Tag Archives: politics

The Best Little Zoo in the World: A History of the Belize Zoo

Executive Summary The Belize Zoo and Tropical Education Center occupies an unusual place among the world’s conservation institutions: it was not planned, endowed, or designed, but improvised by one woman who refused to abandon a group of film animals left … Continue reading

Posted in History, Musings | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Heap of Witness: Treaties, Boundaries, and the Land That Is the LORD’s

A sermon on the binding of oaths, the bounds of nations, and the difference between keeping a word and merely saying one. Brethren, there is a river in the south of this country called the Sarstoon, and along its banks … Continue reading

Posted in Bible, Biblical History, Christianity, History, International Relations, Musings | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Functional Partnership: Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and the Management of a Working Relationship

Abstract From March 1862 until the end of the war, the relationship between Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee functioned with a smoothness almost unique among Davis’s relations with his senior commanders. This paper treats that partnership as the control … Continue reading

Posted in American Civil War, American History, History, Military History | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The Land’s Unkept Sabbaths: Whether the Periodic Dissolution Is Law or Only Liturgy in Present-Day Bravia

Porterville Working Paper No. 23 Prof. Heinrich Tschudi, Chair of Law and Covenant Studies, Provincial College of Porterville I. The Question, Which Indicts Its Author In Working Paper No. 22 I built a doctrine that rests upon a load-bearing claim, … Continue reading

Posted in NaNoWriMo | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Paper 10 — Gifts, Bribes, and the Office: A Scriptural Account of Self-Enrichment in Authority

Where the structural account ends The preceding paper carried the analysis as far as institutional reasoning can take it. It showed that the gap between what the rules forbid and what officeholders extract is a stable equilibrium, produced by conflicted … Continue reading

Posted in Bible, Christianity, Musings | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Paper 9 — Why Hard Rules Under-Deliver: A Structural Synthesis

The question the survey leaves Eight papers have established two facts that sit uneasily together. The formal prohibitions against officeholder self-enrichment are broad, old, and in the constitutional case categorical; and the operational norm, what officeholders and their families have … Continue reading

Posted in Musings | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Paper 8 — The Adjacent Machinery: Conflicts of Interest, the Revolving Door, Gifts, Disclosure, and Blind Trusts

The constitutional clause and its statutory family The emoluments clauses do not stand alone. They are the oldest and highest members of a large family of controls against officeholder self-dealing, a family that grew over two centuries from two constitutional … Continue reading

Posted in American History, History | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Paper 7 — Insider Trading and the STOCK Act: Informational Emoluments and the Enforcement That Wasn’t

Gain in the form of knowledge The series has so far tracked benefit that arrives as money or its equivalent: a gift, a payment, a commercial advantage, a relative’s enrichment. This paper turns to a benefit that arrives as information, … Continue reading

Posted in Musings | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Paper 6 — The Family Channel: Relatives, Households, and the Boundary of the Prohibition

The seam the text left open The close of Paper 2 identified, among the seams visible in the constitutional text, the individual framing of the prohibitions. The Foreign Emoluments Clause bars “any Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust” … Continue reading

Posted in American History, History | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Paper 5 — Benefit Regardless of Law: A History of Officeholder Self-Enrichment from the Founding Forward

The empirical question The doctrinal papers built a structural account of why the emoluments prohibition is hard to enforce: the harm is diffuse, no plaintiff fits the standing template, the gatekeeper is conflicted, the remedy is uncertain, and the fixed … Continue reading

Posted in American History, History | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment