Center for Independent Thought

Karl Hess for lifetime achievement.

Richard A. Epstein for Forbidden Grounds and for a "lifetime of intellectual work on behalf of individual liberty and property rights."

Professor Lord Peter T. Bauer for being "an eloquent champion of free markets and the rule of law around the world."

James Bovard for "prolific writing about government abuses of individuals in their economic and personal lives."

Philip Zimmerman for developing Pretty Good Privacy encryption software.

David Kopel and Paul Blackman for No More Wacos. Bettina Bien Graves for lifetime achievement.

Chip Mellor and Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice, for their litigation and cutting-edge constitutional work in favor of economic liberty, property rights, and school choice.

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, a tireless defender of individual freedom in all spheres during his long tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives. While his emphasis has been on economic freedom, he has also battled on behalf of personal privacy and civil liberties.

Jacob Sullum, author, journalist, and winner of the general award, relentlessly defends the rights of consenting adults to consume even potentially harmful products, such as drugs and tobacco. He is a consistent champion of all civil and economic liberties.

Libertarian/feminist Joan Kennedy Taylor for her lifelong devotion to liberty.

Historian Robert Higgs (general category) for his work on the reasons and methods by which government grows and usurps liberty, particularly how the state creates and exploits fear in order to expand its power over its subjects.

George Mason University economist Donald Boudreaux (general category), whose prolific writing has extended beyond theoretical economics to explore in popular venues the virtues of individual liberty, including some of less popular forms.

Founder and president emeritus of the Cato Institute, Ed Crane, in the general category. Crane is an icon in the libertarian movement. Under his leadership, the Cato Institute grew to become one of the nation's most prominent public policy research organizations.

Journalist and TV show host John Stossel in the general category.

A Lifetime Achievement Award is presented to Edward Snowden, a former U.S. Intelligence Community employee and whistleblower who in 2013 released, through journalists, documents that revealed warrantless mass surveillance of Americans' telephone records, the government's extraordinary level of access to the data of nine giant internet companies including Google and Facebook, and U.S. surveillance of phone calls by world leaders.

As president of the Center for Independent Thought, the parent organization of Laissez-Faire Books, she also launched and managed the Thomas S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties and the Roy A. Childs Fund for Independent Scholars. CIT's biggest project was Stossel in the Classroom, which repackaged ABC News and Fox Business videos on economics and public policy by John Stossel for classroom use. The videos have been viewed by tens of millions of high school students – according to Stossel, reaching more people than ABC News and Fox News.