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Lysander Spooner: American Anarchist is the first book-length exposition of the ideas of the American anarchist and abolitionist who lived mostly in Boston, Massachusetts, from 1808 to 1887. Few people today are familiar with Spooner. Nonetheless, there are many interesting strands of original thought to be found in his works that have contemporary significance—for example his reflections on the need for jury nullification or his devastating critique of the social contract. Rediscovering Spooner today is no mere investigation of a bygone nineteenth century thinker, but rather a gateway to a brilliant and original scholar whose counsel should not be ignored.

Lysander Spooner: American Anarchist is the first book-length exposition of the ideas of the American anarchist and abolitionist who lived mostly in Boston, Massachusetts, from 1808 to 1887.Few people today are familiar with Spooner.

Lysander Spooner has become one of the most influential anarchist thinkers of the nineteenth century, but the details of his transition toward anarchism are unclear. This paper explores this question. I argue that although Spooner was a natural-rights Jeffersonian prior to the Civil War, it is clear he was not yet an anarchist. His writings on the constitutionality of slavery demonstrate the seeds of anarchism, but also show his willingness to effect change through the legislative process. After the Dred Scott ruling, he became markedly more radical, but the American Civil War was the catalyst for his embrace of the anarchism for which he is known today. More specifically, I contend that Spooner’s 1864 letter to Charles Sumner is the first written expression of his anarchism, a position that was retroactively explained through his No Treason pamphlets.

The main purpose of this essay is to articulate the ideas of the last powerful advocate of natural rights in nineteenth-century America. That last powerful advocate was the Massachusetts-born radical libertarian Lysander Spooner (1808-1887). Besides his powerful antebellum attacks on slavery, Spooner developed forceful arguments on behalf of a strongly individualistic conception of natural law and private property rights and against coercive moralism, coercive paternalism, and state authority and legislation. This essay focuses on the theoretical core of Spooner’s position which is his doctrine of natural rights—a doctrine that is primarily developed in Spooner’s The Law of Intellectual Property (1855), Natural Law (1882), and A Letter to Grover Cleveland (1886). I situate Spooner within the libertarian tradition in political thought by beginning this essay with an examination of two English writers whose radical writings (for the most part) preceded Spooner’s—Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869) and the early Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). I emphasis the strongly Lockean character of Spooner’s thought and support this contention in part by showing how much more Lockean Spooner was than either Hodgskin or the early Spencer.

The U.S. Constitution found in school textbooks and under glass in Washington is not the one enforced today by the Supreme Court. In Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy Barnett argues that since the nation's founding, but especially since the 1930s, the courts have been cutting holes in the original Constitution and its amendments to eliminate the parts that protect liberty from the power of government. From the Commerce Clause, to the Necessary and Proper Clause, to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, to the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has rendered each of these provisions toothless. In the process, the written Constitution has been lost. Barnett establishes the original meaning of these lost clauses and offers a practical way to restore them to their central role in constraining government: adopting a \"presumption of liberty\" to give the benefit of the doubt to citizens when laws restrict their rightful exercises of liberty. He also provides a new, realistic and philosophically rigorous theory of constitutional legitimacy that justifies both interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning and, where that meaning is vague or open-ended, construing it so as to better protect the rights retained by the people. As clearly argued as it is insightful and provocative, Restoring the Lost Constitution forcefully disputes the conventional wisdom, posing a powerful challenge to which others must now respond. This updated edition features an afterword with further reflections on individual popular sovereignty, originalist interpretation, judicial engagement, and the gravitational force that original meaning has exerted on the Supreme Court in several recent cases.

Uncivil Disobedienceexamines the roles violence and terrorism have played in the exercise of democratic ideals in America. Jennet Kirkpatrick explores how crowds, rallying behind the principle of popular sovereignty and desiring to make law conform to justice, can disdain law and engage in violence. She exposes the hazards of democracy that arise when citizens seek to control government directly, and demonstrates the importance of laws and institutions as limitations on the will of the people. Kirkpatrick looks at some of the most explosive instances of uncivil disobedience in American history: the contemporary militia movement, Southern lynch mobs, frontier vigilantism, and militant abolitionism. She argues that the groups behind these violent episodes are often motivated by admirable democratic ideas of popular power and autonomy. Kirkpatrick shows how, in this respect, they are not so unlike the much-admired adherents of nonviolent civil disobedience, yet she reveals how those who engage in violent disobedience use these admirable democratic principles as a justification for terrorism and killing. She uses a \"bottom-up\" analysis of events to explain how this transformation takes place, paying close attention to what members of these groups do and how they think about the relationship between citizens and the law. Uncivil Disobediencecalls for a new vision of liberal democracy where the rule of the people and the rule of law are recognized as fundamental ideals, and where neither is triumphant or transcendent.

From outlawing polygamy and mandating public education to protecting the rights of minorities, the framing of group life by the state has been a subject of considerable interest and controversy throughout the history of the United States. The subject continues to be important in many countries. This book deals with state responses to cultural difference through the examination of a number of encounters between individuals, groups, and the state, in the United States and elsewhere. The book opens the concepts of groups and the state, arguing for the complexity of their relations and interpenetrations. Carol Weisbrod draws on richly diverse historical and cultural material to explore various structures that have been seen as appropriate for adjusting relations between states and internal groups. She considers the experience of the Mormons, the Amish, and Native Americans in the United States, the Mennonites in Germany, and the Jews in Russia to illustrate arrangements and accommodations in different times and places. The Minorities Treaties of the League of Nations, political federalism, religious exemptions, nonstate schools, and rules about adoption are among the mechanisms discussed that sustain cultural difference and create frameworks for group life, and, finally, individual life. At bottom, Emblems of Pluralism concerns not only relations between the state and groups, public and private, but also issues of identity and relations between the self and others.

In the writings of Lysander Spooner, the inadequacy of social contract theory is a recurring theme. Its failure leads him to an innovative and extensive critique of government in general, as well as a specific rejection of the constitution of the United States. Personal experience as a leading opponent of slavery, and, paradoxically, dissatisfaction with the ensuing imposition of government by the northern United States upon the South, convinced Spooner of the ultimate impossibility of trying to ground government on consent, which, for him, would be a necessary condition for its authority. For Spooner, legitimate government is both practically and naturally untenable. Adapted from the source document.

Missing in your editorial and much of this discussion about marijuana is the freedom of individuals to partake in any substances...