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:
- The Universal Principles of Liberty
- “On the Role of Commentators and Codes and the Oracles of the Law,” StephanKinsella.com (July 31, 2025)
- On the Non Liquet in Libertarian Theory and Armchair Theorizing
- Roman Law and Hypothetical Cases
- “Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023) [LFFS]
- KOL020 | “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society: Lecture 3: Applications I: Legal Systems, Contract, Fraud” (Mises Academy, 2011)
- KOL345 | Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution” or: State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PorcFest 2021)
- KOL359 | State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PFS 2021)
As for quasi-contracts the entire fields of contract as well as torts need to re reexamined, as does causation and negligence. See:
- The Title-Transfer Theory of Contract
- Causation and Aggression
- The Libertarian Approach to Negligence, Tort, and Strict Liability: Wergeld and Partial Wergeld
- Libertarian Answer Man: Libertarian Liability Theory, Behavior, and Intentional Action
- Libertarian Answer Man: Strict Liability; and Tracing Title Back to Adam
- Libertarian Answer Man: Strict Liability; Negligence as “Partially Intentional”
- Libertarian Answer Man: Intent in Action, Strict Liability
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:
- Fraud, Restitution, and Retaliation: The Libertarian Approach
- Areas That Need Development from Libertarian Thinkers: Unifying law
