Fiduciary Government

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.

Introduction. Fiduciary government: provenance, promise, and pitfalls Evan J. Criddle, Evan Fox-Decent, Andrew S. Gold, Sung Hui Kim and Paul B. Miller; Part I. Modes of Governance: 1. Fiduciary representation Paul B. Miller; 2. Two problems of fiduciary government D. Theodore Rave; 3. Guardians of legal order: the dual commissions of public fiduciaries Evan J. Criddle and Evan Fox-Decent; 4. Fiduciary theory: the missing piece for positive rights Laura S. Underkuffler; Part II. Historical Approaches: 5. 'The state is a minor': fiduciary concepts of government in the Roman law of guardianship Daniel Lee; 6. Fiduciary government and government officers' incentives Nicholas R. Parrillo; Part III. The Problem of Legitimacy: 7. Fiduciary political theory and legitimacy Stephen R. Galoob and Ethan J. Leib; 8. The state as a wrongful fiduciary Andrew S. Gold; Part IV. Corruption and Breach of Trust: 9. The Supreme Court's fiduciary duty to forgo gifts Sung Hui Kim; 10. Congressional officials and the fiduciary duty of loyalty: lessons from corporate law Donna M. Nagy; 11. The American law of local officials as fiduciaries: lessons on fiduciary government's potential and limits Nadav Shoked; Part V. Skeptical Challenges: 12. Pluralism and the public trust Seth Davis; 13. The public trust Timothy Endicott.

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, Montréal. 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