Articles by Roderick T. Long

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Molinari Society will be hosting its sixth annual symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in New York City, December 27-30, 2009. We hereby invite the submission of papers on the topic of intellectual property (IP).

IP has long been a matter of debate among libertarians. For its defenders, it represents a just protection of innovators’ rights to the products of their labour, as well as a vital economic incentive for creative effort; for its opponents, it is one more state-granted monopoly privilege with elements of protectionism and censorship. The issues raised by IP seem especially urgent in the present age of electronic media, when the ease of copying and disseminating information is at an all-time high; and the legitimacy or otherwise of IP has recently become an especially hot topic of discussion in the libersphere in the wake of the long-anticipated publication of Michele Boldrin and David Levine’s book Against Intellectual Monopoly (as well as the re-release of Stephan Kinsella’s Against Intellectual Property in book form).

Those submitting papers should be prepared, if selected, to present their papers at the December meeting.

Send submissions to Roderick T. Long at:
BerserkRL@yahoo.com

Deadline for receiving submissions: 5 May 2009
Notification of acceptance / rejection: 15 May 2009

Orange Beach, Alabama: 26-27 September 2008 | CFP: 7 August 2008

Submissions in any area of philosophy are welcome. More info here. There’s also an undergraduate essay contest (same deadline).

My working paper “Inside and Outside Spooner’s Natural Law Jurisprudence” is online; abstract follows:

Lysander Spooner, the foremost legal theorist of 19th century American radical liberalism, might seem to have defended two distinct and incompatible theories of the relation between liberal legal norms and positive law. In early works such as The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1846), liberal legal norms appear to emerge from considerations immanent within the positive law; but in later works like Natural Law, or the Science of Justice (1882), liberal legal norms appear instead to function as an external constraint on the legitimacy, and indeed the legality, of positive statutes. I argue, drawing on earlier natural law tradition as well as on more recent analytic theories of language, and applying Spooner’s canons of interpretation to his own texts, that Spooner’s apparently distinct formulations yield a single consistent approach, a defensible and attractive radical liberal natural-law jurisprudence that transcends the internal/external distinction.

Comments welcome!

Also, I see that my 2004 article “Aristotle’s Egalitarian Utopia: The polis kat’ euchen” is now online in its entirety at Google Books, as a result of the relevant number of Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre’s being online in part.  It explores what Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, his merit-based system of constitutional classification, and his account of the role of philosophic contemplation in the good life might have to tell us about the character of Aristotle’s ideal state.