Stephan Kinsella

Stephan Kinsella was born in 1965 and grew up in Prairieville, a small town near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He studied electrical engineering at Louisiana State University (BS 1987, MS 1990) and law at its Paul M. Hebert Law Center (JD 1991), and in 1992 took an LL.M. in international business law at King’s College London.

From 1992 he worked as a patent attorney at law firms in Houston and Philadelphia, and from 2000 to 2012 he was general counsel of Applied Optoelectronics; he also taught as an adjunct professor at South Texas College of Law. He was book review editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies (2000–2004), a Senior Fellow of the Mises Institute (2009–2013), and founder and executive editor of the journal Libertarian Papers (2009–2018).

In “Against Intellectual Property” (Journal of Libertarian Studies, 2001; a Mises Institute book, 2008) he argued that patents and copyright are monopoly privileges granted by the state that conflict with property rights in scarce resources, since ideas are not scarce. In 2010 he founded the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF).

In legal philosophy he set out an estoppel theory of rights (1992, 1996) and defended Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argumentation ethics; with Jörg Guido Hülsmann he edited the Hoppe festschrift Property, Freedom, and Society (2009). His essays on law were collected in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (2023), with a foreword by Hoppe and freely available. He now lives, retired, in Houston.

Sources: Mises Institute — Stephan Kinsella · StephanKinsella.com — About · Mises Institute — Against Intellectual Property · Wikipedia — Stephan Kinsella