Lysander Spooner
historical figure · 3 works · 10 mentions · 24 anchored passages · author page · cited 4 times in 2 works
the author · I · We
in the texts
The Law of Intellectual Property
The essay's author, arguing that a book and the ideas it describes are legally distinct commodities.
That a book, and the ideas it describes, are, in fact, and in law, distinct commodities;
That if an author were to part with his exclusive right to multiply copies, his ideas might be misrepresented, mutilated, and attributed to other persons than himself;
This presumption of law, in favor of the author, arises, without any special notice being given, in the book, that he wishes to retain his copyright, or any other exclusive right, in the ideas described.
An Essay on the Trial by Jury
American legal theorist and abolitionist, author of the essay.
The author claims the copyright of this book in England, on Common Law principles, without regard to acts of parliament;
Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) was a legal theorist, abolitionist, and radical individualist who started his own mail company in order to challenge the monopoly held by the US government.
Lysander Spooner (1808-1887)
The Unconstitutionality of Slavery
The author, writing in the first-person plural, who constructs and asserts the legal argument against slavery's constitutionality.
We make a stand, then, at this point, and insist that the main question—the only material question—is already decided against slavery;
We might here safely rest the whole question—for no one, as has already been said, pretends that the constitution of the United States, by its own authority, created or authorized slavery as a new institution;
Yet we of the free States give to the south a share in the incalculable wealth produced by our inventions and labor-saving machinery, our steam engines, and cotton gins, and manufacturing machinery of all sorts, and yet say at the same time that we have no interest, and that there is “no propriety” in the constitutional guaranty of that personal freedom to the people of the south, which would enab …