The Constitution That Isn't One

The ancient regime sought legitimacy through divine mandate, the sovereign claiming authority granted from above. The democratic age replaced this with popular mandate, the sovereign claiming authority granted from below. Both rest on the same foundation: someone must be sovereign, someone must possess the final word on what is just, and all disputes must ultimately resolve at the feet of this authority. The Universal Principles of Liberty, published in August 2025 by a consortium of libertarian legal scholars, offers a different answer entirely. There is no sovereign. There are only principles, and those who choose to adopt them.

This document, drafted primarily by Stephan Kinsella with Alessandro Fusillo, David Dürr, and Patrick Tinsley, represents something genuinely new in political philosophy: a systematic codification of libertarian jurisprudence designed not as a constitution imposing order from above but as a meta-normative baseline that individuals and communities voluntarily adopt. Hans-Hermann Hoppe served as adviser to the project, and his influence pervades the document's philosophical architecture. The distinction from traditional constitutionalism is not merely semantic but fundamental. Constitutions establish governments and grant them powers; the Universal Principles establish nothing except the conditions under which human beings may interact justly. States may exist or not; the Principles remain silent on this question. What they do insist upon is that no institution enjoys a coercive monopoly over law or enforcement.

The philosophical foundation rests on what Hoppe has termed argumentation ethics, the insight that anyone engaging in discourse about justice already presupposes certain norms that cannot be denied without performative contradiction. To argue at all is to attempt persuasion rather than coercion, which presupposes that your interlocutor has the right to consider your argument freely and accept or reject it on his own terms. This capacity for rational consideration requires control over one's own body and mind: the very act of argumentation therefore presupposes self-ownership. Extend this reasoning and you find that external resources are equally necessary for survival and participation in discourse, and that the only objective, conflict-free method of assigning property rights in such resources is original appropriation, the Lockean principle of first use and transformation. The argument does not derive ought from is; rather, it demonstrates that no deviation from libertarian property ethics can be argumentatively justified without contradicting what the arguer demonstrates by the act of arguing.

From this foundation the Principles derive their core provisions. Self-ownership is affirmed as the original and presumptive right of every person. Original appropriation establishes just ownership of unowned external resources through demarcation, occupation, or productive transformation. Voluntary exchange permits transfer of property through contract. Aggression, defined as the use, theft, or invasion of another person's resources without consent, is declared unjust. These provisions will be familiar to anyone acquainted with libertarian theory, but the Principles' contribution lies not in their novelty but in their systematic articulation and hierarchical structure.

What makes this document function as a basis for decentralized justice is its treatment of interpretation and enforcement. Where the Principles are silent or unclear, arbiters may consult secondary codes developed by adopting communities, customary practice, and established bodies of private law such as Roman law, Anglo-American common law, or modern civil codes. The document explicitly references scholarly commentaries, especially from libertarian thinkers, as interpretive resources. The document provides a framework within which law can be discovered through the accumulated wisdom of human experience in resolving disputes.

Enforcement follows the same decentralized logic. Article IV establishes that individuals are free to select competing arbitral providers and protection agencies, and that these bodies may establish appellate structures by mutual consent. The aspiration stated in the document is worth noting: adopters pledge to negotiate in good faith, compromise where possible, and submit disputes to neutral arbitration rather than resort to force. Self-help is to be avoided where possible, as is vigilante justice and acting as judge in one's own case. This is not naive pacifism but recognition that violence is expensive and that rational actors generally prefer the lower transaction costs of negotiated settlement.

The historical precedents for such arrangements are more extensive than modern statism would suggest. Roman private law enabled decentralized social order and laid foundations for market economies without mediation by public law. The Lex Mercatoria, the law of international commerce developed by medieval merchant communities, operated across national boundaries through voluntary arbitration and reputational enforcement. Celtic Ireland maintained a polycentric legal system for centuries. The common law itself emerged not from legislation but from the recorded discussion of cases, judges and jurists gradually articulating principles that were understood to already exist rather than creating them from nothing. Law, in this tradition, is discovered rather than made.

The Universal Principles occupy a peculiar position in this tradition: they are at once a codification and a rejection of codification. They establish a baseline but insist that this baseline flows from reason, experience, and ethics rather than from any authority's decree. They are adopted voluntarily, and any person may adopt them by any clear act of consent. The closing affirmation captures the spirit: "We bow to no state, we kneel to no order but justice, we answer to no master but reason and ethics."

For the communities of cryptoanarchists, seasteaders, and network state builders already constructing parallel institutions, this document provides something that has long been missing: a serious, scholarly articulation of the legal principles upon which their experiments rest. The non-aggression principle has always been the libertarian touchstone, but the NAP alone does not resolve the thousand questions of application that arise when human beings actually attempt to live together. Who adjudicates disputes? What standards of evidence apply? How is restitution calculated? What becomes of those who refuse to participate in arbitration? The Universal Principles do not answer all these questions, but they establish the framework within which answers can be discovered through the operation of competitive legal orders.

The document also does something rare in libertarian discourse: it lists examples of unjust laws explicitly. Taxation, eminent domain, drug prohibition, conscription, weapons bans, monopoly over money, intellectual property, defamation law treating reputation as property, positive obligations not voluntarily accepted, and censorship all appear on this list. These are not merely opinions but applications of the core principles to specific cases. A law that conflicts with the Universal Principles is declared unjust and void. This is not the timidity of constitutional interpretation that must forever defer to legislative judgment but the confidence of a jurisprudence that knows its foundations.

Whether these principles will ever govern significant human populations remains to be seen. History suggests that ideas have power only when adopted by people willing to live by them and defend them. The Universal Principles provide the intellectual architecture; the building remains for others.