The Genius of the Common Law
The Carpentier Lectures delivered at Columbia University in 1911. They are an introduction to the history and ideas behind the English Common Law.
The Carpentier Lectures delivered at Columbia University in 1911. They are an introduction to the history and ideas behind the English Common Law.
Thinking like an economist has been a point of pride since Adam Smith. What often seems to be an endless muddle of political and social perspectives, pseudo-scientific analysis, journalistic advocacies, and financial matters from daily household concerns to the stock market, is suddenly illuminated once one discovers the economic point of view. Kirzner’s The Economic Point of View is a thoughtful study of how and why economists are successful at sorting out certain issues but less successful at others, issues from welfare to wealth to human actions. Ludwig von Mises, for whom Kirzner once worked as a graduate assistant, wrote the Foreword to the first edition.
A collection of essays some of which were previously published in the Encyclopedia Britannica. They cover money, exchange, rent, the history of commerce, maritime law, and biographical essays on Quesnay, Smith, and Ricardo.
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 are collected in Liberty Fund’s The Ideal Element in Law, Pound’s most important contribution to the relationship between law and liberty. The Ideal Element in Law was a radical book for its time and is just as meaningful today as when Pound’s lectures were first delivered. Pound’s view of the welfare state as a means of expanding government power over the individual speaks to the front-page issues of the new millennium as clearly as it did to America in the mid-twentieth century. Pound argues that the theme of justice grounded in enduring ideals is critical for America. He views American courts as relying on sociological theories, political ends, or other objectives, and in so doing, divorcing the practice of law from the rule of law and the rule of law from the enduring ideal of law itself.
The 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was the last edition which appeared before the First World War destroyed the old liberal order in Europe. The next edition, the 12th, reproduced the 11th edition with the addition of 4 supplementary volumes which covered the war and its immediate aftermath. This article is part of the supplementary volumes.
A translation of some of Wyclif’s shorter Latin works, his Treatise Trialogus, his Treatise against Orders of Friars, and other shorter works.
One of the earliest Indian plays written in Sanskrit. It is a comedy set in a royal court in which love and mistaken identity play a part.
The first of many anti-slavery tracts written by the Quaker Thomas Clarkson. This one began as a prize-winning Latin dissertation submitted to Cambridge University in 1785. In it he examines the history of slavery, the slave trade, and the nature of slavery in the European colonies.
Hobbes on Civil Association consists of Oakeshott’s four principal essays on Hobbes and on the nature of civil association as civil association pertains to ordered liberty. The essays are “Introduction to Leviathan” (1946); “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes” (1960); “Dr. Leo Strauss on Hobbes” (1937); and, “Leviathan : A Myth” (1947). The foreword remarks the place of these essays within Oakeshott’s entire corpus.
A collection of sermons by the English Puritan minister John Robinson who was the pastor to the Pilgrim Fathers.