Research

• "Baptism and Civic-Membership in Medieval and Early Modern Law." History of Political Thought, 45(2), 229-256. Digital Link. 

• “Jurisdiction, Territory, Sovereignty: Giulio Pace and the Dominion of the Sea”, in Sovereignty: European and Global Histories, 1400-1800 (October 23, 2024), eds. Cornel Zwierlein and Daniel Lee. Brill. Digital Link.

• "Introduction" to Thomas More's Utopia, Contubernales Press, 2023. 

Accepted, 2024: "Mixed Labor and Mixed Property: The Law of Locke's Original Appropriation" (Journal of the History of Ideas)

My first book project, titled Ghost of the Empire: Church, Law, and the Public Sphere, 1300-1650 attempts to more precisely describe and theorize the Church's legal and political activity in pre-Modern Europe. This project is the outgrowth of my dissertation, and recovers for the first time a theoretically and contextually responsible account of the Church in the medieval history of public law. 

By reconstructing and tracing the writing of civil and canon lawyers, I recover specific rights, claims, and powers of the Church which challenge theoretical and historical descriptions of the Church:

• The Church prescribed boundaries over civic membership by baptizing citizens and recording crucial demographic information in baptismal books which it kept as public archival records.

• The Church claimed the right to confiscate private property of citizens (ius confiscandi), the pre-Modern equivalent of civil asset forfeiture. 

• The Church claimed the right to suspend the law-making capacities of entire cities as a collective punishment, which necessarily includes non-Christians.

• The Church claimed, in part, to have the ius terrendi—the right to induce terror, which is constitutive of the concept of 'territory' both within their land-holdings (the terra Ecclesiae) and outside of it.

• The Church, borrowing from classical political thought and literature, claimed that the walls and defenses of the city were "holy",  "sacred" and public—a claim which the temporal state gladly used to compel them to help fund supporting them.

The Church often developed the bureaucratic machinery which would be adopted and copied by late-Renaissance and Early Modern states—they often took wholesale models of record keeping, disciplinary institutions, and strategies for managing criminal and economic jurisdiction within their territory. 

My current appointment at St. Anne's College is allowing me to develop my second project, tentatively titled Accountability: A Legal and Theological History. 

Scholars like Melissa Lane, Kinch Hoekstra, and Matthew Landauer have recently published on Athenian institutions and conceptions of accountability; in particular, the Athenian "audit" (euthunai/euthynai)—a financial audit of magistrates consisting of a financial audit and then a broader audit of other offenses. Charges, if there were any, were adjudicated by a popular court. Crucially, elections were not sufficient for the Athenian conception of "accountability".

This project begins with the Roman interpretation and translation of Athenian institutions of "accountability", specifically as reflected in the Roman law of public administration, elections, trials, and guardianship. The action of "rendering account" (rationem reddere) could be financial as in cases of conditional manumissions, legal as in cases of accusations of mismanagement of conservators or trusts, or simply oral—individuals were expected to "explain" their actions, or literally "giving reasons" (reddere rationem).  

The crucial inflection point for this history is the attractiveness of this conception for Late Antique Christian authors who found in the concept of accountability the perfect vehicle for describing Judgment Day: the Apocalypse was no longer a passive judgment of one's life, but it was a full-fledged dialectical audit, with Christ as the grand auditor. It is remakable then that scenes of the Last Judgment were frequently painted in medieval, renaissance, and early modern courtrooms as reminders of this very kind of accountability. Within the theology of accountability was a second useful conception for ecclesiastical writers: pastoral care. Priests, Bishops, and temporal rulers were all responsible for the care and stewardship of their subjects. They could be charged in ecclesiastical courts for violations of proper stewardship—an ecclesiastical framework that became the backbone of renaissance and early modern theories of resistance and revolution. 

Renaissance authors wrestled with the "unaccountability" of the Pope and the Emperor, while early modern theorists of sovereignty from Bodin to Pufendorf stressed that "unaccountability" was essential for sovereignty itself. In early modernity, English authors translated "reddere rationem" as "to give (an) account" or "to render (an) account", which in turn generated the word "accountability". 

Even in Jeremy Waldron's recent parsing of accountability, which recognized a historical-theological conception of agent-accountability, it becomes clear that the temporalization of accountability brought the procedure of Judgment Day back down to the courts and indeed even into public opinion—this, I suggest, is one prong of the famous maxim, vox populi vox Dei, the 'voice of the people is the voice of God'. I will also argue that these pre-early modern conceptions of accountability were more robust than many modern conceptions of forensic and electoral accountability, and indeed, more in-line with recent scholarly and theoretical arguments about the requirements of restorative and transformative justice. 

Finally,  it is precisely the pastoral-care content of representation and stewardship that Foucault identified at operating at the heart of the "governmentalization of the state"; it is also precisely the character of "reason-giving" ( reddere rationem, loosely) which undergirds contemporary accounts of democratic politics, from Dewey to Rawls (and Kant), and from Charles Tilly to scholars across the disciplines. 

• "The (Un)Accountability of Sovereignty: Pufendorf, Grotius, and the Holy Roman Empire"

• "Baptism and Manumission in American Colonial Statutes: The American Legacy of Medieval Law"

• "Grace, Redemption, and Unfree Freedom: Augustine's Legal Theology of Salvation"

• "'Not Almost Worth the Speaking': Villeinage and the Problem of Neo-Roman Liberty"

• "Language and War: Digest 1.1.5 and the Legal Ideas of the Origin of Human Society"

• "Medieval Majoritarianism"

• "The Boundaries Problem: Walls in the Classical Legal and Political Imagination"

• "Thomas More: Tyranny and Utopia"

• "'The Whole Vast Design': John Adams' Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law Reconsidered"

Outlining and Primary Research Phase:

• Immanuel Kant and the "Guardian Spirit" (genius): Defending the Absurd in Kant's Critique of Rights

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• String Theory: A Descriptive Theory of Rights

• The Church and the ius gentium (law of nations)