Freedom and the Law

Freedom and the Law is Italian jurist and philosopher Bruno Leoni's most popular work. It was first published in 1961 and the 3rd edition is now made widely available through the Internet by the Online Library of Liberty [1], with permission of the George Mason University.

In this book, Leoni contended that the greatest obstacle to the Rule of Law is the problem of overlegislation. Leoni also pointed to a parallelism between the market and common law on the one hand, and socialism and legislation on the other.

Through a review of Roman doctrine and jurisprudence, Leoni shows that the Romans thought of Law as a process of discovery instead as of a set of enacted orders, and that the popular confusion between law and legislation is contemporary to our era and the advent of socialism.