Bruce L. Benson (born March 18, 1949) received his Ph.D. from
Texas A&M University in 1978 and is chair of the Department of Economics, DeVoe L. Moore Professor, Distinguished Research Professor and courtesy Professor of Law at
Florida State University. He is an American academic economist who is widely recognized as an authority on
law and economics and a major exponent of
anarcho-capitalism legal theory. He is the recipient of the 2006 Adam Smith Award, the highest honor bestowed by the
Association of Private Enterprise Education. He is a Senior Fellow at the
Independent Institute and has recently been a Fulbright Senior Specialist in the Czech Republic, Visiting Professor at the University de Paris Pantheonon Assas, a Property-and-Environment-Research-Center Julian Simon Fellow, and Visiting Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.