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Introduction Customary Legal Systems with Voluntary Enforcement The Kapauku Papuans of West New Guinea The Beginnings of Common Law Customary Law for the Commercial Revolution Conclusions [This article is excerpted from the first two chapters of The Enterprise of Law .]   Anyone who would even question the “fact” that law and order are necessary

Illegal activities in the private sector arise because the market mechanism is not allowed to perform its allocative functions. Often when government action creates a shortage by preventing the sale of a good or service at a freely determined market price, there are some individuals in the private sector who are willing to both buy and sell on the

Volume 5, Number 4 (1981) Two trends stand out in an examination of the historical development of land use regulation in the United States. First, continually increasing controls have been placed on the rights of private landowners to use their land as they please. Second, in recent years state and federal involvement in land use regulation has

Several years ago, in an episode of “All in the Family ,” Archie Bunker proposed a possible solution to the airline highjacking problem. He suggested that the government should arm all the passengers. Potential highjackers, fearing for their lives when confronted by a hundred or so armed adversaries, would no longer carry out these crimes. Archie

If law exists only where there are state-backed courts and codes, then every primitive society was lawless. Indeed, one widely held definition or “theory” of law is that “the rule of law simply means the ‘existence of public order.’ It means organized government, operating through the various instruments and channels of legal command. In this

It is not actually possible to describe what a system of privately produced law and order would be like in modem society because one cannot describe what does not exist, and, more fundamentally, guesses based on historic privatized systems or current trends in privatization may miss the mark substantially. The sophisticated crime protection and

Volume 12, Number 1 (1996) Murray Rothbard explained that “Few aspects of libertarian political theory are in less satisfactory state than the theory of punishment.” Rothbard certainly advanced this theory significantly, of course, by expounding upon the theory of “proportionality” and explaining the role of restitution in a libertarian society.

The literature of American legal history is primarily a history of federal and state governments, creating the false impression that these governments have produced and enforced all relevant law. Indeed, there seems to be a widely held belief that law and order could not exist in a society without the organized authoritarian institutions of the