Leonard P. Liggio, (July 5, 1933 – October 14, 2014), became active in the freedom movement as a member of Students for Taft upon arriving at Georgetown University. In the decade that followed, he encountered many of our cause’s great heroes of the 20th century. He sat in on Ludwig von Mises’ gradate seminar, attended the meetings of Ayn Rand’s “Collective” in her Manhattan apartment, and began a long-running friendship with Murray Rothbard.

As an analyst for the William Volker Fund, Leonard began a career of identifying and assisting classical liberal scholars that has now entered its seventh decade.

During this time, he has served as the President of the Philadelphia Society, the Mont Pelerin Society, and the Institute for Humane Studies where he continues as its Distinguished Senior Scholar.

Leonard was a research professor of law at George Mason University, as well as a visiting professor at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin, the Institute for Political and Economic Studies at Georgetown University, and at the University of Aix-en-Provence, France. He was also on the board of The Freda Utley Foundation.

Since 1994, as the Atlas Network’s Executive Vice President of Academics, Leonard has built bridges among scholars and think tanks activists all over the world. At Atlas, he led the International Freedom Project, funding a number of inter-disciplinary courses on the nature of freedom in the U.S. and abroad, which was generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation from 1999-2003.

He is a Trustee of Liberty Fund and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He has also served on the governing boards or advisory boards of the following institutions: the Acton Institute (USA), Centro Interdisciplinar de Ética e Economia Personalista (Brazil), Fundación Burke (Spain), Hayek Institute (Austria), Institute for Economic Studies-Europe (France), the Philadelphia Society (USA), The Social Affairs Unit (UK), and Toqueville Institute (France).

Leonard has been a member of the Editorial Board at the Cato Journal since 1981, of the American Journal of Jurisprudence at Notre Dame Law School since 1995, and of Markets & Morality since 2000. He was the Editor of Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought from 1978 to 1982.

In 1965, with Murray Rothbard and George Resch, he created Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, a publication which emphasized “common philosophical bonds uniting the anarchism and isolationism of the Old Right, and the instinctive pacifistic anarchism characterizing the New Left in the middle sixties.”

In 2007, he was recognized with the Adam Smith Award, the highest prize bestowed by the Association of Private Enterprise Education. In 2011, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics. In 2013, Atlas Network announced the creation of a Liggio Lecture Series in honor of his 80th birthday and as part of its Liggio Legacy Program.

For further information, here is Leonard’s curriculum vitae, and we also recommend this three-part blog post in which Leonard shared extensive autobiographical notes on his various roles within the classical liberal movement.

The most important research papers and publications:

• “Modern Historiography and Political Education,” presented at the 50th Anniversary Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1997.
• “The Heritage of The Spanish Scholastics” (published in two parts: part 1, part 2) Religion & Liberty, 2000.
• “The Medieval Law Merchant, Economic Growth and the Challenge of The Public Choice State”, written for
  Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines, 
• “Social Scientists, Schooling, and the Acculturation of Immigrants in 19th Century America,” written with Joseph Peden for The Journal of Libertarian Studies, 1978.
• “Herbert Butterfield: Christian Historian as Creative Critic,” New Individualist Review, 1961
• “Flex Morley and the Commonwealth Tradition: The Country-Party, Centralization and the American Empire,” in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, 1978.
• “Henry George, Private Property, and The American Origins of Rerum Novarum,” for a Liberty Fund symposium held at The Acton Institute, 2003.
• “Charles Dunoyner and French Classical Liberalism,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 1977.
• “The Development of the Judicial System at the Great Fairs of Champagne and Brie in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries”, written while at Fordham University, 1959
• “Religious Culture and Customary Legal Tradition: Historical Foundations of European Market Development”,” prepared for George Mason University School of Law
• “Catholicism in The Era of American Independence,” Catholic Dossier, 1999
• “The Future That Never Happened: A Review of It Didn’t Happen Here: Socialism Failed in the United Statesby Lipset and Marks,” Policy Review Online, 2000
• “Property in Roman Religion and Early Christian Fathers,” a chapter in Business and Religion: A Class of Civilizations?, edited by Nicolas Capaldi, 2005
• “On Joyce Appleby’s The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism,” The Freeman, 2011
• “The Influence of the French Revolution”
• “The Hispanic Tradition of Liberty: The Road Not Taken in Latin America,” presented at the Mont Pelerin Society Regional Meeting in Guatemala, 1990
• Contemporary Policy Topics
• “Mao-izing American Education,” Reason, 1976
• “Political Economy of Higher Education,” presented to Salvatori Leadership Conference, 1993
• “The Role of The State in Higher Education,” presented at an Atlas International Workshop, 1993
• “The Collapse of Communism: The Continued Challenge of Socialism,” presented at Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala, 1990
• “The New Nationalism: What Does America Stand For,” presented at the Rockford Institute, 1992
• “The Importance of Political Traditions,” published by the Free Market Foundation of Southern Africa, 1992
• “Foreign Policy and the Values of a Republic,” presented at a Cato Institute forum on “The New World Order and its Alternatives: America’s Role in the 1990s,” 1992
• “Native Americans and Property Rights,” The Libertarian Forum, 1971
• “S. Foreign Policy Reconsidered since the Cold War,” presented at the Organization of American Historians 87th Annual Meeting in 1994.
• “This Hemisphere of Liberty,” presented at the 1996 Regional Meeting in Cancun, Mexico, of the Mont Pelerin Society.
• “The Market for Rules, Privatization, and The Crisis of the Theory of Public Goods,” in George Mason University Law Review, 1988-1989.
• Economics and the Classical Liberal Revival
• “On Classical Liberalism: History and Thought,” in The International Library of Austrian Economics, 
• “Law and Legislation in Hayek’s Legal Philosophy,” Southwestern University Law Review, 1994.
• “A. Hayek and the Classical Liberal Tradition,” published by the Philadelphia Society,  2000.
• “Introduction to F.A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty,” prepared for the Chinese translation by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 1999
• “Comment on: Norman P. Barry, Making Sense of Hayek: The Theory of The Spontaneous Order,” presented at the 1994 General Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society.
• “Mises and History,” in The Libertarian Forum, 1974.
• “Murry Rothbard and Jacksonian Banking,” from The Contributions of Murry Rothbard to Monetary Economics
• “A New Look at Robert A. Taft,” written for the American Historical Association, 1973
• “On Peter J. Boettke’s Living Economics,” published for Atlas, 2012
• “On Ralph Raico’s The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton,” published for the Mises Economics Blog, 2010.
• “Ideas Always Have Consequences,” presented at the National Conference on Economic Freedom, 1981
• “Leonard Liggio’s Presidential Address,” presented at the 2004 General Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society.