I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Leonard P. Liggio 189
on the history of legal institutions at a law school. It was in 1983 that I encountered my
other major legal history influence, Harold Berman’s Law and Revolution, which is the
most influential book on European legal history. Berman was then at Harvard and is
now at Emory University. I have the pleasure of visiting with him whenever he comes to
Washington.
An additional legal history influence was Richard Epstein, who I first encountered at
a Liberty Fund/Institute for Humane Studies seminar at the University of San Diego in
1979. Epstein, who had studied Roman Law at Oxford, led me to a deeper understanding
of the Law Merchant in his explanation that true Roman Law (before the backward Justinian
Code of the Bas Empire) was judge-made like Common Law. He had already explained in
his essay on “Strict Liability in Torts” that the true Roman Law had very advanced ideas
on torts.
Henry Veatch, philosophy chairman at Georgetown University, also lectured.
At Columbia Law School I studied with the top law professors in the U.S.: Julius Goebel,
Patterson, Allan Farnsworth, Jones, Jack Weinstein, Herbert Wechsler, Charles Black (and
his wife, Barbara Black, later dean of Columbia Law School, was my tutor). A few years later
I joined the Columbia University Faculty Seminar on the History of Legal and Political
Thought. It was a monthly meeting at the Columbia Faculty Club, of which Joe Peden and
Murray Rothbard were members. There, I was able to further develop research areas I had
already initiated, such as the Peace of God movement, the Fairs of Champagne, and the Law
Merchant. The origin of my interest was the works of the great professor at the University
of Ghent, Henri Pirenne (who wrote his two-volume medieval economic history from memory
while incarcerated in a German castle as a World War I prisoner of war).
I studied International Law, which helped me since international private law is a modern
version of the Law Merchant. I was able to study the work of John Bassett Moore and his
beloved student Edwin C. Borchard (whose law students at Yale founded the America First
Committee: Gerald Ford (future president); Potter Stewart (future Supreme Court Justice);
R. Douglas Stuart, Jr. (future Quaker Oats CEO); Kingman Brewster (future president of
Yale University and ambassador to Britain); R. Sargent Shriver (future vice-presidential
candidate of the Democratic party in 1972 and brother-in-law of JFK (who joined the AFC
at Harvard); and Philip Jessup. These authors influenced Robert A. Taft’s views, which he
built on William Howard Taft’s.
My interest and the interest of Murray Rothbard and Joe Peden in medieval economic
institutions and thought had been encouraged by our encounters with Raymond de Roover,
who was a close friend of Ludwig von Mises. One of the students of Mises’s seminar followed
Mises’s advice and organized a monthly dinner of the Mises circle at the NYU Faculty
Club. Each month someone would speak: Henry Hazlitt, F.A. Hayek, Fritz Machlup,
Raymond de Roover, Philip Courtney, Sylvester Petro, etc. De Roover was from Antwerp
and was an accountant. He taught at Boston College Graduate School and then at the City
University of New York. His knowledge of accountancy permitted him to decipher the
accounts of the Florentine bankers (the Medici bank) and to discover that they received
interest through having payment, for example, in florins and contracting in letters-ofexchange
for repayment in Venetian ducats, or maybe dinars. He wrote very important