The Law is one of the most important books ever written on the uses and abuses of law. While short, The Law has proven itself repeatedly to be life changing to those who read it. Walter Williams an economics professor at George Mason University put it thusly:
I must have been forty years old before reading Frederic Bastiat's classic The Law. An anonymous person, to whom I shall eternally be in debt, mailed me an unsolicited copy. After reading the book, I was convinced that a liberal-arts education without an encounter with Bastiat is incomplete. Reading Bastiat made me keenly aware of all the time wasted, along with the frustrations of going down one blind alley after another, organizing my philosophy of life. The Law did not produce a philosophical conversion for me as much as it created order in my thinking about liberty and just human conduct.
He goes on to say:
Many philosophers have made important contributions to the discourse on liberty, Bastiat among them. However, Bastiat's greatest contribution is that he took the discourse out of the ivory tower and made ideas on liberty so clear that even the unlettered can understand them and statists cannot obfuscate them. Clarity is crucial to persuading our fellowman of the moral superiority of personal liberty.
If you are looking for a single book that once read will provide you with many hours of thought and may perhaps change the way you look at life and your interactions with others, this is it.
