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Online Library of Liberty The OLL is a curated collection of scholarly works that engage with vital questions of liberty.

Spanning the centuries from Hammurabi to Hume, and collecting material on topics from art and economics to law and political theory, the OLL provides you with a rich variety of texts to explore and consider.

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Explore the OLL Collection: Quotations About Liberty and Power La Boétie argues that tyranny will collapse if enough people refuse to cooperate and withdraw their moral support to it (1576)

The French judge and poet Etienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) believed that tyrants are able to rule because most people give them their moral support. The converse is true. Tyranny will collapse under its own weight if enough people refuse to cooperate with it and no longer believe in the legitimacy of a tyrant’s rule:

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Liberty Matters: A Forum for the Discussion of Ideas About Liberty Judge Glock, "Albert Venn Dicey and the Immunity of the Administrative State" (December 2020)

Welcome to our December 2020 edition of Liberty Matters.  In this month’s forum Judge Glock has written our lead essay on the A.V. Dicey.  Dicey was an English legal scholar at Oxford in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who is best known for having popularized the phrase “the rule of law”.  Dicey’s most famous work was Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution and was widel...

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Explore the OLL Collection: Images of Liberty and Power James Gillray on War and Taxes during the War against Napoleon

In this essay we wish to examine 5 prints drawn by James Gillray in the 1790s and 1800s which explore the theme of the suffering of the British people (“John Bull”) under the heavy taxation and national debt which the British government imposed on them while fighting the war against Napoleon.

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Best of the OLL BOLL 71: Lysander Spooner, "Natural Law; or the Science of Justice" (1882)

This is part of “The OLL Reader: An Anthology of the Best of the OLL” which is a collection of some of the most important material in the OLL. A thematic list with links to HTML versions of the texts is available here. In this pamphlet Spooner presents his theory of natural law and natural rights which is the foundation of his political and legal theories. it was planned to be the first part of...

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