James Bovard is the author of Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty (2023) Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), and eight other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to the New York Post, and has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, and the Washington Post, and is a fellow with the Libertarian Institute. His books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean.

The Wall Street Journal called Bovard 'the roving inspector general of the modern state,' and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a 'one-man truth squad.' His 1994 book Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty received the Free Press Association's Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His book Terrorism and Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner Award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the Freedom Fund Award from the National Rifle Association.

His writings have been been publicly denounced by the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the Transportation Security Administration, U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In 2015, the Justice Department sought to suppress his articles in USA Today.