Gary Chartier

In 2015, the University of Cambridge presented Chartier with an earned LLD in recognition of his work in legal theory.

Chartier offers an understanding of property rights as contingent but tightly constrained social strategies—reflective of the importance of multiple, overlapping rationales for separate ownership and of natural law principles of practical reasonableness, defending robust but non-absolute protections for these rights in a manner similar to that employed by David Hume. This account is distinguished both from Lockean and neo-Lockean views which deduce property rights from the idea of self-ownership and from consequentialist accounts that might license widespread ad hoc interference with the possessions of groups and individuals. Chartier uses this account to ground a clear statement of the natural law basis for the view that solidaristic wealth redistribution by individual persons is often morally required, but as a response by individuals and grass-roots networks to particular circumstances rather than as a state-driven attempt to achieve a particular distributive pattern. He advances detailed arguments for workplace democracy rooted in such natural law principles as subsidiarity, defending it as morally desirable and as a likely outcome of the elimination of injustice rather than as something to be mandated by the state. He discusses natural law approaches to land reform and to the occupation of factories by workers. He objects on natural-law grounds to intellectual property protections, drawing on his theory of property rights more generally. And he develops a general natural law account of boycotts.

Chartier argues for anarchism on the basis that the state is unnecessary, illegitimate, and dangerous, and that the elimination of the state will unleash human creativity. His affinity for anarchism differentiates him from other proponents of natural-law ethics. Natural law theorists from St. Thomas Aquinas to the present have frequently been statists. They have often rejected consent-based theories of state authority as unrealistic, arguing instead, in a manner similar to David Hume's, that actually existing states deserve allegiance because of their capacity to preserve order. Chartier contends that the state is not needed to maintain social order, and that natural law theorists need not be attached to it in preference to other means of maintaining order, including custom, convention, and various voluntary arrangements. He has also linked his concerns with anarchism and natural law theory indirectly by defending anarchism against objections levelled by natural law theorist Mark C. Murphy. Murphy has maintained that all arguments for "philosophical anarchism" fail because they misconstrue the nature of many people's support for the authority of state-made law and that people who believe in the authority of state-made law are entitled to retain their beliefs in the face of anarchist criticism. Chartier argues in response that for many people, at least, belief in state authority is defeasible and can rightly be undermined by positive arguments against particular justifications for the authority of state-made law. Also important to his defense of anarchism is his detailed justification for the conclusion that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the institutions of a consensual, polycentric legal order can enforce the law without becoming morally indistinguishable from states. Even in Economic Justice and Natural Law, which is not concerned particularly with anarchism, he explicitly challenges the necessity of the state, and his discussion of law in a natural law context focuses on "communal norms, rules, and institutions"—which need not be maintained using force and which are intended to be understood as elements of a polycentric legal order—rather than on state-made laws.

Chartier has been an active participant in discussions among market anarchists and others about the aptness of "capitalism" as a label for what some participants in the conversation have termed "freed markets" in order to distinguish them from existing economic arrangements, which they see as shot through with statist privilege. He has argued that proponents of genuinely freed markets should explicitly reject capitalism and identify with the global anti-capitalist movement, while emphasizing that the abuses the anti-capitalist movement highlights result from state-tolerated violence and state-secured privilege rather than from voluntary cooperation and exchange. According to Chartier, "it makes sense for [left-libertarians] to name what [it is] they oppose [in] 'capitalism.' [And by d]oing so . . . ensure[] that advocates of freedom aren't confused with people who use market rhetoric to prop up an unjust status quo, and[, therefore,] express[] solidarity between defenders of freed markets and workers— as well as [with] ordinary people around the world who use 'capitalism' as a short-hand label for the world-system that constrains their freedom and stunts their lives." He has joined Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson, and others (echoing the language of Benjamin Tucker and Thomas Hodgskin) in maintaining that, because of its heritage and its emancipatory goals and potential, radical market anarchism should be seen—by its proponents and by others—as part of the socialist tradition, and that market anarchists can and should call themselves "socialists."

Chartier is the author of eight scholarly books—An Ecological Theory of Free Expression, The Logic of Commitment, Public Practice, Private Law, Anarchy and Legal Order, Radicalizing Rawls, Economic Justice and Natural Law, The Analogy of Love, and The Conscience of an Anarchist—and of articles in journals including the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Law and Philosophy, Legal Theory, the UCLA Law Review, and Religious Studies, the co-editor (with Charles Johnson) of Markets Not Capitalism and (with David M. Hart, Roderick T. Long, and Ross Kenyon) of Social Class and State Power, and the editor of The Future of Adventism.

Jonathan Crowe called Economic Justice and Natural Law "important and original." Timothy Chappell declared that it was "[e]ssential reading" and maintained that it was "elegant, clear, and well-informed." According to Stephen Munzer, it was "perceptive, timely, and beautifully ordered" and featured arguments that were "probing and trenchant." By contrast, St. John's University economist Charles Clarke criticized the book's anarchism, evaluating it as insufficiently attentive to the need for governmental involvement in the economy and as unduly similar in tone to the work of Austrian economists. The book was the focus of a Molinari Society session at the April 2011 San Diego convention of the American Philosophical Association's Pacific Division.

After working as the editor of a newspaper in Temecula, California, and of a journal published by La Sierra University, and teaching courses in religion and philosophy at Loma Linda University and California Baptist University, Chartier enrolled at the UCLA School of Law. At UCLA, he studied with philosophers including Stephen R. Munzer, Seana Shiffrin, and Pamela Hieronymi, with the political theorist Stephen Gardbaum, with former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, and with constitutional law scholar Kenneth L. Karst; he graduated in 2001 as a member of the Order of the Coif and as the recipient of the Judge Jerry Pacht Memorial Award in Constitutional Law. He had served during law school as lecturer in business ethics at La Sierra; a full-time academic appointment began in September 2001. Following a 2005 stint as lecturer in law at Brunel University, Chartier was promoted to the rank of associate professor and tenured at La Sierra in 2008. He became associate dean of La Sierra's business school in 2009; he was promoted to the rank of professor in 2012. He was named La Sierra's first Distinguished Professor effective January 2016.

Chartier received a bachelor's degree at what is now La Sierra University in 1987; he graduated magna cum laude and received the University President's Award. Though he had majored in history and political science, his undergraduate study of philosophy and religion led to his enrollment in a doctoral program in the philosophy of religion and theology at what was then Claremont Graduate School. While at Claremont, where he studied under John Hick, he applied and was accepted into a PhD program in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, where his teachers included Nicholas Lash and Brian Hebblethwaite, and from which he was graduated in 1991. His dissertation, supervised by Hebblethwaite, focused on the idea of friendship; his examiners were Stephen R. L. Clark and Michael Banner. By this time, his political views had taken a conventionally social democratic turn.

Gary William Chartier (born December 30, 1966) is an American legal scholar and philosopher who is currently Distinguished Professor of Law and Business Ethics and Associate Dean of the Tom and Vi Zapara School of Business at La Sierra University in Riverside, California.

Chartier was born on December 30, 1966, in Glendale, California, at what is now Glendale Adventist Medical Center, to physician Stanley E. Chartier and Helen L. Bloodworth Chartier, later a realtor. His parents were socially conservative Seventh-day Adventists; his physician father had previously worked as an accountant and had taught the subject at local colleges. When Chartier was in high school he became interested in political theory after reading books by Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Robert Anton Wilson, and Friedrich Hayek. He appeared as a guest on Wally George's Hot Seat television show in 1986 to defend an anarchist manifesto he submitted to the show's producers.