The hottest Legal Philosophy Substack posts right now

Personal liberty should be broad: people should be allowed extreme speech (even libelous or slanderous claims), full drug legalization is preferred to criminalization or forced treatment, and warrantless wiretapping of innocent people is a criminal violation.
Many policies usually labeled 'right-wing' are really civil-liberty issues: government control of the airwaves, bans on tobacco advertising, and gun-control laws can unjustly restrict speech and the rights of peaceful, law-abiding people.
Treating orders to commit crimes as making someone an accessory matters a great deal: if leaders who direct or incite harmful actions aren’t held as accessories, then incitement and conspiracy can’t be shrugged off as mere speech.

Government should be modeled as a political market where voters, politicians, and lobbyists act in their own self-interest, so many government failures follow from misaligned incentives rather than benevolent intervention. Deliberative democracy is unrealistic because ordinary citizens often lack incentives to seek truth and get little timely feedback.
Behavioral economics broadens the rationality assumption by adding attention and information-processing costs, which helps explain more real-world behavior but also makes theories more complex and sometimes less predictive. So far it hasn’t clearly improved economic prediction across the board, though it may have promise in areas like macroeconomics.
Redistribution and welfare-state transfers create strong incentives for rent-seeking and can undermine the gains from free trade and open migration, since political transfers replace voluntary exchange as a way to gain. Secure property rights and reliance on voluntary transactions tend to produce healthier incentives for prosperity.

A fertilized embryo has intermediate moral value, so abortion can be morally justified in truly extreme cases like to save a woman’s life or prevent catastrophic harm, but it isn’t justified for mere inconvenience or brief misery.
The best evidence finds that getting or being denied an abortion has minimal long‑term effects on subjective well‑being, though denial causes short‑term distress and some moderate economic harm that tends to shrink over time.
People commonly catastrophize unwanted pregnancies, so there’s a moral duty to carefully check whether a pregnancy would really ruin your life rather than deciding in a hysterical moment.

Murray Rothbard criticized support for government as an intellectual mistake, highlighting his approach to argument in libertarianism.
Disagreement with Rothbard on producing libertarian law in an anarcho-capitalist society due to differing views on law development and enforcement.
Rothbard and Ayn Rand shared similar styles and approaches in their political views despite disagreements, with Rothbard eventually satirizing Rand in a play.

Jiang Ping played a key role in shaping China's legal system, advocating for individual rights, and promoting the rule of law over the ruling of law.
Jiang's life reflected the transition in China from 'rule by law' to 'rule of law,' emphasizing the importance of connecting laws to higher ideals like human rights and democratic governance.
Jiang's passing symbolizes a struggle in China's legal world between the Party's control-oriented legal reforms and the more liberal intellectual strand that aimed for the rule of law.

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