. But I love all Rush up until about the Grace Under Pressure era (1984). I saw them a few times back in Louisiana and Texas but over time started disliking live concerts. I just prefer studio albums and don’t much like to be around pot-smoking fanboys messy stadium-style urinals.
But Rush, after disbanding after Neil Peart’s death in 2015, had reunited for a (presumably final) tour. So my hard-core Rush fan and fellow libertarian Carl Bowen, who has been to 12 Rush concerts, who lives Manhattan, got tickets and he and I and another couple of libertarians, including Rush virgin Greg Morin, are attending the concert tonight in Madison Square Garden. See:
Someone asked me if I wanted to see an essay to provide feedback on it, based on a 4-page excerpt (below). My reply below, along with a Summary of his excerpt and the excerpt.
Kinsella:
No time. Re the excerpt I saw, a few quick thoughts:
It seems like you have lots of disjointed and scattered observation and things that are just assertions, un-unnuanced, no proof, no argument, no citations or references e.g. “Negligence is a subcategory of aggression.”
Hey Stephan. Have you ever written about the legal concept of quasi-contracts? I tried searching on Google and couldn’t find anything.
Kinsella:
Not explicitly, except maybe on incidentally on occasion, see e.g. note 12 to The Title-Transfer Theory of Contract: “Alessandro Fusillo observed to me that Rothbard might not have been aware of the fact that his notion of “implicit theft” echoes the concept of quasi delicts. See La. Civ. Code, arts. 2315 and 2316; Levasseur (2009, §1.1.1.D).”
I tend to focus for now on fundamentals for a few reasons.
First, modern statist law is hopelessly distorted and cannot be fixed; it can only criticized in view of more abstract natural justice principles (libertarianism). Second, it is premature and probably impossible to work out the details of a functioning libertarian law code without it working in practice. That said, in addition to codifying the abstract and fundamental principles as The Universal Principles of Liberty I am also working on further refinements in my Supplemental Principles as well as in my Kinsella’s Annotations and Commentary (both TBD). But I suspect that once this is done, aside from commentary and criticism and contributions by other libertarian scholars, not much more can be done. On all this see:
As I note in some recent posts, I think we have to rethink many existing divisions and classifications which are part of positive law, but this may have to wait until libertarian principles and law are further developed . But this might include: merging criminal and tort and property law together, but not from criminal to property/tort/restitution, but the other way around (though in practice it would be a restitution system)—as well as other existing distinctions mainstream thinkers take for granted. See:
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