Fiduciary Principles and the Jury

This Essay argues that because jurors exercise state power with wide discretion over the legal and practical interests of other citizens, and because citizens repose trust and remain vulnerable to jury and juror decisions, juries and jurors share important similarities with traditional fiduciary actors such as doctors, lawyers, and corporate directors and boards. The paradigmatic fiduciary duties – those of loyalty and care – therefore provide useful benchmarks for evaluating and guiding jurors in their decision-making role. A sui generis public fiduciary duty of deliberative engagement also has applications in considering the obligations of jurors. This framework confirms much of what we know about the jury’s form of political representation and also recommends some practical directions for jury reform

Fiduciary Principles and the Jury

This Essay argues that because jurors exercise state power with wide discretion over the legal and practical interests of other citizens, and because citizens repose trust and remain vulnerable to jury and juror decisions, juries and jurors share important similarities with traditional fiduciary actors such as doctors, lawyers, and corporate directors and boards. The paradigmatic fiduciary duties – those of loyalty and care – therefore provide useful benchmarks for evaluating and guiding jurors in their decision-making role. A sui generis public fiduciary duty of deliberative engagement also has applications in considering the obligations of jurors. This framework confirms much of what we know about the jury’s form of political representation and also recommends some practical directions for jury reform

A Fiduciary Theory of Judging

For centuries, legal theorists and political philosophers have unsuccessfully sought a unified theory of judging able to account for the diverse, and oftentimes conflicting, responsibilities judges possess. This paper reveals how the law governing fiduciary relationships sheds new light on this age-old pursuit, and therefore, on the very nature of the judicial office itself. The paper first explores the routinely overlooked, yet deeply embedded historical provenance of our judges-as-fiduciaries framework in American political thought and in the framing of the U.S. Constitution. It then explains why a fiduciary theory of judging offers important insights into what it means to be a judge in a democracy, while providing practical guidance in resolving a range of controversial legal issues surrounding judicial performance, such as judicial ethics at the Supreme Court, campaign contributions in state judicial elections, and the role of public opinion in constitutional interpretation

Fiduciary Law\u27s Lessons for Deliberative Democracy

One of the ascendant understandings of democracy in contemporary political theory is that democratic societies ought to be deliberative The precise requirements for deliberative democracy are contested both as a matter of normative theory and institutional design; but most deliberative democrats see deliberation as essential to the legitimation of decision-making within the polity. Yet deliberative democrats have expended most of their efforts mapping what deliberation should look like at two different levels of decision-making: the deliberation among citizens themselves in exercises of direct and participatory democracy - and the deliberation among legislators or other official actors within the organs of state government. Although it is likely the case that most deliberative democrats would see an important role for deliberation as between legislator and citizen, this deliberative space is underexplored. It is easy to understand why this would be so: deliberative democrats usually require that deliberation take place among free and equals, and there is a very real sense in which legislators who deliberate with their constituents do so from a position of political superiority and expertise. It thus seems to us that a separate account of deliberation between legislators and those they rule is necessary. In the Essay that follows, we suggest that features of fiduciary law usefully model how deliberation can be understood between political unequals, in particular when the individual with more political power is supposed to be holding the interests of the individual with less power in trust. If our elected political leaders are, after all, our public fiduciaries, they may be bound by fiduciary duties that underwrite a dialogic imperative with their constituents. Yet, most essentially, fiduciary law\u27s lesson for deliberative democracy is that a specialized kind of deliberation is possible and desirable between unequals - between fiduciary and beneficiary

Translating Fiduciary Principles into Public Law

Because public office is a public trust, fiduciary architecture can help orient us in figuring out how political power should be exercised legitimately. Part of the appeal of conceiving the political relationship between representative and represented in fiduciary terms is that it regards politics in more realistic and textured ways — as a constellation of power relationships in a web of trust and vulnerability — rather than as a mere social contract no one ever signed. Thinking of legislators as public fiduciaries tells us much about the nature of the relationship between the governed and their governors and it can also provide some normative benchmarks for evaluating the political morality of elected representatives and for designing the institutions that channel and control their conduct. The essay develops two points. Part I elaborates upon some of the messiness associated with identifying relevant fiduciaries and beneficiaries in the political sphere; and Part II interrogates whether judicial remedies are appropriately calibrated to generate the trust necessary for public fiduciary relationships to function well

A Fiduciary Theory of Judging

For centuries, legal theorists and political philosophers have unsuccessfully sought a unified theory of judging able to account for the diverse, and oftentimes conflicting, responsibilities judges possess. This paper reveals how the law governing fiduciary relationships sheds new light on this age-old pursuit, and therefore, on the very nature of the judicial office itself. The paper first explores the routinely overlooked, yet deeply embedded historical provenance of our judges-as-fiduciaries framework in American political thought and in the framing of the U.S. Constitution. It then explains why a fiduciary theory of judging offers important insights into what it means to be a judge in a democracy, while providing practical guidance in resolving a range of controversial legal issues surrounding judicial performance, such as judicial ethics at the Supreme Court, campaign contributions in state judicial elections, and the role of public opinion in constitutional interpretation

Topologically protected magnetoelectric switching in a multiferroic

Electric control of magnetism and magnetic control of ferroelectricity can improve the energy efficiency of magnetic memory and data-processing devices(1). However, the necessary magnetoelectric switching is hard to achieve, and requires more than just a coupling between the spin and the charge degrees of freedom(2-5). Here we show that an application and subsequent removal of a magnetic field reverses the electric polarization of the multiferroic GdMn2O5, thus requiring two cycles to bring the system back to the original configuration. During this unusual hysteresis loop, four states with different magnetic configurations are visited by the system, with one half of all spins undergoing unidirectional full-circle rotation in increments of about 90 degrees. Therefore, GdMn2O5 acts as a magnetic crankshaft that converts the back-and-forth variations of the magnetic field into a circular spin motion. This peculiar four-state magnetoelectric switching emerges as a topologically protected boundary between different two-state switching regimes. Our findings establish a paradigm of topologically protected switching phenomena in ferroic materials