Bruce L. Benson

Bruce L. Benson (born March 18, 1949)^[1] is an American academic economist who is widely recognized as an authority on law and economics and a major exponent of anarcho-capitalism legal theory. He is DeVoe L. Moore Professor and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University, where he serves as Chairman of the Department of Economics and a Courtesy Professor of Law. He is the recipient of the 2006 Adam Smith Award, described as the highest honor bestowed by the Association of Private Enterprise Education. He is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute.

Publications

Professor Benson is the author of hundreds of articles published in peer-edited economics and libertarian journals, as well as many books. He has written some of the leading libertarian or anarchist law and economics perspectives on regulation, criminalization, commercial law, and native American law (see also: private law, polycentric law). His books include:

• American Antitrust Law in Theory and in Practice (with Melvin L. Greenhut), Aldershot, England: Avebury, 1989, 265 plus xiii pages.

• The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State, San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1990, 397 plus viii pages (Award: 1991 Honorable-Mention Runner-up (among 5 finalists), Free Press Association “H. L. Mencken National Book Award.”).

• The Economic Anatomy of a Drug War: Criminal Justice in the Commons (with David W. Rasmussen), Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994, 265 plus viii pages.

• To Serve and Protect: Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice, New York: New York University Press, 1998, 372 plus xxvii pages; with a forward by Marvin E. Wolfgang, Director, Center for Studies in Criminology, University of Pennsylvania. Edited Series: “Political Economy of the Austrian School” series, Mario Rizzo, General Editor (Award: The Atlas Economic Research Foundation's 2000 Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Award recognizing “the institute that publishes a book ... in 1998 or 1999 that, in the opinion of the judges, made the greatest contribution to public understanding of the free economy” (book was written for the Independent Institute)).

• Justicie Sin Estado (Madrid: Unión Editorial, 2000) (Spanish translation of The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State, translated into Spanish by José Igncio del Catillo and Jesús Gomez)

• Self Determination: The Other Path for Native Americans, an edited volume (co-edited with Terry Anderson and Tom Flannagan), Stanford University Press, 2006, 332 plus xv pages.

Notes and references

External links

• Florida State University faculty profile
• Bruce L. Benson archive at The Independent Institute

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