Free Law in a Free Society

Freedom and the Law, by Bruno Leoni (Nash, 204 pp., $7.50)

The conventional modern theory of law and the state holds that in order to have law one must have centralized government: a legislature to “make” the law; an executive to enforce it; a judiciary to interpret it. But this means that the ultimate source of law is the legislature, and since the legislature sits as a permanent body, the source of law can only be the ever-shifting whims and caprice of a changing body of legislative members. F. A. Hayek is only the most recent of a long line of conservative theorists who have placed great importance on the certainty of law as a vital part of the “Rule of Law”; and yet, as the late Bruno Leoni points out in this extraordinarily important book, no approach to certainty can be achieved when legislatures can, and do, change the law at any time that the spirit moves them.

MR

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Murray N. Rothbard

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Freedom and the Law, by Bruno Leoni (Nash, 204 pp., $7.50)

The conventional modern theory of law and the state holds that in order to have law one must have centralized government: a legislature to “make” the law; an executive to enforce it; a judiciary to interpret it. But this means that the ultimate source of law is the legislature, and since the legislature sits as a permanent body, the source of law can only be the ever-shifting whims and caprice of a changing body of legislative members. F. A. Hayek is only the most recent of a long line of conservative theorists who have placed great importance on the certainty of law as a vital part of the “Rule of Law”; and yet, as the late Bruno Leoni points out in this extraordinarily important book, no approach to certainty can be achieved when legislatures can, and do, change the law at any time that the spirit moves them.