The safeguards provided by an objective legal system hinge on a proper understanding of what objective law is. In this lecture, Tara Smith, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas and holder of the BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism, will clarify objectivity itself — not in epistemological detail, but in application to everyday living — and then chart its requisites for a proper legal system. We will see how the function of government sets the terms for the just exercise of state power and how confusions about objectivity result in its corruption.
Are you currently enrolled in a JD program? Have you completed the first year of law school? Are you eager to advance Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism in the culture? If you fit the description, then we can offer you the opportunity to take part in ARI’s summer legal fellowship program.
The Wall Street Journal offers a good take down of the arguments for the Export-Import Bank, which the House just reauthorized for another 6 months. One irony in this debate, which the Journal notes: many on the left, including the Obama administration, Elizabeth Warren, and Nancy Pelosi, support the Ex-Im bank despite their real antipathy for business and their professed antipathy for “the rich” obtaining benefits at the expense of everyone else. As the Journal explains, “these liberals are friends of business only when government is allocating the favors.” That’s true, but the issue goes deeper than handing out favors.
I had a strong sense of déjà vu when I read this Wall Street Journal editorial about Argentina’s harassment of a U.S. printing company for closing a plant in Buenos Aires. Why did this sound so familiar?
In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, Alex Tabarok reviews a new book that provides yet another glimpse into the inner workings of our destructive regulatory state. The book, called Innovation Breakdown: How the FDA and Wall Street Cripple Medical Advances, chronicles the fight by a company called MELA Sciences to win approval from the FDA for a noninvasive method for detecting skin cancer. Initially enthusiastic about the product, the FDA later turned against the company when a new FDA director with a less favorable view of business came on board. The author of the book, who was the company’s CEO at the time (he has since retired), spent a year of his life at great personal cost fighting with the FDA before prevailing.
In this episode of Eye to Eye, I sit down with Edwin Rockefeller, author of The Antitrust Religion, to discuss his hard-hitting, top-to-bottom criticism of antitrust law and the “community” of lawyers, regulators, economists, and academics who interpret its mysteries.
When the president can get away with repeatedly rewriting Obamacare by fiat because he has a “mandate” from the people, we have to ask: Is America still a nation ruled by laws?
As the Supreme Court heard arguments last week about the constitutionality of Obamacare’s contraception mandate, a lower court considered another aspect of Obamacare: whether the law is actually being implemented as it was written.
You’ve no doubt heard Obamacare referred to as a train wreck. It’s a good metaphor for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that train wrecks don’t just destroy the train, they cut a swath of destruction through the countryside.
