Three standalone courses in subnational authority, fiscal emergency, and research operations
The Maintenance of Position runs its method along a single axis: outward and upward, toward the treaty, the correspondent chain, the concession, the planning guidance. Every instrument it reads was signed by someone with the capacity to sign.
These three courses run the other direction. Downward, into the tier of government that sits closest to the citizen and holds the least secure claim to its own authority — a tier that signs nothing, whose powers are delegated, revocable, and held at the sufferance of a superior legislature that may withdraw them in an ordinary session nobody watched. And inward, into the apparatus by which any of this is established at all.
The two axes meet at exactly one joint, and no curriculum anywhere teaches it: a government in fiscal distress, displaced by its own superior tier, whose conduct is nonetheless attributable to a state that has bound itself by treaty to standards enforceable in a forum the distressed government cannot enter. Municipal insolvency and investment-treaty arbitration are taught in different buildings by people who do not read each other. The doctrine joining them is settled. Its consequences are not.
The Maintenance of Position asks every student to submit a case they investigated and declined, and calls that assessment the program's signature. It does not anywhere teach the apparatus that makes declining possible. The declined case is currently examined as a temperament. It is a technique, and MTH 7 teaches it.
The same six instruments as PROGRAM-001, unchanged. Because these courses are standalone, each teaches all six from scratch in its opening weeks rather than assuming them. A student arriving from the other program loses nothing; a student arriving from nowhere loses nothing either.
Two counter-week sessions per course, six across the program, marked in red throughout the schedules. The strongest opposing case is taught on its own terms, from its own best authors, with no rebuttal offered in the same session.
Placement is deliberate rather than symmetrical. In IGR 5 the counters sit at weeks four and nine — early enough to stop the frame setting, late enough that students have instruments to argue with. In FIS 6 at four and eleven, bracketing the technical core. In MTH 7 at five and twelve, the first against the apparatus itself and the second against its register, so the course is attacked at both of its load-bearing points and neither attack is answered in session.
| Component | IGR 5 | FIS 6 | MTH 7 | What it examines |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document annotation sets (4) | 20% | 20% | 15% | Close reading of primary texts. Nominal and Effective isolated in the margin, on the page, with line references. |
| Forensic node portfolios | 30% | 30% | 25% | Position, narrative, present. Verdict taxonomy applied to every claim. Chicago footnotes. Three in IGR 5 and FIS 6; two in MTH 7. |
| The declined case (1) | 15% | 15% | 25% | A case investigated and refused, with the reasoning for refusal. Graded on rigour, never on outcome. |
| Adversary brief | 15% | 15% | 15% | The strongest case against the course's own frame, argued to win. Graded by whether a proponent would accept it as fair. |
| Terminal instrument | 20% | 20% | 20% | Built from primary sources in a designated build week and defended orally at fourteen. |
The MTH 7 departure, stated rather than hidden. The declined case rises to twenty-five per cent and one node portfolio is dropped to pay for it. Grading it at the standard weight would misdescribe what the course is for. Annotation falls correspondingly, because MTH 7's primary texts are shorter and more numerous than elsewhere in the index. No timed final in any of the three; where an institution requires a proctored terminal assessment, substitute the week-fourteen oral defence.
There is no sequence here and no capstone. Each course is complete in itself, presumes no other course in the index, and is presumed by none. A student may take one and never return.
They do pair, for anyone who wants two. IGR 5 is the domestic mirror of IGR 1 — the same triad applied to the tier that cannot sign. FIS 6 reads PPP 3 back from below, taking up the investor-state material at week six from the position of the party that was never at the table. MTH 7 pairs with anything in either program, and pairs best taken first.
Each of the three duplicates something taught elsewhere in the index — the triad in week one, the verdict taxonomy shortly after, and in FIS 6 a treatment of investor-state arbitration that PPP 3 also carries at week eight. That duplication is the price of independence and it is the correct price. A course that cannot be taken first is not standalone. The duplication is deliberate, is marked at each occurrence in the schedules, and should be stated in catalogue copy rather than concealed.
Subnational authority · What a local government may do, and what it may be prevented from doing
Federalism is normally taught as a division of powers and local government as administration. Students learn which level does what, and the interesting questions are held to be about efficiency and coordination. That framing survives contact with almost no actual case, because the powers in question are not divided — they are granted downward, conditioned, narrowed, and withdrawn, and the instrument of withdrawal is usually not a constitutional amendment but an ordinary statute.
This course treats subnational authority as a position that must be measured rather than a status that can be looked up. Students begin with the grant — the constitutional article, the charter, the enabling statute — and then establish what survived preemption, opinion, litigation cost, and fiscal dependence.
The negative grant. Authority at this tier is more often established by what a superior body declined to prohibit than by what it affirmatively granted. That makes reasoning from legislative silence the characteristic error of the field, practised by officials, advocates, and students in identical form.
Cost is a lever. A power that cannot be exercised without unaffordable litigation is measured at its effective value. Students report the price of a power alongside the power.
