Philosophy of Law

• “Passing Judgment: Ayn Rand’s View of Justice” (A video lecture by Tara Smith) Watch “Passing Judgment: Ayn Rand’s View of Justice”
• “A Philosopher Looks at the O.J. Verdict” (An audio lecture by Leonard Peikoff, available for purchase from the Ayn Rand Bookstore)
• “What To Do About Crime” (An audio lecture by Leonard Peikoff, available for purchase from the Ayn Rand Bookstore)

The proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories, all of them involving the issues of physical force and the protection of men’s rights: the police, to protect men from criminals—the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders—the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws.

These three categories involve many corollary and derivative issues—and their implementation in practice, in the form of specific legislation, is enormously complex. It belongs to the field of a special science: the philosophy of law. Many errors and many disagreements are possible in the field of implementation, but what is essential here is the principle to be implemented: the principle that the purpose of law and of government is the protection of individual rights.

“The rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness are the only rights treated by philosophical politics. They are the only rights formulated in terms of broad abstractions and resting directly on universal ethical principles. The numerous applications and implementations of these rights, such as freedom of the press or trial by jury or the other prerogatives detailed in the Bill of Rights, belong to the field of philosophy of law and require for their validation a process of reduction to man’s philosophic rights.”

“The laws of a proper society are objective in regard to their validation and, as a result, in regard to their interpretation as well. Since rational laws prohibit only crimes defined in terms of specific physical acts (physical force), the individual is able to know, prior to taking an action, whether or not the law forbids it and what the consequences of disobedience will be. The meaning of such laws is independent of the claims of any interpreter, in any branch of government; it can be grasped from the statement of the law itself. This stands in stark contrast to laws forbidding crimes that are not defined in terms of specific physical acts; e.g., laws against ‘blasphemy,’ ‘obscenity,’ ‘immorality,’ ‘restraint of trade,’ or ‘unfair profits.’ In all such examples, even when the terms are philosophically definable, it is not possible to know from the statement of the law what existential acts are forbidden. Men are reduced to guessing; they have to try to enter the mind of the legislator and divine his intentions, ideas, value-judgments, philosophy—which, given the nature of such legislation, are riddled with caprice. In practice, the meaning of such laws is decided arbitrarily, on a case-by-case basis, by tyrants, bureaucrats, or judges, according to methods that no one, including the interpreters, can define or predict.”