Fiduciary Government

Description

The idea that the state is a fiduciary to its citizens has a long pedigree - ultimately reaching back to the ancient Greeks, and including Hobbes and Locke among its proponents. Public fiduciary theory is now experiencing a resurgence, with applications that range from international law, to insider trading by members of Congress, to election law and gerrymandering. This book is the first of its kind: a collection of chapters by leading writers on public fiduciary subject areas. The authors develop new accounts of how fiduciary principles apply to representation; to officials and judges; to problems of legitimacy and political obligation; to positive rights; to the state itself; and to the history of ideas. The resulting volume should be of great interest to political theorists and public law scholars, to private fiduciary law scholars, and to students seeking an introduction to this new and increasingly relevant area of study.

Evan J. Criddle is a Professor at William and Mary Law School. His books include Fiduciaries of Humanity: How International Law Constitutes Authority (2016) (with Evan Fox-Decent) and The Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law (forthcoming) (co-edited with Paul B. Miller and Robert H. Sitkoff). He has authored ground breaking articles on fiduciary government in the Cornell Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Texas Law Review, and UCLA Law Review. Evan Fox-Decent is Professor of Law of McGill University's Faculty of Law. His first monograph, Sovereignty's Promise: The State as Fiduciary (2011), was short-listed for the C. B. Macpherson Prize awarded annually by the Canadian Political Science Association for best book related to political theory. His second monograph, with Evan J. Criddle, is Fiduciaries of Humanity: How International Law Constitutes Authority (2016), and develops a novel account of international law based on fiduciary precepts. Andrew S. Gold is Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. He has also been the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School; an H. L. A. Hart Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford; and a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at McGill University, Montreal. He is the co-editor of several volumes, including Philosophical Foundations of Fiduciary Law (2014) (co-edited with Paul Miller), Contract, Status, and Fiduciary Law (2016) (co-edited with Paul Miller), the Research Handbook of Fiduciary Law (2018) (co-edited with D. Gordon Smith), The Oxford Handbook of New Private Law (forthcoming) (co-edited with John Goldberg, Daniel Kelly, Emily Sherwin, and Henry Smith). He is also a co-founder of the North American Workshop on Private Law Theory. Sung Hui Kim is Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, where she teaches and writes on corporate law, securities law and professional responsibility. Her scholarship has appeared in Capital Markets Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, UCLA Law Review, Securities Law Review and University of Chicago Press. She has co-authored Professional Responsibility: A Contemporary Approach, 3rd edition (2017) and co-edited Can Delaware Be Dethroned?: Evaluating Delaware's Dominance of Corporate Law (2018). Before law teaching, she served as general counsel for Red Bull North America, Inc. after a career in corporate transactional practice. Paul B. Miller is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for International and Graduate Programs at Notre Dame Law School. Miller is a leading private law theorist whose work focuses on philosophical questions in fiduciary law, trust law, and corporate law. He is a co-founder and co-organizer of two leading academic conferences in his field - the annual North American Workshop on Private Law Theory, and the annual Fiduciary Law Workshop. He has co-edited Philosophical Foundations of Fiduciary Law (2014), Contract, Status, and Fiduciary Law (2016), and The Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law (forthcoming).

'This excellent and novel volume seeks to reinstate the fiduciary principle to its historic place in regulating a government's relationship with its people. After two centuries of neglect, a growing number of mainly North American scholars have embarked enthusiastically on this task. They have recognized, correctly, that resort to this principle, with necessary modernization, is capable ultimately of providing greater clarity, coherence and guidance in legal and political thought than that which prevails today.' The Honourable Justice Paul Finn, Federal Court of Australia 'The fiduciary theory of government holds that governments and government officials only hold power in trust for the benefit of others; therefore they have special duties of fairness and good faith. Debating both the attractions and the problems of the fiduciary conception, these essays are a valuable addition to a growing literature.' Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School