The Spooner Collection: An Essay on the Trial by Jury, Vices are not Crimes, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery

by Lysander Spooner

This ebook is a collection of three books by Lysander Spooner and is complete with a linked Table of content to each book and within each book making navigation quicker and easier.

Lysander Spooner was an American individualist anarchist, entrepreneur, libertarian, political philosopher, abolitionist, supporter of the labor movement, and legal theorist of the nineteenth century. He is also known for competing with the U.S. Post Office with his American Letter Mail Company, which was forced out of business by the United States government. His activism began with his career as a lawyer, which itself violated Massachusetts law. Spooner had studied law under the prominent lawyers and politicians John Davis and Charles Allen, but he had never attended college. According to the laws of the state, college graduates were required to study with an attorney for three years, while non-graduates were required to do so for five years.

An Essay on the Trial by Jury is an excellent treatise on the reason we have the jury system available as a right within the Anglo-Saxon justice system and an excellent point of beginning for the study of Constitutional and Common Law.

Vices are not Crimes highlights the role that morality had for Spooner among the anarchists and libertarians of his day. Spooner was the last of the great natural-rights theorists among anarchists, classical liberals, or moral theorists.

The Unconstitutionality of Slavery advocats the view that the U.S. Constitution prohibited slavery. This view was advocated in contrast to that of William Lloyd Garrison who advocated opposing the constitution on the grounds that it supported slavery.

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First published November 29, 2010

About the author

Lysander Spooner was an American individualist anarchist, entrepreneur, political philosopher, abolitionist, supporter of the labor movement, and legal theorist of the nineteenth century. He is also known for competing with the U.S. Post Office with his American Letter Mail Company, which was forced out of business by the United States government. He has been identified by some contemporary writers as an anarcho-capitalist,while at least one writer is convinced that his advocacy of self-employment over working for an employer for wages qualifies him as an anti-capitalist or a socialist, notwithstanding his support for private ownership of the means of production and a free-market economy.