Author

Allen Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall has 7 articles published.

Allen Mendenhall
Allen Mendenhall is a Mises Canada Emerging Scholar. He is a staff attorney to Chief Justice Roy S. Moore of the Supreme Court of Alabama, an adjunct professor at Faulkner University, a doctoral candidate in English at Auburn University and a former Adjunct Legal Associate at the Cato Institute. His book is 'Literature and Liberty: Essays in Libertarian Literary Criticism.
Posted on in Law/Politics

Five Reasons Libertarians Can Support Judge Roy Moore

I worked as Roy Moore’s staff attorney for over three years and know him well. Depicted as a right-wing loon, he’s actually a pensive man who authored thoughtful opinions as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Five opinions written by Moore stand out as reasons libertarians could support him in the Alabama primary to fill the U.S. Senate seat once held by Jeff Sessions. Like most of his opinions, these received little fanfare or notice. Keep Reading

Posted on in Law

The American Bar Association Stifles Legal Education

The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications is a nonprofit accrediting agency for journalism programs. Bradley Hamm, the dean at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, has called the council’s accreditation-review process “flawed,” “superficial,” “extremely time-consuming,” and “sort of a low bar.” So he’s gotten out. Northwestern University has effectively terminated its relationship with the council, calmly embracing its new status as unaccredited. The online journal Inside Higher Ed, which points out that the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, has done the same, quotes Dean Hamm as saying that, “as we near the… Keep Reading

Posted on in Philosophy/Politics

Kingsmen – End Sovereign Immunity!

The doctrine of sovereign immunity derives from the English notion that “the king can do no wrong” and hence cannot be sued without his consent. The purpose of this doctrine was, in England, from at least the Middle Ages until eighteenth century, to bar certain lawsuits against the monarch and his or her ministers and servants. With the rise of the English Parliament after the death of Elizabeth I, government officers and politicians sought to gain the power of immunity that the monarch and his or her agents had enjoyed. In practice, however, English subjects were not totally deprived of… Keep Reading

Posted on in Economics

Hayek, Statistics, and Trade-Cycle Theory

Austrian economics is often caricatured and criticized because of its approach, or deliberate lack of an approach, to mathematical models, multivariable calculus, and econometrics. Attacks are leveled against Austrians such as Mises, Rothbard, and Kirzner for their failure or refusal to avail themselves of applied empirical research in their scholarship. The Austrian methodology most frequently targeted is praxeology. It is not the purpose of this short article to refute these attacks or to explore their errors and merits. That has been done ably by others (see, for example, the series of debate-essays available here, here, here, and here). Nor does… Keep Reading

Posted on in Philosophy/Politics

You Are Perfectly Free to Say Nice Things

Continuing in its fifth year, the Broadsides series published by Encounter Books consists of paperback pamphlets modeled on 18th-century political pamphlets such as The Federalist Papers and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Short and accessible, polemical and jargon-free, speedily produced and mass-marketed, these pamphlets examine any number of policy issues from immigration and climate change to gun control and Obamacare. Published this year, the 39th book in the series is Greg Lukianoff’s Freedom From Speech, a vigorous and cogent refutation of the increasingly popular notion that people have a right not to be offended. Lukianoff is an attorney and the president… Keep Reading

Posted on in Economics/Politics

Getting Conned by CONs

In the healthcare industry, a certificate of need, also known by the acronym CON, is an anticompetitive licensing restriction allegedly designed to promote fair competition by requiring hospitals to demonstrate the need for certain projects and services in order to receive governmental permission for those projects and services. Under a CON scheme, a hospital–-let’s call it Hospital X–-that wishes to expand its facilities applies to a state health planning agency for a CON. Nearby hospitals–perhaps Hospital X’s competitors, Hospital Y and Hospital Z–may oppose Hospital X’s CON application. An administrative law judge (ALJ) reviews Hospital X’s CON application and supporting… Keep Reading

Posted on in Politics

The Lawyers’ Guild

Last month thousands of recent law school graduates sat for a bar examination in their chosen state of practice. They were not undertaking a harmless rite of passage but overcoming a malicious obstacle: an artificial barrier to entry in the form of occupational licensure. Barriers to entry are restrictions on access to or participation in markets or vocations. Occupational licensure is a type of barrier to entry that regulates professions by requiring certification and licensing in the manner of medieval guilds. Medicine and law are perhaps the most recognizable professions to require their practitioners to obtain and maintain licenses. The… Keep Reading

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