ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 11i
I Asked a Forty-Year Appellate Lawyer What a Court Is For. He Said It Is a Bureaucracy.
James Ostrowski is a trial and appellate lawyer in Buffalo, New York, in his forty-second year of practice. He took degrees from SUNY Buffalo and Brooklyn Law School, sat in Murray Rothbard’s private seminar, wrote the Cato study “Thinking about Drug Legalization” in May 1989, and is the author of thirteen books. In May 2026 he stood for chair of the Libertarian Party, led the first ballot, and lost on the third. In April 2019 he won the reversal of the first conviction ever prosecuted under the New York SAFE Act: Benjamin Wassell had sold two of his own rifles to an undercover investigator, and Jim won unanimously on a jurisdictional point — the Attorney General had no authority to bring the case.
I asked him what the purpose of a court is. Courts are a bureaucracy, he said. They act in their own interest and they are deeply ideological. Judges are politicians, and appointed judges are frequently more political than elected ones and less transparent about it, because when a handful of people put a judge on a bench nobody outside that handful can see the constituency being served. That is a cold thing to hear at the end of a week spent admiring a constitutional settlement, and it is the most useful thing anyone said on this show all week.
Then I handed him the arms clause of 1689 and asked which of his clients’ liberties survive only because Albany has not gotten around to them yet. He reached for compulsory government schooling and the drug war, both almost entirely state and local, where the money and the enforcement and the prisons actually are. A state can oppress and a town can oppress, and the only real advantage of the town is that you can leave it. We close on his new book, Government Takes 80%, which compares the cost of government in 1900 against 2026.
Every episode of this show asks the same question of whatever it examines: did this leave us more free, or more governed?
⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00:00 — Introduction to the English Bill of Rights
0:00:38 — Episode Overview
0:03:08 — Guest Background
0:05:59 — Origins of a Legal Career
0:12:20 — Early Drug Policy Advocacy
0:20:19 — The Reality of the Courts
0:24:23 — Defeating the NY SAFE Act
0:30:38 — Challenging Gun Licensing
0:33:58 — Analyzing the 1689 Arms Clause
0:44:23 — Liberty at the State Level
0:49:54 — The Ratchet Effect of Government Growth
0:58:43 — Libertarianism’s Historical Contributions
1:04:26 — Government Takes 80%
1:12:17 — Closing Reflections
1:19:08 — Preview of Next Week
📚 Companion article — Week 11, on the Glorious Revolution: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/1688-triumph-and-warning-the-glorious-revolution-and-its-limits
⚖️ Jim’s work and books:
LibertyMovement.org — https://libertymovement.org
Books page — https://libertymovement.org/books/
Amazon author page — https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00OE8JKQO
X / Twitter — @JimOstrowski
