A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe was published today, Sep. 21, 2024, at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, in Bodrum, Turkey. More information here.
Some photos from the ceremony announcing the book are below.
Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (63.6MB)
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 442.
This is a debate between me and Walter Block about voluntary slavery contracts, hosted by Matthew Sands of the Nations of Sanity project as part of his “Together Strong” debate series. (See previous episode KOL426)
Unedited transcript (from Youtube) below. [continue reading…]
[Update: see various biographical pieces on my publications page, including Alan D. Bergman, Adopting Liberty: The Stephan Kinsella Story (2025).]
As I recounted in “How I Became a Libertarian,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), I was fortunate to meet Murray Rothbard before he died, in October 1994 at the John Randolph Club meeting near Washington, D.C, where he autographed by copy of Man, Economy, and State: “To Stephan: For Man & Economy, and against the state –Best regards, Murray Rothbard.” 1
I had forgotten some of details of that trip but just came across a letter to a former law school classmate from 1996 which has some details about my first meeting with Rothbard, Hoppe, et al. Here is an edited excerpt: [continue reading…]
[Update: see various biographical pieces on my publications page, including Alan D. Bergman, Adopting Liberty: The Stephan Kinsella Story (2025).]
In the Preface to Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023 [LFFS]), which contains updated articles published over a nearly 30 year period from 1994 to 2023, I noted that
Although the chapters were all written separately and at different times over three decades, many of them build on (or anticipated) others. For example, in chapter 10, originally published 1998–99, I outlined a sketch of a view of contracts, inalienability, and so on (note 48), and wrote “Elaboration of these ideas will have to await a subsequent article.” I did so in 2003, in the article which became chapter 9. Thus, I was able to piece together several articles in a fairly systematic form since they either built on or anticipated each other and were written to be consistent with each other and all flowing from the same core principles and reasoning.
Thus, my book contains chapters that build and refer to each other even if they were written years apart. [continue reading…]
This is my Preface and Acknowledgments to Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023); see also Hoppe’s Foreword.
The issue of what property rights we have, or should have, what laws are just and proper, has long confronted mankind, and continues to be the subject of debate today. This book seeks to address these issues, with an approach that keeps in mind the nature and reality of human life—that we are purposeful human actors living in a world of scarcity and facing the possibility of interpersonal conflict—and the purpose of law and property norms: to enable us to live together, in society, peacefully and cooperatively. The goal is to vindicate the private law as developed in the decentralized systems of the Roman and common law, with an emphasis on consistency, principle, and the inviolable rights of the individual. In short, to argue for a private law system informed by libertarian principles. [continue reading…]
Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (114.4MB)
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 441.
This is Episode 238 of The Bitcoin Standard Podcast, with Dr. Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard. From his shownotes:
Legal Scholar Stephan Kinsella joins to discuss his new book, Legal Foundations of a Free Society, in which he discusses libertarianism as a system for determining legitimate property rights, why property rights are important, and the problem with intellectual property rights..
A tweet alerted me to an alleged Portuguese translation of one of my articles, “Ética Argumentativa: Algumas Notas Breves Sobre o Conceito.”
I asked what this was a translation of and they sent me the below to an old “Mises Wire” piece allegedly authored by me. However I have never seen this, I did not write it, and it is oddly worded, as if it was written by a Russian bot and/or written in a foreign language and then auto-translated. I have no idea how this got posted at Mises.org under my name, but it’s not mine.
Update: It appears now it was written by Juan Carpio, and somehow my name got attached to it by mistake.
[continue reading…]
Below is the first second third draft of a working paper published under the Papinian Press Working Papers series. I expect a version of this to be published next year in David Howden, ed., Palgrave Handbook of Misesian Austrian Economics (Palgrave, forthcoming 2025), as part of the Palgrave Studies in Austrian Economics Book series. The working paper text is below and the PDFs of three drafts 1.8, 1.11, and 1.13. As noted below, “A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability,” chap. 9 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023), contains a more detailed presentation of some of the issues discussed here, although this paper includes additional arguments not explicitly made there.
(BTW I was asked to use the inline-citation format for references for this piece, instead of my preferred modified-Chicago/footnotes format, and I think the cluttered way references look in-line here is an illustration of why I despise this format.)
For more on the theory of contract, see my chapters “A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability,” “Inalienability and Punishment: A Reply to George Smith,” and “Selling Does Not Imply Ownership, and Vice-Versa: A Dissection,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society, and the following talks or interviews:
Errata: Add footnote 11 to the end of the section entitled “Implicit Theft”:
11. Interestingly, elsewhere Rothbard (2009, ch. 10, §7) again employs the concept of “implicit theft” in criticizing patent law: “Patents prevent a man from using his invention even though all the property is his and he has not stolen the invention, either explicitly or implicitly, from the first inventor.” “Inventions” are not ownable, scarce resources (they are designs, recipes, processes, not physical objects), and so cannot be “owned,” and thus cannot be stolen, so this reasoning is a bit confused, and, in any case, the concept of “implicit theft” makes no sense. Rothbard’s confusion on this issue also led him to support a type of patent (and copyright) by contract. See Kinsella (2008, the section “Contract vs. Reserved Rights,” and 2023h, n.46), and note 3, above.
Update: See also On Property Rights in Superabundant Bananas and Property Rights as Normative Support for Possession
Stephan Kinsella is a libertarian writer and patent attorney in Houston, Texas. He has published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His publications include Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023), Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), and International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford, 2020).
My Failed Libertarian Speaking Hiatus; Memories of Mises Institute and Other Events, 1988–20192025
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