The issues surrounding governmental interference with the rights of private property have been a source of recurrent conflict throughout American social and political history. From Revolutionary-Era debtor relief laws, to early nineteenth-century legislative grants of private monopolistic and condemnatory powers, to the great abolitionist struggles of the Civil War Era, to the rise of the twentieth century’s regulatory state, bitter rhetorical and political wars have been waged about the nature, extent, and sanctity of claimed individual rights of private property.

Gerald C. MacCallum, Jr. was a professor of philosophy who taught at the University of Wisconsin—with a few leaves of absence to teach elsewhere—from 1961 until 1977. He taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in the philosophy department there and he co-taught the jurisprudence course from time to time at the University of Wisconsin Law School.