Manuel Klausner, RIP
Manuel Klausner, a co-founder and longtime trustee of Reason Foundation, and former editor and publisher of Reason, has died at 85.
Klausner first became interested in political ideas while an undergraduate at UCLA in the late 1950s. His outlook turned in a classical liberal/libertarian direction when he went to law school at New York University (NYU) in the early 1960s, under the influence of Sylvester Petro, then teaching labor law at NYU.
Petro also introduced Klausner to the ideas of Ludwig von Mises, then giving his famous series of seminars at the university. Klausner attended Mises’ seminars and would often ride on the subway with the great Austrian economist and advocate of free markets and classical liberalism, learning more. Klausner also met and was influenced by Mises’ student Murray Rothbard during his NYU law school years.
After getting his law degree from NYU, Klausner studied at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark in 1963–64, with support from Ford Foundation and Fulbright grants. There he did his first work with a small political party that he found had decent, if not perfect, classical liberal principles called the Independent Party, which held five seats in parliament at the time. “I used to speak to them, before Denmark decriminalized porn, and talking about why they should favor that and be a basically laissez-faire party opposed to the welfare state,” Klausner recalled in a 1999 interview for my 2007 history of the American libertarian movement, Radicals for Capitalism.
On returning to America, he taught at the University of Chicago Law School in 1964–65, where he also did editing work for the early libertarian student magazine New Individualist Review and The Journal of Law and Economics. “Chicago was an exciting place to be because of the quality of faculty, the intellectual atmosphere, and a serious tradition of liberty among people there,” Klausner said in that 1999 interview. “It turned out to be an extraordinary experience for me to be part of that community of scholars and the rich intellectual tradition at Chicago, both law and economics and philosophy and history—there were many great scholars there who take liberty seriously.” He credited Aaron Director and Ronald Coase as particularly rich influences in his Chicago time.
Klausner began practicing law in the mid-’60s in Los Angeles with Kindel
Article from Reason.com
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