Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 018.
This is lecture 1 (of 6) of my 2011 Mises Academy course “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society.” The remaining lectures follow in subsequent podcast episodes.
Video, Transcript and Slides below.
[Update: Lecture 5b, Q&A (KOL022b), has just been added]
This lecture's topic is "Libertarian Basics: Rights and Law," and discusses:
Legal Theory and Austrian Economics
Scarcity and Property Rights
Rights as property rights
The Nature of rights
the Is-Ought Problem
Argumentation Ethics and Estoppel
Universalizability
Essence of Libertarianism
Self-ownership
Homesteading
Lockean proviso
Labor ownership and mixing
Anarcho-libertarianism
For slides for all six lectures, plus extensive hyperlinked suggested reading material, see this Libertarian Standard post. For a listing of the syllabus and topics covered in each lecture, see this Mises Academy Course Page (archived).
For more information, see my Mises Daily article "Introduction to Libertarian Legal Theory," and Danny Sanchez's post Study Libertarian Legal Theory Online with Stephan Kinsella.)
Video:
https://youtu.be/NawbP9yteOA
Slides:
The videos of all six lectures are also available on this playlist.
TRANSCRIPT
Libertarian Legal Theory, Lecture 1: Libertarian Basics: Rights and Law
Stephan Kinsella
Mises Academy, Jan. 31, 2011
00:00:00
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Good morning to people that it’s morning for. Good evening to people in Europe. And good evening and afternoon to people in America. So the course is called Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society. Now, tonight I will spend a little bit more in the preliminaries than I will in the other courses. So we might spend 15 or so minutes on some things that won’t waste as much time in next class and the subsequent classes.
00:00:33
So it’s called Libertarian Legal Theory. It’s not really what lawyers would think of as legal theory. It’s more how to apply libertarian insights to what the law should be, so that’s why it’s legal theory. Now, having some legal background and knowledge can help, but you certainly don’t have to be a lawyer to understand this stuff, and in fact, being a lawyer can sometimes be a hindrance because lawyers are steeped in the statist and the positivist legal system. This – hold on just a second. Danny left. Let me make sure he’s okay.
00:01:12
00:01:20
Okay, so – okay, Danny is still there. Okay, I see. So let me just give a little background about this course. We picked the title “Property, Conflict, and Society” because that is what I think libertarianism all boils down to. Now, the material in this course, to be honest, we have six lectures. I think there’s enough material here for at least seven or eight or nine or maybe ten lectures. So I’m going to squeeze as much in as I can. If we have to leave some out, I have some things I can cut out and give you readings for, for later. There’s a lot of material. It should be a lot of fun and very interesting.
00:01:57
And these classes last for about 90 minutes. What I did last class, the IP class I did, I spoke for about 50-60 minutes, and we took questions and answers for about 30 minutes for the rest of the class. What I’m going to do this time, if I need to, I will speak for the entire 90 minutes if I need to, to get all the material in. And then I can stay later for more Q&A if people want me to, and I’m also going to do office hours on Wednesdays at 7 p.m. London time. And I may do another office hours like every other week at a later or earlier time during the day, which is better for Americans, but the 7 p.m. London time is designed to be better for non-western-hemisphere-time-zone people.
00:02:40
Okay. I’m going to slide three now. I’m just going to give a brief overview. This course is not about me,
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