About the Center

For our mission statement see the sidebar to right.

The Center’s Director and Advisory Board include libertarian scholars; utilitarians as well as rights-based thinkers; economists of the Austrian and other schools of thought; artists and creators; business specialists; attorneys; men and women; and Americans, Europeans and others.

The Center is the publisher of the online scholarly journal Libertarian Papers.

Director

• Stephan Kinsella — A libertarian writer and registered patent attorney, Mr. Kinsella is a leading anti-IP libertarian theorist, author of Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), and founder and Director of the C4SIF. He was the founder and Editor of Libertarian Papers, and is a co-founder and member of the Advisory Council for the Open Crypto Alliance (2020–22) and a member of the Editorial Board of Reason Papers (2009–). He previously was General Counsel for Applied Optoelectronics, Inc., a partner with Duane Morris, and adjunct law professor at South Texas College of Law (1998–99), and served as Chair of the Computer Law Subcommittee of the Federalist Society’s Intellectual Property Practice Group and as Senior Fellow for the Ludwig von Mises Institute (2009–2013). Co-editor of Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Mises Institute, 2009) and author of the forthcoming Law in a Libertarian World: Legal Foundations of a Free Society, Kinsella’s legal publications include International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2020), Online Contract Formation (Oceana, 2004), Trademark Practice and Forms (Oxford University Press, 2001–2011; West/Thomson Reuters 2011–2013), Louisiana Civil Law Dictionary (Quid Pro Books, 2011) and several other legal treatises. He received his LL.M. (international business law) from King’s College London-University of London; his JD from Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University; and BSEE and MSEE degrees from Louisiana State University.

