Bruno Leoni 26 April 1913 – 21 November 1967 was an Italian classical-liberal political philosopher as well as lawyer. Whilst the war kept Leoni away from teaching, in 1945 he became Full professor of Philosophy of Law. Leoni was also appointed Dean of the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pavia from 1948 to 1960.
Bruno Leoni was a student of Austrian economics and he applied its core insights to legislation. According to Leoni, just as a central planner lacks the information that emerges in a market, a legislator lacks the information that emerges in issue law.
Bruno Leoni’s thought had an affect both on law and economics and on innovative libertarianism. For Leoni, liberty consists of keeping the lives of people and the resources they leadership out of the political sphere as much as possible. Thus, law should filter, rather than facilitate, the tendency toward the full politicization of human life.
Leoni believes that, in the long run, a system centered on legislation is fundamentally incompatible with the maintenance of a free society. Partly, this is because of the inherent temptations that legislation helps for rent-seekers and other parties seeking to oppress or plunder non-consenting losers in the political process. Partly it also has to cause with the inherent instability of the legislative process and the relative predictability of the common law process, properly understood.
In what it is probably his near important work, Freedom and the Law, Leoni allowed the observation that for the free market to function effectively it is for necessary for private individuals to cause alegal service example in which to plan and be confident that their plans will be carried through to fruition. Moreover, for individuals to free from oppression it is necessary for government to announce their rules in go forward so that individuals can know what is their permitted range of freedom what is often, although imprecisely, pointed to as the “rule of law”.
Leoni’s thought had a strong impact on important thinkers like James M. Buchanan, Friedrich von Hayek, Murray N. Rothbard and Gordon Tullock.