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Freedom and the Law. Bruno Leoni
Читать онлайн.Название Freedom and the Law
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781614871767
Автор произведения Bruno Leoni
Жанр Юриспруденция, право
Издательство Ingram
Few who attended those sessions have forgotten them. The intellectual stimulation, the discussions lasting far into the might, the camaraderie—all these combined into a nearly perfect whole. Leoni, a superb linguist fluent in English, French, and German as well as his native tongue, delivered his lectures in English from handwritten notes. I suspect they were written at odd times and, certainly on odd pieces of paper. They were constantly being amended as he became more accustomed to the group. He even brought with him a small book that had belonged to his father—a dictionary of American slang of the twenties. The lectures as well as some of the discussions were recorded on tape.
I prepared the draft of Freedom and the Law from these notes and tapes at the strong urging of F. A. (Baldy) Harper and with financial assistance from the William Volker Fund. Later a professional editor added the finishing touches. This work was done with the author's express approval and retained the order and form of delivery as far as possible. This volume is as close to the original series of lectures as the constraints of the written word permit.
The original notes, manuscript, and tapes were deposited at the Institute for Humane Studies, Inc., in Menlo Park, California. When they moved to George Mason University, this material was deposted at the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace at Standord University.
The first edition of Freedom and the Law was published by D. Van Nostrand Company of Princeton, New Jersey, in 1961 as part of the William Volker Fund Series in the Humane Studies. A second edition, virtually unchanged except for my new Foreword, was sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies and published by Nash Publishing Company of Los Angeles in 1972. For this new edition, I have incorporated into the Foeword some of the remarks I made at the Mont Pelerin Society General Meeting in St. Vincent, Italy, on September 1, 1986, on “The Legacy of Bruno Leoni.”
Although most of Leoni's works are in Italian, Freedom and the Law is not. At one of the Mont Pelerin Society meetings, an Italian gentleman asked if permission could be obtained to undertake an Italian translation. I replied affirmatively and enthusiastically, but nothing, so far as I know, has come of it. There have been two translations into Spanish; one published by the Centro de Estudios Sobre La Libertad in Buenos Aires (1961), and one by the Biblioteca de la Libertad, Union Editorial in Madrid (1974). Both translate the title as La Libertad y la ley.
Since its first publication, Freedom and the Law has enjoyed, I am told, considerable attention by students of law and economics. For example, 1986, two conferences on the book were held under the direction of Liberty Fund, Inc. One was held in Atlanta in May and the other in Turin, Italy, in September. The major new paper prepared for the former—“Bruno Leoni in Retrospect,” by Peter H. Aranson—was subsequently published in the Summer 1988 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy along with “Freedom and the Law: A Comment on Professor Aranson's Article,” by Leonard P. Liggio and Thomas G. Palmer.
In the opinion of many, Freedom and the Law is the least conventional and most challenging of all Leoni's works, promising to bridge, as Professor F. A. Hayek has written, “the gulf which has come to separate the study of law from that of the theoretical social sciences. … Perhaps the richness of suggestions which this book contains will be fully apparent only to those who have already been working on similar lines. Bruno Leoni would have been the last to deny that it merely points a way and that much work still lay ahead before the seeds of new ideas which it so richly contains could blossom forth in all their splendor.”
That promised bridge, unfortunately, was never completed. It is our fond hope in publishing this third edition of Freedom and the Law, together with some related lectures given in 1963, that the many students and colleagues, friends and admirers of Bruno Leoni will expand and develop the ideas and suggestions contained herein beyond the point where his efforts so abruptly ceased.
Bruno Leoni was a remarkable student of law and political science and had a susbtantial understanding of economics as well. I recall with a mixture of sorrow and joy the many facets of a Bruno Leoni i admired, loved, and enjoyed being with.
| June 1990 | Arthur Kemp |
| Professor Emeritus, Economics, | |
| Claremont McKenna College, | |
| Claremont, California |
It seems to be the destiny of individual freedom at the present time to be defended mainly by economists rather than by lawyers or political scientists.
As far as lawyers are concerned, perhaps the reason is that they are in some way forced to speak on the basis of their professional knowledge and therefore in terms of contemporary systems of law. As Lord Bacon would have said, “They speak as if they were bound.” The contemporary legal systems to which they are bound seem to leave an ever-shrinking area to individual freedom.
Political scientists, on the other hand, often appear to be inclined to think of politics as a sort of technique, comparable, say, to engineering, which involves the idea that people should be dealt with by political scientists approximately in the same way as machines or factories are dealt with by engineers. The engineering idea of political science has, in fact, little, if anything, in common with the cause of individual freedom.
Of course, this is not the only way to conceive of political science as a technique. Political science can also be considered (although this happens less and less frequently today) as a means of enabling people to behave as much as possible as they like, instead of behaving in the ways deemed suitable by certain technocrats.
Knowledge of the law, in its turn, may be viewed in a perspective other than that of the lawyer who must speak as if he were bound whenever he has to defend a case in court. If he is sufficiently well versed in the law, a lawyer knows very well how the legal system of his country works (and also sometimes how it does not work). Moreover, if he has some historical knowledge, he may easily compare different ways in which successive legal systems have worked within the same country. Finally, if he has some knowledge of the way in which other legal systems work or have worked in other countries, he can make many valuable comparisons that usually lie beyond the horizon of both the economist and the political scientist.
In fact, freedom is not only an economic or a political concept, but also, and probably above all, a legal concept, as it necessarily involves a whole complex of legal consequences.
While the political approach, in the sense I have tried to outline above, is complementary to the economic one in any attempt to redefine freedom, the legal approach is complementary to both.
However, there is still something lacking if this attempt is to succeed. During the course of the centuries many definitions of freedom have been given, some of which could be considered incompatible with others. The result is that a univocal sense could be given to the word only with some reservation and after previous enquiries of a linguistic nature.
Everyone can define what he thinks freedom to be, but as soon as he wants us to accept his formulation as our own, he has to produce some truly convincing argument. However, this problem is not peculiar to statements about freedom; it is one that is connected with every kind of definition, and it is, I think, an undoubted merit of the contemporary analytical school of philosophy to have pointed out the importance of the problem. A philosophical approach must therefore be combined with the economic, the political, and the legal approaches in order to analyze freedom.
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