Manuel Klausner, RIP
The co-founder of Reason Foundation and former editor of Reason fought for liberty in his legal practice and policy advocacy.
Manuel Klausner, a co-founder and longtime trustee of Reason Foundation, and former editor and publisher of Reason, has died at 85.
Klausner first became interested in political ideas while an undergraduate at UCLA in the late 1950s. His outlook turned in a classical liberal/libertarian direction when he went to law school at New York University (NYU) in the early 1960s, under the influence of Sylvester Petro, then teaching labor law at NYU.
Petro also introduced Klausner to the ideas of Ludwig von Mises, then giving his famous series of seminars at the university. Klausner attended Mises' seminars and would often ride on the subway with the great Austrian economist and advocate of free markets and classical liberalism, learning more. Klausner also met and was influenced by Mises' student Murray Rothbard during his NYU law school years.
After getting his law degree from NYU, Klausner studied at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark in 1963–64, with support from Ford Foundation and Fulbright grants. There he did his first work with a small political party that he found had decent, if not perfect, classical liberal principles called the Independent Party, which held five seats in parliament at the time. "I used to speak to them, before Denmark decriminalized porn, and talking about why they should favor that and be a basically laissez-faire party opposed to the welfare state," Klausner recalled in a 1999 interview for my 2007 history of the American libertarian movement, Radicals for Capitalism.
On returning to America, he taught at the University of Chicago Law School in 1964–65, where he also did editing work for the early libertarian student magazine New Individualist Review and The Journal of Law and Economics. "Chicago was an exciting place to be because of the quality of faculty, the intellectual atmosphere, and a serious tradition of liberty among people there," Klausner said in that 1999 interview. "It turned out to be an extraordinary experience for me to be part of that community of scholars and the rich intellectual tradition at Chicago, both law and economics and philosophy and history—there were many great scholars there who take liberty seriously." He credited Aaron Director and Ronald Coase as particularly rich influences in his Chicago time.
Klausner began practicing law in the mid-'60s in Los Angeles with Kindel & Anderson, where he worked over the next three decades extensively in cases ranging over business law to constitutional, election, and media law. He grew to enjoy public speaking to spread libertarian ideas. Enthusiasm, Klausner told me, was key to his personality, and key, he believed, to success in any endeavor. By the end of the 1960s he "was doing a lot of speaking, I was very interested in achieving positive social change using the political system and print media, so it was a natural for me."
His enthusiasm for spreading libertarian ideas led to him connecting with a local libertarian philosopher he heard on the radio, Tibor Machan; the two men eventually allied with local engineer Robert Poole and took over Reason in 1971, which had been foundering under its founding editor Lanny Friedlander. Klausner played many roles with the magazine through the 1970s, including editor and publisher, and in 1978 was a co-founder of Reason Foundation, which took on the publishing of Reason, as well as other public policy work pushing libertarian ideas in the real world.
Klausner appreciated California's citizen initiative process and had been active in trying to use that process for libertarian causes, though not all of his efforts ended up on the ballot. He worked to push a very early marijuana legalization initiative in 1972 (that did not make the ballot, though he was ahead of the curve as the state, and many other states, have since legalized marijuana possession and use), as well as efforts to eliminate the sales tax in California. He played a role in California's successful Proposition 209 in 1996, which tried to end discrimination or disparate treatment based on racial classifications in California government.
He was an early supporter of the Libertarian Party, and was the only other candidate running for federal office outside the John Hospers/Tonie Nathan presidential ticket in the Party's first active year, 1972. Klausner ran a unique write-in campaign for Congress in two different districts. His slogan was "the candidate of principle for the thinking person." He chose not to pay a filing fee which would have had his write-in votes counted, so enjoyed saying a "countless number of people voted for me for Congress in 1972." He was proud that Rothbard told him that he, Klausner, was the only politician he knew who became more radical while running for office, when Klausner realized from confronting libertarian audiences that he could no longer defend coercive taxation for any reason.
Klausner founded his own law practice in 1996. He was also the longtime chair of the Libertarian Law Council and of the Federalist Society's Free Speech & Election Law Practice Group, and a founding director of the Institute for Justice. For the past decades he led Reason Foundation's program providing pro-liberty amicus briefs in important Supreme Court cases. Among his honors were the 1982 Lawyer of the Year Award from the Constitutional Rights Foundation and the Los Angeles County Bar Association, and the Lawyer of the Year Award from the Federalist Society's Los Angeles Lawyers Chapter in 2013.
He was also a theater enthusiast, and worked as a producer on various stage shows over the years, including Hadestown and Maybe Happy Ending. His wife Willette Murphy Klausner, whom he married in 1969, is herself a longtime producer for film and theater with her WMK Productions.
A generous bon vivant and gourmet, and a man dedicated to the importance of economic thinking, Klausner provided a little anecdote I've been retelling for decades. He was dining with me and some other young Reason staffers, at a time when those staffers were all still in our 20s, if I recall correctly. It was the type of masterful upscale restaurant he doted on and loved exposing people to. He casually informed us before the meal that he'd pick up half the tab. This, of course, made us mindful of the cost of what we were ordering on a menu that had some high-ticket items indeed. At the end of the meal, he quietly picked up the entire tab, teaching an indelibly stylish lesson in both generosity and prudent economic thinking, something that was always Manuel—Manny to his friends—Klausner's way.
Klausner studied tai chi for decades under Nzazi Malonga (Master Zi) at his Dharma Health Institute in Playa Del Rey. When he first heard Klausner propounding his political views, which he always liked to do, Zi says "I thought he was trying to provoke me" but soon realized that though Klausner stood behind his libertarian views, he would happily listen to disputants in any social situation and if they got upset just remain poker-faced and advise them to "read this book by Milton Friedman."
Even if political disagreements threatened to get heated in social situations, such as the many meals Klausner hosted at L.A. restaurants from the most "hoity-toity" to trailers on the side of the road serving burritos (and many people at both types of places would know and love Klausner, Zi recalls), Klausner was happy to just move on to the next course or round after having his say. Zi recalls he could sometimes get Klausner to change his mind on a point—"but only if you came at him with the data."
Beneath Klausner's politics, and central to his personality, Zi found, was "a genuine concern for the well being of other people." Klausner would happily support Zi's business financially through hard times, insisting that, as Zi remembered him saying, "This is the free market. I like your product and support it and support you and this is how the free market works."
"Imagine us together," Zi says, Klausner a man "who grew up in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles," and Zi a refugee "kid from the Congo," and "he became an extension of my family, such a big brother to me. He was a genuinely good man" and "a good man when nobody was looking."
Klausner told me in 1999 that "on my death bed I'll be proud and happy—I'm positive by nature. We have a free country here in that we can accumulate capital and invest in building frameworks to circulate ideas," which Klausner did, successfully and enthusiastically.
