The Trump administration's tariff policy runs counter to more than 200 years of economic theory. The method in which they've been implemented runs counter to established legal reasoning. The administration states "facts" about the tariffs that are mutually contradictory, such as claiming that the tariffs will raise significant tax revenue and protect American businesses. Come hear the noted law and economics scholar Richard Epstein's lecture at Texas Tech University to learn more. 

Richard Epstein is the inaugural Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, where he serves as a Director of the Classical Liberal Institute, which he help found in 2013. He has served as the Peter and Kirstin Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 2000. Epstein is also the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985 and has been a senior fellow of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago Division of Biological Sciences since 1983. He was a winner of the Bradley Prize in 2011. Epstein has written numerous articles on a wide range of legal and interdisciplinary subjects, as well as over 15 books; his most recent is The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (Harvard U. Press, 2014). His next book, The Dubious Morality of Modern Administrative Law (Manhattan Institute), will be published this coming fall. Epstein is at work on the 12th Edition (with Catherine Sharkey) of Cases and Materials in Torts (Wolters Kluwer 2020). He writes a weekly column for the Hoover Institution’s Defining Ideas, and a monthly column for the Las Vegas Journal Review, and appears regularly in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes.com and other publications. He does a weekly podcast, the Libertarian with Troy Senik, a monthly podcast, Law Talk, with Troy Senik and John Yoo, and a regular podcast, Reasonable Disagreements with Adam White. He is also a frequent guest on the John Batchelor Show.

Alex Nowrasteh is the vice president for economic and social policy studies at Cato Institute. His popular publications have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Washington Post, and most other major publications in the United States. Nowrasteh regularly appears on Fox News, MSNBC, Bloomberg, NPR, and numerous television and radio stations. His peer‐​reviewed academic publications have appeared in the World Bank Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Public Choice, Kyklos, the Journal of Bioeconomics, and others. He has also contributed numerous book chapters to various edited volumes. Nowrasteh is the coauthor (with Benjamin Powell) of Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which is the first book on how economic institutions in receiving countries adjust to immigration. Wretched Refuse? received the SDAE Prize for the Best Book in Austrian Economics in 2022 from the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics. Nowrasteh, a native of Southern California, received a BA in economics from George Mason University and an MS in economic history from the London School of Economics.

Mark Pennington Mark Pennington has been Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy since January 2012 and was Head of Department between 2016 and 2020. Prior to joining King’s he taught for 12 years in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Mark is currently director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society. Mark’s work takes place at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and economics with a focus on problems of limited knowledge and bounded rationality. This approach is exemplified in his new book Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2025) which is the first attempt to integrate Michel Foucault’s ‘post-modern’ social and political theory with the perspective of liberal political economy. In doing so Mark develops the case for a distinctively ‘post-modern’ liberalism focused on threats to freedom in contemporary societies arising from multiple ‘power/knowledge’ complexes that seek to correct ‘pattern anomalies’ in the name of social justice, public health, sustainability, and law and order. Mark’s earlier work includes analyses of the classical liberal tradition, environmental governance, social capital, and the relationship between markets and democratic citizenship – brought together in the book Robust Political Economy: classical liberalism and the future of public policy (Edward Elgar, 2011). He is also the author of Planning and the Political Market (Continuum, 2001) a political economy analysis of the UK town and country planning system. From September 2025 Mark will be working with Roberto Fumagalli on a new 33-month project supported by the John Templeton Foundation on ‘Market Economies and Green Ideals’.