Lysander Spooner
Wendy McElroy at LewRockwell.com - a long piece of the life and works of Lysander Spooner (free on-line copies of the books to which Ms. McElroy links in her article). [lew]
The 19th-century individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker called Lysander Spooner "our Nestor," a Greek name denoting "wisdom." The 20th-century libertarian Murray Rothbard referred to Spooner as "the last of the great natural rights theorists ... the last of the Old Guard believers in natural rights."
Natural-rights or natural-law theory, as espoused by Spooner, is based on the idea that justice and just laws are inherent in nature -- in the nature of man and of reality. Thus, rights can be discovered and they can be codified through documents such as the Constitution. Rights cannot be created by man or by human agencies such as government. Rather they emerge through reason and in the process of resolving social conflicts. For example, the idea of self-ownership -- that every person has a natural jurisdiction over his own body -- emerged as a resolution to the conflict over slavery in America.
