ARI invites law students to join the Legal Fellowship program. The fellowship is a unique program, in which law students do in-depth policy research on topics at the intersection of law and philosophy. Our legal fellows work with ARI’s director of Legal Studies Steve Simpson, an experienced constitutional lawyer who for many years worked at the Institute for Justice. Today we’d like to introduce you to one of the 2017 legal fellows: Cristian Reyes, a recent graduate of Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles.
In 1997, Lisa Kostova, a high school student in Bulgaria, submitted an essay on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Thanks to the prize she won, she was able to travel to the United States to further her education and establish a promising career. Lisa recently wrote to ARI to tell us her story.
“The roots of my article ‘Publishing Atlas Shrugged’ — and similar articles in Robert Mayhew’s collections about the other Ayn Rand novels — are in my work supporting the promotion and marketing of books by Ayn Rand, first as a consulting advisor and more recently as publishing manager at the Ayn Rand Institute,” says Richard Ralston.
Most thinkers throughout history have held a negative or, at best, neutral view of productive work. If not scorned outright, production has usually been viewed as having no moral significance. But Ayn Rand had a unique view of the human potential, central to which is the importance she accords to the act of production. Productive achievement, in her philosophy, is man’s “noblest activity.” This talk explores what Objectivism means by the virtue of productiveness and discusses aspects of our culture’s positive and negative attitudes toward producers and productive activity.
No one can speak for the dead. But as an expert on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, I’m often asked what Rand would have thought of President Trump, especially now, on the one-year anniversary of his election and in light of stories in the Washington Post and elsewhere trying to link Trump to Rand.
“Interest in Ayn Rand’s ideas is growing rapidly throughout Europe, and we are currently receiving more invitations to events than we can fulfill,” says Annie Vinther Sanz, general manager of ARI Europe. “This autumn’s twenty-six events will cover nine countries, and we expect more than three thousand attendees. The Objectivist movement in Europe is becoming a force to be reckoned with.”
