Leoni fought in World War II as part of the “A Force”, an organization that rescued prisoners of war in Italy after 1943. Leoni was the founder and editor of the political science journalIl Politico. He was also involved as secretary and later president of the Mont Pelerin Society. Following Richard Posner, Leoni has been also one of the fathers of the Law and Economics school. Leoni died prematurely in Alpignano, under tragic circumstances, killed in 1967 by Osvaldo Quero. In 2003, Italian libertarian scholars Carlo Lottieri, and founded the Bruno Leoni Institute, a free-market think-tank.
Work
Bruno Leoni was a student of Austrian economics and he applied its core insights to legislation. According to Leoni, just as a central planner lacks the information that emerges in a market, a legislator lacks the information that emerges in case law. Bruno Leoni’s thought had an impact both on law and economics and on contemporary libertarianism. For Leoni, liberty consists of keeping the lives of people and the resources they command out of the political sphere as much as possible. Thus, law should filter, rather than facilitate, the tendency toward the full politicization of human life. Leoni believes that, in the long run, a system centered on legislation is fundamentally incompatible with the maintenance of a free society. Partly, this is because of the inherent temptations that legislation provides for rent-seekers and other parties seeking to oppress or plunder non-consenting losers in the political process. Partly it also has to do with the inherent instability of the legislative process and the relative predictability of the common law process, properly understood. In what it is probably his most important work, Freedom and the Law, Leoni makes the observation that for the free market to function effectively it is necessary for private individuals to have a stable legal framework in which to plan and be confident that their plans will be carried through to fruition. Moreover, for individuals to free from oppression it is necessary for government to be announce their rules in advance so that individuals can know what is their permitted range of freedom. Leoni’s thought had a strong impact on important thinkers like James M. Buchanan, Friedrich von Hayek, Murray N. Rothbard and Gordon Tullock.
