Luna Law: The Liberation Vision in Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
![handle is hein.journals/tenn63 and id is 81 raw text is: LUNA LAW: THE LIBERTARIAN VISION
IN HEINLEIN'S THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS
DMITRY N. FEOFANOV*
To Roger, with gratitude.
Table of Contents
I. INTRODUCTION .................................... 71
A. Luna Law-And Our Own ......................... 71
B. The Story ...................................... 75
II. THE LAW ....................................... 77
A. Procedural Law ................................ 77
B. Substantive Law ................................. 86
1. Property Law ................................ 86
2. Fam ily Law ................................. 96
3. Crim inal Law .............................. 113
4. Constitutional Law ........................... 124
III. CONCLUSION .................................... 139
We don't have laws, I said. Never been allowed to.
MANUEL GARCIA O'KELLY, explaining the Luna legal system.
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Luna Law-And Our Own
Robert Heinlein wrote a number of adult works' advancing his
individualist, libertarian2 political philosophy.3 Among these, The Moon
* Member, Illinois Bar. Diploma, Musical College of the Moscow Conservatory,
1976; M.A., Northeast Missouri State University, 1979; M.M., University of Illinois, 1980;
J.D., Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1994.
The author wishes to express his appreciation to friends and teachers Anita Bernstein,
Lloyd Cohen, David Friedman, Molly Lien, Steven Manley, and J. Neil Schulman for their,
manifestly unsuccessful, attempts to restore the author to sanity during the writing of this
Article. Special thanks are due to Justice David Harris of the Iowa Supreme Court for
ignoring this handicap of his law clerk. Dmitry Feofanov may be reached at.
alumfeofanov@minna.acc.iit.edu.
1. Until the late fifties, Heinlein concentrated on writing short and extended stories
for pulps and slicks, and novels for the juvenile market. ROBERT A. HEINLEIN,
GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE 261-62 (Virginia Heinlein ed., 1989) [hereinafter GRUMBLES].
When his publisher turned down Starship Troopers-a book that subsequently won Heinlein
a Hugo-Heinlein changed publishers and began writing mostly for the adult market. Id. at
94-100.
2. This term has been consistently understood as referring to one who upholds the](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/tenn63&div=9&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Luna Law: The Liberation Vision in Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
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