Legal Foundations of a Free Society

As noted above, the material here was originally intended to appear

in footnote 21, above. Due to its length, I include this material in this

appendix.

George H. Smith published “A Killer’s Right to Life” in Liberty magazine in

1996, making various arguments and claims about inalienability. I responded in

the Journal of Libertarian Studies, in a piece which complements and supplements

my previous articles on the inalienability and punishment issues, now

chapters 5 and 9 in the present volume. Despite my disagreements with Smith

on this issue, I respect and have learned from his work, such as his great essay

“Justice Entrepreneurship in a Free Market.”

While in law school in Louisiana (the only civil law state in the US), I was

introduced to the Roman and civil law and also to contract law and theory.

It was during my first-year contracts class, in 1988, that I conceived of my

“estoppel” based theory of rights. I also became interested in the Rothbard-Evers

title-transfer theory of contract. I presented a paper on this topic in 1999,

integrating the views of Rothbard and Evers with various concepts from the

civil law and the common law. I later published an article on this in the

Journal of Libertarian Studies, upon which this chapter is based.

In 2001, I presented a paper entitled “Reinach and the Property Libertarians

on Causality in the Law” at a Mises Institute symposium on Adolf Reinach

and Murray Rothbard. I later collaborated with Patrick Tinsley on an article

based on this paper, published in 2004 in a related symposium issue in

The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. This chapter is a substantially

revised version of that article.

This chapter is based on an article originally published in 2002 on the

now-defunct site Anti-state.com, as a response to an article by Robert

P. Murphy and Gene Callahan (hereinafter, MC), on the same forum,

which was critical of Hoppe’s argumentation ethics.

Please consider a donation to the Mises Insistute, at https://mises.org/giving

After publishing articles on my estoppel-based theory of rights and

Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics” defense of libertarian rights

between 1992 and 1996, I published an article surveying estoppel, argumentation

ethics, and similar theories in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in

1996, entitled “New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory.”

An updated version of this article was published as “Dialogical Arguments

for Libertarian Rights” in The Dialectics of Liberty in 2019. This chapter is

based on the latter piece, and is updated still further.

Please consider giving to the Mises Institute at https://mises.org/giving

In Part III.C above, I discussed the legitimacy of punishing aggressors, that is, the justice of responsive force—force that is in response to aggression, or initiated force. As noted above, the material here was originally intended to appear in footnote 44, above. Due to its length, I include this material in this appendix.

I published my first article on libertarian theory, “Estoppel: A New Justification for Individual Rights,” in Reason Papers in 1992.* An expanded treatment was published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1996 and a similar version in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review.† This chapter is based on the latter article, also incorporating some material from the JLS article. There I thanked “Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Jack Criss for helpful comments on an earlier draft.”

The Appendix includes references to concepts put forth by Rothbard, Hoppe, Locke, and even Communism proponent G. A. Cohen.

Please consider giving to the Mises Institute, https://mises.org/giving

Continuing to Part 2, Rights, of the Audiobook, I have demarked it Season 2. Unlike most podcasts that make you wait a year for Season 2, this is an Audiobook and I'm producing as quickly as possible.

-Mike Williams, December 2024

Chapter 4: Originally published in Mises Daily (Sep. 7, 2006). The illustrating photochosen by an editor at Mises.org for the original article inspired the imageused on the back cover of this book. See my post “The Story of a Libertarian Book Cover,” StephanKinsella.com (March 4, 2011).

Please consider a donation, or small recurring gift, to the Mises Institute, https://mises.org/giving