Writing

"Mixed Property and Mixed Labor: The Law of Locke's Original Appropriation"

Journal of the History of Ideas

"Baptism and Civic-Membership in Medieval and Early Modern Law"

History of Political Thought

“Jurisdiction, Territory, Sovereignty: Giulio Pace and the Dominion of the Sea”

Sovereignty: European and Global Histories, 1400-1800, ed. Daniel Lee and Cornel Zwierlein

Locke's famous account of labor-mixing in acquiring property is often treated as a metaphor: labor cannot be literally mixed with objects. This article situates Locke's vocabulary and argument of "mixing," "joining," and "annexing" in a long legal tradition of writing about mixed, joined, and fused substances in property acquisition. It suggests that Locke's account can be textually and contextually interpreted as an example of accession and specification—civil and common legal modes of original acquisition through mixing properties—and that this account solves many of the famous criticisms of Locke's theory of property.

Baptism is a theological and religious sacrament by which individuals become Christians. This article shows that in medieval and renaissance law, baptism was also a civil legal event which could grant civilitas. From the Siete Partidas onwards, baptism was taken to be a legitimate origin of natural obligations within a community. As jurists like Lucas de Penna bridged the legal gap between spiritual matters (spiritualia) and temporal matters (temporalia), jurists and theorists alike could argue that baptism ought to change one’s legal origin (patria or origo) or liberate them from certain civic obligations while contracting them into others. Only by tracing how baptism came to have civil and legal significance can we then understand how participants in political communities leveraged the obligations created through baptismal oaths against tyrants, kings, bishops and their fellow civic-members.

This piece sheds new light on the 1619 treatise by Giulio Pace, De dominio maris Hadriatici. In contrast to modern interpretations, this piece argues that Pace introduced an innovative three-fold distinction about the "sea", arguing that the sea was res nullius as a matter of property, res communis as a matter of use, and capable of someone’s dominium. The legal significance of Pace’s decision to classify the Adriatic as res nullius can be seen in the subsequent claims of occupatio that can be made over res nullius: In theory, Venice could own the Adriatic, either by occupation or by prescription of time, and exercise its jurisdiction. Pace could serve as Venetian answer to Grotius and as functional equivalent to John Selden’s Mare clausum option just by elegantly refining the old mos-italicus tradition.

"Introduction" to the New Latin Edition

Book Projects

Ghost of the Empire

Church, Law and Civil Society, 1300-1650

The medieval church was a state.

—F.W. Maitland (1850-1906)

In the Middle Ages the Church was not a State, it was the State.

—John Figgis (1866-1919)

The Papacy is no other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.

—Thomas Hobbes (1651)

Since Thomas Hobbes, the “state” has been the reference point for understanding the curious character of the medieval church. As a legal person, set of institutions, and political entity, it exercised many of the rights of sovereigns, and to many of the same ends. The trouble is that the civil and canon lawyers who built the medieval and early modern legal order rejected this framework outright. The church made citizens at the baptismal font and confiscated property as the public treasury; it silenced bells and stripped whole cities of the right to politically assemble; it consecrated and patrolled city walls while dictating who belonged inside them; and it built and financed jails while walking convicts to the gallows. Each of these rights belonged to what jurists called regalia—rights particular to sovereigns and states. This book is the first to show that the Church claimed and exercised these rights while denying that it was a state at all.

Ghost of the Empire rewrites and reimagines how political theorists and intellectual historians ought to approach religion in the history of political thought. Drawing on thousands of legal texts and commentaries, it demonstrates the complete entanglement of the Catholic and post-Reformation Church in the rhythms of daily life. In its influence on daily life, the Church innovated and exercised the rights that would later be aligned with sovereignty and the modern state, but without being a state. It was something stranger: the Church. A uniquely privileged, almost all-powerful legal corporation, integrated at every layer of social, political, and international life—this haunted Bodin and Hobbes as they authored a theory of sovereignty to unsuccessfully exorcise it. Beyond introducing an anachronism, forcing the Church into the vocabulary of sovereignty has also set artificial constraints on the ways scholars think about secularization, the nation-state, corporations, and the place of religion in the lives of democratic subjects. Ghost of the Empire instead takes seriously what Bodin and Hobbes saw when they looked at medieval legal history: a ghost that not only haunted them but haunts modern politics still.

This symbol, the handing of the two keys of power from Christ to Peter (the Church), was a common motif to illustrate ecclesiastical authority. This painting is from the walls of the chaplains office at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Accountability

A Legal and Theological History

In the background of Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance, you can see an example of the Last Judgment, also known as a "Doom Painting". Found across England and Europe on church walls and in private collections, the moment of judgment was a "reckoning" (a "Dom"), or "rendering of account" (reddere rationem). This vocabulary was Roman-legal and financial, tracing back to a household audit. The scales found here are a visual pun, playing with multiple conceptions of "counting" and what counts as judgment.

The audit, however, was interrogatory—not a simple balancing act, and not focused on punishment. Images like these record a shift toward punishment, and away from the active activity of "rendering account". They also record how explicitly financial the concept of accountability has always been. The gospel message, "render an account of thy stewardship", was occasionally minted on the back of coins and tokens in Renaissance europe as a reminder.

This book tells the history of the concept of accountability, in several phases—the roman legal and christian theological origins of an interrogatory conception of accountability mixed with punishment; the application of interrogatory accountability in medieval and renaissance institutions that could hold Popes and Emperors "responsible"; the pivot toward punishment, and definition of sovereignty as "unaccountable" by definition; and the struggles to replace roman-Christian accountability with a secular alternative in Bentham, Nietzsche, Arendt, and beyond.

It also shows the rise of electoral accountability as a distinctively French-American construction, which has, as a crucial pivot-point in the American tradition, the presidency of Andrew Jackson and his "taking" (stealing) of "responsibility".

The Emperor's New Clothes

Regalia and the Performance of Sovereignty

"Regalia" in the medieval law referred to the rights accordant to kings (reges); they also referred loosely to the symbols of authority, rituals and clothes included. Sovereignty, as imagined by Jean Bodin, was a bundle of regalia—rights that were indivisible, and belonged exclusively to sovereigns.

These lists, often expounded in the Feudal Law, transformed into massive treatises on "regalia": fishing, mining, minting coin, building bridges, roads, and walls, taxes, supervising labor, protecting harvests and distributing grain, control over clothing, founding universities, control over forests, ports, markets, weights and measures, treasure, shipwrecks, control over the calendar, and so on.

But the logic of regalia required performance: the active protection and display of these rights and powers, lest local communities fill the gap and become quasi-sovereigns of their own.

This book uses the early legal commentaries on regalian rights, alongside early modern treatises of regalian rights, to tell a piecemeal history of the coming-together of the rights of sovereignty.

How were the different rights of sovereignty defined, policed, and defended before they were rights of sovereignty? What explains the different historical development of the kinds of rights that counted as "regalian"? Why these rights and not others? How dependent on active, popular rituals, was the claim of sovereign authority?

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