Advisory Board

• Michele Boldrin — Michele Boldrin is Joseph G. Hoyt Distinguished University Professor and Chair, Department of Economics, Washington University in Saint Louis. He is the author with David Levine of Against Intellectual Monopoly. Other books include Competitive Equilibrium Dynamics, (with L.Montrucchio, in progress), General Equilibrium, Growth and Trade II: Essays in Honor of Lionel W. McKenzie (edited jointly with R.Becker, R.Jones and W.Thomson, New York, Academic Press, 1993), Sistema de Pensiones y Mercado de Trabajo en España (joint with Sergi Jimenez and Franco Peracchi, Fundación Banco Bilbao e Vizcaya, Bilbao, Madrid, 2000), and Human Capital, Trade and Financial Development in Rapidly Growing Economies: From Theory to Empirics (edited with Been-Lon Chen and Ping Wang, Kluwer Publ. Co., 2004).
• Julio H. Cole — Julio Cole is Professor of Economics at Universidad Francisco Marroqui?n, in Guatemala, and editor of the journal Laissez-Faire. He earned both his undergraduate degree (licenciatura) and his Ph.D. in economics from Universidad Francisco Marroquín. He is the author of several books, including Latin American Inflation: Theoretical Interpretations and Empirical Results (1987), and Elementos de Econometría Aplicada (2^nd ed., 2006), and has contributed to numerous scholarly and professional journals. His publications on IP include “Patents and Copyrights: Do the Benefits Exceed the Costs?,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 15, no. 4 (Fall 2001) and “Would the Absence of Copyright Laws Significantly Affect the Quality and Quantity of Literary Output?,” The Journal of Markets and Morality 4, no. 1 (Spring 2001). Email: jhcole@ufm.edu.
• Karl Fogel — Mr. Fogel is an open source developer, author, and copyright reform activist. After working on CVS and writing “Open Source Development With CVS” (Coriolis, 1999), he went to CollabNet, Inc. as a founding developer in the Subversion project. Based on his experiences there, he wrote “Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project” (O’Reilly, 2005). After a brief stint as an Open Source Specialist at Google in 2006, he left to found QuestionCopyright.org. He works for O’Reilly Media on open government development and serves as  President and Secretary of QuestionCopyright.org, and writes and speaks regularly on copyright, open source, and the application of open source principles to areas outside software. He was instrumental in the development of the Creator-Endorsed Mark.
• Terence Kealey — Professor Kealey was Vice Chancellor & Clinical Bio-Chemist of the University of Buckingham. He is author of The Economic Laws of Scientific Research (1996, Macmillan) and Sex, Science and Profits: How People Evolved to Make Money (2008, Heinemann).
• David Koepsell — Professor Koepsell is an author, philosopher, attorney, and educator whose recent research focuses on the nexus of science, technology, ethics, and public policy. He earned his PhD in Philosophy as well as his Law degree from the University of Buffalo where he studied with Barry Smith. He has authored numerous articles as well as authored and edited several books, including Who Owns You? The Corporate Gold Rush to Patent Your Genes (Wiley-Blackwell 2009), Searle on the Institutions of Social Reality, co-edited with Laurence Moss (Oxford UK: Blackwell 2003), Reboot World (New York: Writer’s Club Press 2003) (fiction), and The Ontology of Cyberspace: Law, Philosophy, and the Future of Intellectual Property (Open Court, 2000), which has been translated into Japanese and Portuguese. His next book is Innovation and Nanotechnology: Converging Technologies and the End of Intellectual Property (UK: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming 2011). He has lectured worldwide on issues ranging from civil rights, philosophy, science, ontology, intellectual property theory, society, and religion. Koepsell has practiced law, worked for Bowstreet, Inc. as an ontologist in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and taught both law and philosophy at SUNY Buffalo. He is currently a tenured Asst. Prof. of Philosophy at TU Delft in The Netherlands. He is an associate editor of Free Inquiry magazine, and is the co-founder, with Edward Summer, of Carefully Considered Productions, an educational media not-for-profit corporation. See Koepsell on IP.
• Bertrand Lemennicier (1943–2019) — Dr. Lemennicier was Professor of economics at the economic department of the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris Sorbonne, Pantheon-Assas. In his research career he followed the approach of economists such as Gary Becker, Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, and Friedrich Hayek who applied the tools of the economic analysis to fields outside  from the core of economics like marriage, crime, law, and politics. Influenced by the work of Murray Rothbard and other radical libertarian writers, he joined the French intellectual libertarian movement in the 1980s. Former executive director of the Institut de Recherche sur la gouvernance et l’Economie des Institutions (IRGEI), he was author of numerous articles and books, including, concerning IP, Brevets d’invention, droits de reproduction et propriété intellectuelle (Patents, Reproduction Rights and Intellectual Property), and other publications including The Market of the Marriage and the Family (1988 Editions P.U.F), Five Questions about the Trade Unions (in collaboration with Jacques Garello and Henri Lepage, 1990 Editions P.U.F), Economy of the Right (1991 Cujas Editions), Morals Vis-à-Vis the Economy (Editions of Organization, 2006), and a textbook, Microeconomic: Theory and Applications (CDROM, 2003-2005, bwm-mediasoft, Luxemburg). He was member of the Mont Pélerin Society (MPS), the International Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL), and the Property and Freedom Society (PFS).
• David K. Levine — David Levine is John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, research associate of the NBER, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the EIEF and  managing editor of NAJ Economics. His scientific research is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. He is the author with Michele Boldrin of Against Intellectual Monopoly, with Drew Fudenberg of Learning in Games and the editor of several conference volumes. He has published extensively in professional journals, including The American Economic Review, Econometrica,The Review of Economic Studies,The Journal of Political Economy, The Journal of Economic Theory, The Quarterly Journal of Economics,and The American Political Science Review. He previously taught at UCLA where he held the Armen Alchian Chair in Economic Theory and occasionally served as Chair of the Department. He has served as President of the Society for Economic Dynamics, as co-editor of Econometrica, Economic Theory and the Review of Economic Dynamics,as member of the American Economic Association Honors and Awards Committee, as member of the Sloan Research Fellowship Program Committee and as panelist for the National Science Foundation.
• Roderick T. Long — Dr. Long is Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. An Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory, he is President of the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society; a Senior Scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute; editor of The Industrial Radical; co-editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies and Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?; co-founder (more or less) of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left; author of Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand (2000) and Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action (forthcoming from Routledge); a member of the board of the Foundation for a Democratic Society and the advisory board of the Center for a Stateless Society; past editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies; and past president of the Alabama Philosophical Society.  He received his philosophical training at Harvard (A.B. 1985) and Cornell (Ph.D. 1992) and has taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Michigan.
• Michael Masnick — Mike Masnick is the founder and CEO of Floor64. In addition to providing the strategic direction for the company, Mike oversees all editorial aspects of the Floor64’s public and customer sites. Mike’s insight into the realms of business and technology are the basis for his frequent posts to the award winning Techdirt blog. The widely followed, often quoted blog was launched in 1997. Prior to founding Floor64 Inc., Mike worked in business development and marketing at Release Software, an e-commerce startup, and in marketing at Intel. Mike has a bachelor’s degree in Industrial and Labor Relations and an MBA, both from Cornell University.
• Wendy McElroy — Ms. McElroy is a regular columnist for The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, and a contributing editor to numerous books and magazines as well as being one of the foremost experts on the American individualist anarchist tradition. Her books include Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the 21st Century, Freedom, Feminism, and the State, Sexual Correctness, The Reasonable Woman: A Guide to Intellectual Survival, Dissenting Electorate: Those Who Refuse to Vote and the Legitimacy of Their Opposition, Queen Silver, Individualist Feminism of the Nineteenth Century, Debates of Liberty: An Overview of Individualist Anarchism, 1881–1908 and Liberty 1881–1908: A Comprehensive Index.
• Nina Paley — Ms. Paley is the creator of the critically acclaimed animated musical Sita Sings the Blues, the first feature film to be released under a true copyleft license with the Creator-Endorsed Mark. Since 2009 she has been Artist in Residence at QuestionCopyright.org, where she is currently working on Minute Memes and the Sita Distribution Project. She is a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow and 2010 winner of an “IP3” award from Public Knowledge. The subject of the documentary “The Revolution Will Be Animated,” she writes and speaks regularly on the subject of creative freedom. Her newest project is the daily comic strip Mimi and Eunice which features a large and growing anti-IP category and a new book called Misinformation Wants to be Free.
• Sheldon Richman — Mr. Richman is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute and chairman of the board of trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society. He blogs at Free Association, is a contributor to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, and has authored several books including Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families and, most recently, America’s Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited. Selected IP-related publications may be found on the Center’s Resources page.
• Jeffrey A. Tucker — Mr. Tucker is the Editorial Director at the American Institute for Economic Research, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Austrian Economics Center, Distinguished Honorary Member at Instituto Mises Brasil, Managing Partner at Vellum Capital, former Editorial Vice President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo and numerous articles, including “Goods, Scarce and Nonscarce.”

Colophon

The bird in our logo symbolizes freedom, while the origami aspect symbolizes man-made creativity. Designed by Stephanie Long.

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