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Details
- A substantial reworking of one of our era's definitive libertarian works by America's leading libertarian intellectual
- Author's Supreme Court briefs have made him one of the most influential and controversial intellectual figures in American law and politics
- The most original and engaging libertarian theory of government since Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia
- Genuinely multidisciplinary, drawing on insights from law, philosophy, politics, and economics
- A new Afterword to this second edition responds to several important criticisms of the original work and further explains how his "libertarian" approach is more modest than either the "social justice" theories of the left or the "legal moralism" of the right.
In this book, legal scholar Randy Barnett elaborates and defends the fundamental premise of the Declaration of Independence: that all persons have a natural right to pursue happiness so long as they respect the equal rights of others, and that governments are only justly established to secure these rights.
Drawing upon insights from philosophy, economics, political theory, and law, Barnett explains why, when people pursue happiness while living in society with each other, they confront the pervasive social problems of knowledge, interest and power. These problems are best dealt with by ensuring the liberty of the people to pursue their own ends, but this liberty is distinguished from "license" by certain fundamental rights and procedures associated with the classical liberal conception of "justice" and "the rule of law." He then outlines the constitutional framework that is needed to put these principles into practice.
In a new Afterword to this second edition, Barnett elaborates on this thesis by responding to several important criticisms of the original work. He then explains how this "libertarian" approach is more modest than either the "social justice" theories of the left or the "legal moralism" of the right.
Readership: Scholars and students of political philosophy, the philosophy of law, moral philosophy, political theory, and economics.
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1: Introduction: Liberty vs. License
Part I: The Problems of Knowledge
2: Using Resources: The First-Order Problem of Knowledge
3: Two Methods of Social Ordering
4: The Liberal Conception of Justice
5: Communicating Justice: The Second-Order Problem of Knowledge
6: Specifying Conventions: The Third-Order Problem of Knowledge
Part II: The Problems of Interest
7: The Partiality Problem
8: The Incentive Problem
9: The Compliance Problem
Part III: The Problems of Power
10: The Problem of Enforcement Error
11: Fighting Crime Without Punishment
12: The Problem of Enforcement Abuse
13: Constitutional Constraints on Power
14: Imagining a Polycentric Constitutional Order: A Short Fable
Part IV: Responses to Objections
15: Beyond Justice and the Rule of Law?
16: Afterword
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Randy E. Barnett is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he directs the Georgetown Center for the Constitution and teaches constitutional law and contracts. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, the University of Pennsylvania, and Northwestern. In 2008, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies. His publications include more than one hundred articles and reviews, as well as ten books. After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he tried many felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook County States' Attorney's Office in Chicago. In 2004, he argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzalez v. Raich before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2011-12 he represented the National Federation of Independent Business in its constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act.
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Review(s) from previous edition
"The Structure of Liberty is that rare creature, a book that delivers on most of the promises it makes. Already the book is on its way to becoming a contemporary classic, the successor in interest to Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia as a source of ideas and arguments for the revitalization of an important intellectual tradition that has long stood at the periphery of legal and political theory. - Michigan Law Review
"This is a serious, engaging, and important work of jurisprudence and political philosophy....Comprehensive in its treatment, fair-minded in the way it deals with evidence and unfailingly rigorous in its argument" - Choice
"The Structure of Liberty is a very well written book of political and legal philosophy, drawing on Barnett's considerable analytical and rhetorical skills. It is an instant classic " - James Lindgren, Northwestern University School of Law
"His interest in basic theory as it relates to the uses and abuses of political power makes his views on a wide range of state policy issues, from taxation to criminal law, worthy of careful attention " - Reason
