Remembering Lysander Spooner

The Volokh Conspiracy blog has a reflection posted on Lysander Spooner, a lawyer, abolitionist, and early libertarian theorist. Today is Spooner's birthday. Many of Spooner's ideas aren't my cup of tea, but his textual demonstration that slavery was not protected by the federal Constitution was absolutly brilliant, and a wonderful example of how a close reading of the Constitution's actual text, rather than a reliance on the farsical notion of a "living Constitution," is the best defense of liberty.

Sage advice for any attorney from Abraham Lincoln

"Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough."

The "glorious triumph" of our Constitution

Thus was achieved another, and still more glorious triumph in the cause of national liberty, than even that, which separated us from the mother country. By it we fondly trust, that our republican institutions will grow up, and be nurtured into more mature strength and vigour; our independence be secured against foreign usurpation and aggression; our domestic blessings be widely diffused, and generally felt; and our union, as a people, be perpetuated, as our own truest glory and support, and as a proud example of a wise and beneficent government, entitled to the respect, if not to the admiration of mankind.

Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, book III, chapter 1 (1833).