Happy Birthday Lysander Spooner!
I would be hard-pressed to name another man in all of human history whose words and deeds better embody my own ideals as a lawyer and a human being than Lysander Spooner. He was born on today’s date in 1808. Georgetown law professor and Volokh Conspirator Randy Barnett, who owns and operates lysanderspooner.org, offers his birthday tribute here and here.
Read if you haven’t already Spooner’s An Essay on the Trial by Jury, or at least the first chapter, titled “The Right of Juries to Judge the Justice of the Laws.” The simple restoration it advocates would potentially by itself be sufficient to bring to our legal and political system the legitimacy it now so tyrannically lacks. Cf. John Hasnas’ essay The Depoliticization of Law.
