“Government creates the market and law. Law is not the negation of liberty; it is its fulfillment. Right law is not a restriction on people’s liberty; it makes their freedom possible. Right law is liberty; liberty is right law.”

—  Alan O. Ebenstein

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

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Alan O. Ebenstein47
American political scientist, educator and author 1959

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“Hayek’s essential political philosophy was that liberty is the supremacy of law. To some, this may appear a paradoxical conception of liberty, for liberty is too often considered to be the absence of law. This, however, was the exact opposite of Hayek’s view. He thought that liberty is not possible without law. Right law is liberty.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

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“The law of England is a law of liberty”

Edward Law, 1st Baron Ellenborough (1750–1818) Lord Chief Justice of England

R. v. Cobbett (1804), 29 How. St. Tr. 49.
Context: The law of England is a law of liberty, and, consistently with this liberty, we have not what is called an imprimatur (let it be printed); there is no such preliminary licence necessary. But if a man publish a paper, he is exposed to the penal consequences, as he is in every other act, if it be illegal.

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“Liberty in the most literal sense is the negation of law for law is restraint, and the absence of restraint is anarchy. On the other hand, anarchy by destroying restraint would leave liberty the exclusive possession of the strong or the unscrupulous.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge

p, 125
Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)

“What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.”

Bernard Bailyn book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter III, POWER AND LIBERTY A THEORY OF POLITICS, p. 57.

Thomas Jefferson photo

“Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law" because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Isaac H. Tiffany (4 April 1819)
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Henry Martyn Robert photo

“Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.”

Henry Martyn Robert (1837–1923) United States Army general and Chief of Engineers

Robert's Rules of Order Revised, 1915, preface http://www.paulmcclintock.com/quotes.htm

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“The last end that can happen to any man, never comes too soon, if he falls in support of the law and liberty of his country: for liberty is synonymous to law and government.”

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (1705–1793) British judge

Rex v. Wilkes (1769), 4 Burr. Part IV., p. 2563.

Catherine the Great photo

“A Man ought to form in his own Mind an exact and clear Idea of what Liberty is. Liberty is the Right of doing whatsoever the Laws allow: And if any one Citizen could do what the Laws forbid, there would be no more Liberty; because others would have an equal Power of doing the same.”

Catherine the Great (1729–1796) Empress of Russia

Item 38
Proposals for a New Law Code (1768)

Jeremy Bentham photo

“Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty: And I repeat that government has but a choice of evils”

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer

Principles of Legislation (1830), Ch. X : Analysis of Political Good and Evil; How they are spread in society
Context: It is with government, as with medicine. They have both but a choice of evils. Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty: And I repeat that government has but a choice of evils: In making this choice, what ought to be the object of the legislator? He ought to assure himself of two things; 1st, that in every case, the incidents which he tries to prevent are really evils; and 2ndly, that if evils, they are greater than those which he employs to prevent them.
There are then two things to be regarded; the evil of the offence and the evil of the law; the evil of the malady and the evil of the remedy.
An evil comes rarely alone. A lot of evil cannot well fall upon an individual without spreading itself about him, as about a common centre. In the course of its progress we see it take different shapes: we see evil of one kind issue from evil of another kind; evil proceed from good and good from evil. All these changes, it is important to know and to distinguish; in this, in fact, consists the essence of legislation.

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“The concept of property itself had come up out of the common law and carried with it the idea of a natural, or common-law rights of liberty to acquire, use and dispose of physical things.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 32

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