Law

As the founder of the Center for Law and Economics at George Mason University and dean emeritus of the George Mason School of Law, Henry G. Manne is one of the founding scholars of law and economics as a discipline. This three-volume collection includes articles, reviews, and books from more than four decades, featuring Wall Street in Transition, which redefined…

As always during its long history, English common law, upon which American law is based, has had to defend itself against the challenge of civil law’s clarity and traditions. That challenge to our common-law heritage remains today. To that end, Liberty Fund now makes available a clear and candid discussion of common law. A Concise History of the Common Law…

According to Bruno Leoni, the greatest obstacle to rule of law in our time is the problem of overlegislation. In modern democratic societies, legislative bodies increasingly usurp functions that were, and should be, exercised by individuals or groups rather than government. Bruno Leoni (1913–1967) was an attorney and Professor of Legal Theory and the Theory of the State at the…

It is Berger’s theory that the United States Supreme Court has embarked on “a continuing revision of the Constitution, under the guise of interpretation,” thereby subverting America’s democratic institutions and wreaking havoc upon Americans’ social and political lives. Raoul Berger (1901–2000) was Charles Warren Senior Fellow in American Legal History, Harvard University.

Roscoe Pound, former dean of Harvard Law School, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Calcutta in 1948. In these lectures, he criticized virtually every modern mode of interpreting the law because he believed the administration of justice had lost its grounding and recourse to enduring ideals. Now published in the U.S. for the first time, Pound’s lectures…

The Law of the Constitution elucidates the guiding principles of the modern constitution of England: the legislative sovereignty of Parliament, the rule of law, and the binding force of unwritten conventions. A. V. Dicey (1835–1922) was an English jurist, Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford University, and author of, among other works, The Law of the Constitution.