-
The Nature of Law
Law is to be understood as a normative discipline which identifies certain actions as just or unjust. That is to say, law is a subset of ethics which identifies which party ought have possession in a given conflict.
-
The Non-Aggression Principle
The Non-Aggression Principle is an axiom of law that assigns the property right to the individual who did not initiate a given conflict. Furthermore, justification as such implies a pre-supposition of the validity of this principle, making any denial of it a performative or dialectic contradiction.
-
Homesteading and Property Rights
The homesteading principle, which is central to the question of how men attain a property right over some scarce means, is to be properly understood as implied directly by the Non-Aggression Principle. The primacy of the connection between a homesteader and the resource in question cannot be denied by anyone without contradiction, as a prior-later distinction is required for any thought or denial to take place.
-
Contract Theory
The proper theory of contracts deals with the question of when a given transfer of title to property is legitimate and thus justly enforceable. This theory illuminates the answer to certain pernicious questions such as: can a man sell himself into slavery? Is fractional reserve banking legitimate, or a form of fraud?
-
The Rights of Children
The theory of the rights of children is far too often overlooked or infected with irrational cultural norms. This is true even for the comparatively more thorough libertarian theory of law. A rational theory of the rights of children must be elucidated for a given legal theory to be complete.
-
Defensive Force and Proportionality
The questions of what types of defense and what types of punishment are legitimate are of great importance to the legal theorist. The libertarian theory of non-aggression provides objective and insightful answers to both.
-
An Elaboration on the Nature of Law as a Subset of Ethics
A worrying tendency exists among libertarians, where it is often said that law is not a subset of ethics. In other words, these libertarians claim that there is such a thing as a crime that ought be committed. Insofar as this tendency is perpetuated, law is relegated to being a pointless field with no reason for existing. Hence I demonstrate that law properly understood is to be placed as a subset of ethics, dealing with the question of which party in a conflict ought have possession.