Today is the 216th anniversary of the birth of Lysander Spooner, who was born in Massachusetts in the US. He was a controversial figure for his whole career. Maybe that should be “careers,” because in his 79 years he worked on a host of different things.
His first controversy was his first career itself. He became a lawyer by studying under two prominent lawyers in the area, which at the time was perfectly legitimate. Lawyers weren’t required to attend college, and Spooner hadn’t. But if you hadn’t attended college, you were supposed to spend five years with your mentors rather than the three expected of college grads. Spooner only studied for three years, then set up his own practice. His mentors were on his side in this, possibly because he argued that having a different requirement for non-graduates amounted to discrimination against the poor. He said “no one has yet ever dared advocate, in direct terms, so monstrous a principle as that the rich ought to be protected by law from the competition of the poor.” (To be honest, the rich have historically been pretty scared of the poor, usually for good reason.)
He won that argument, and in 1836 the state abolished the requirement. Spooner didn’t stop there, though; he argued that any requirement that you have a license to do any sort of work was unjust and discriminatory. He didn’t win that argument. In fact, his legal career didn’t really work out, so he quit lawyering and traveled west to Ohio (which was new territory for the US in those days) and tried to make his fortune by speculating in real estate.
The real estate business didn’t work out either, and in 1840, when he was 32, he went back home to the family farm. His heart wasn’t in farming, though. He’d noticed that the US Post Office charged five cents per stamp. That was pretty expensive in the 1840s. He calculated that he could beat that price, and opened the American Letter Mail Company with offices in Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and other cities. It worked exactly the same as the Post Office; you’d buy a stamp, affix it to a letter, and your letter would be hand-delivered.
Spooner’s mail company was doing pretty well until it ran into a little problem: the whole scheme was illegal. The US Post Office, at the time, had been granted a monopoly and nobody was allowed to compete with it. The American Letter Mail Company closed, but it had a lasting effect: the price of a postage stamp (the legal kind) was reduced from five to three cents, where it stayed for more than a century.
Then Spooner wrote the book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery and became a well-known abolitionist in the years before the US Civil War. He published other books and loads of pamphlets, but when the Civil War began, he was against that, too. His writings suggested that it was wrong to fight a war to preserve the country as a single unit; if the southern states wanted to leave the US, he thought they should be allowed to. That was the key to Spooner; for the most part, he thought people should be allowed to do whatever they wanted.
After slavery was abolished, Spooner started writing about, of all things, jury trials. In his book Trial by Jury he argued that a jury should not only be able to rule on the outcome of a legal case, but even on the law the case was about. In short, they should be able to say “not only is John Doe not guilty, but this entire law is bogus and we just abolished it!” That was one argument he didn’t win.
He kept advocating for individual freedoms even when those freedoms might disrupt wider society. In the mid-1800s a religious cult called the Millerites (after their leader, William Miller) decided that the world was just about to end, like any day now, so they stopped working and mostly just hung around idly. When some of them were arrested for loitering and vagrancy, Spooner wrote a pamphlet defending them. Then when the world ended…no, wait, they were wrong and it didn’t end. Never mind.
Spooner’s work, as fringy as some of it might seem, has been taken seriously by journals, legal historians, and even the US Supreme Court, which cited his book against slavery as recently as 2008. And he’s been the inspiration for some science fiction stories, including Scam Artists of the Galaxy by Thomas Hamilton, which includes a planet with a society entirely based on Spooner’s ideas.
Spooner had a lot to say about laws even though he only briefly worked as a lawyer. You can read most of his very extensive writings in The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner, published in 1971.