The instrument is not the practice. Carried from IGR 1 and enforced here for the same reason. Neither supersedes the other; neither is the truth of which the other is appearance.
| Wk | Session | Primary text | Instrument |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | What a local government claims to be | One constitution's local-government article; one municipal charter in full; Dillon, City of Clinton v. Cedar Rapids (1868) and the Cooley counter-tradition | Triad introduced. Operative isolated from declaratory. |
| 02 | The grant and its forms | Home-rule and general-law enabling statutes read against each other; European Charter of Local Self-Government (1985), in full | Comparative reading. What a grant must say to be a grant. |
| 03 | Preemption: express, field, conflict | Two preemption statutes with the opinions construing them; one statute preempting a field without saying so | Annotation set 1 due. |
| 04 | The case for uniformity counter-week | Preemption defended on its own terms: regulatory patchwork and compliance cost; equal treatment across a jurisdiction; the civil-rights record in which local control was the instrument of exclusion | Argued to win. No rebuttal this session. |
| 05 | The opinion as doctrine | One law-officer opinion, its request letter, and a subsequent body's action taken in reliance on it | Not binding, widely obeyed. Students establish which it was. |
| 06 | The argument from silence | A statute regulating one tier and omitting another, with the official correspondence asserting the omission proves absence of power | Annotation set 2 due. Build the argument, then state what it establishes. |
| 07 | Arithmetic as authority | One supermajority threshold provision; the authorised membership of the body; the minutes of a vote that turned on the denominator | Node portfolio 1 due. Vacancy, absence, quorum, denominator. |
| 08 | Fiscal dependence | One tax-exemption statute with its fiscal note; one local abatement agreement in full; a schedule of intergovernmental transfers | The abatement granted against what cannot be conditioned. |
| 09 | Local control as capture counter-week | Exclusionary zoning records; the homevoter argument at full strength; the case that subsidiarity delivers minority rule and the superior legislature is the corrective | Annotation set 3 due. Argued to win. |
| 10 | Cost as the resolving mechanism | A moratorium enacted and rescinded, with the pleadings, the demand, and the rescinding minutes; one indemnity instrument | Node portfolio 2 due. The credible threat as a legal fact. |
| 11 | The surviving lever | A utility-code carve-out preserving service conditions; one development agreement; one disclosure ordinance | What is left when the primary instrument is foreclosed. |
| 12 | The matrix build week | Student-selected jurisdiction and policy domain; the instruments assembled across weeks 1–11 | Annotation set 4 due. Matrix built in session. |
| 13 | Verdict week | Contested cells drawn from the class's own matrices | Declined case due. Every cell tagged; contested cells adjudicated. |
| 14 | Defence | — | Terminal instrument submitted and defended orally. |
Terminal instrument. The authority matrix. One jurisdiction, one policy domain. Rows are levers, columns are tiers. Every populated cell carries the instrument that grants the lever, a verdict tag, and a note naming what forecloses it. One column is reserved for surviving levers. The matrix closes with an explicit statement of what it does not establish.
| Author | Title | Edition |
|---|---|---|
| Gerald E. Frug | City Making: Building Communities Without Building Walls | Princeton University Press, 1999 |
| Paul E. Peterson | City Limits | University of Chicago Press, 1981 |
| William A. Fischel | The Homevoter Hypothesis | Harvard University Press, 2001 |
| Michelle Wilde Anderson | The Fight to Save the Town | Avid Reader Press, 2022 |
Note on the selection. Two of the four are hostile to this course's frame in opposite directions. Peterson holds that local legal authority is largely beside the point, because capital mobility constrains a city far more tightly than any statute does — if he is right, the authority matrix measures the wrong object. Fischel holds that local control is efficient and the homeowner the correct principal, which makes preemption the injury and the superior legislature the aggressor. Anderson supplies the record of what happens at the bottom when the money goes. Frug runs with the grain and is assigned last, so students meet the objections before they meet the argument.
Public finance and international obligation · What binds a government that never signed
A municipality enters fiscal distress. Its superior government declares an emergency, appoints a manager, suspends the elected council's powers, and restructures the obligations. Well above that transaction, the national government has bound itself by treaty to standards of treatment for foreign investors, and those standards attach to the conduct of any organ of the state — including the tier that never signed the treaty, was not consulted about it, and cannot appear in the forum that enforces it.
This course follows that ladder in both directions. It exists because the two relevant literatures do not meet: municipal insolvency and emergency management are taught as domestic public finance, investment-treaty arbitration as international law. The joint between them is attribution, the doctrine is settled, and almost nobody teaches the consequence.
Consent given elsewhere. The binding party and the bound party are frequently not the same body, and the bound body is frequently the one that did not participate. Students state, for every obligation, who consented, in what instrument, on what date, and whether the bound unit was a party. Where it was not, that fact is recorded rather than smoothed.
The forum question. An obligation without a forum is a different object from an obligation with one, and students who cannot tell them apart cannot read a distressed balance sheet.
Floors, not ceilings. Enforced harder here than anywhere except MTH 7. A liability argued at its low end and still binding is a finding. A liability that requires its most generous reading is not yet one.
| Wk | Session | Primary text | Instrument |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | The ladder | One case run end to end at low resolution: a distressed municipality, a superior-tier intervention, a foreign-held claim, an arbitral forum | Triad introduced. The whole course previewed in one session. |
| 02 | What a fiscal emergency is | One emergency-manager or receivership statute in full; one municipal insolvency filing with its creditor list | Statutory triggers. Who declares, on what finding. |
| 03 | Who suspends whom | The appointment instrument and the order suspending an elected body's powers, with the litigation challenging it | Annotation set 1 due. Displacement as an instrument. |
| 04 | Emergency management works counter-week | The record of restored solvency; creditor recoveries; service continuity; the argument that suspension is temporary and default is not | Argued to win. No rebuttal this session. |
| 05 | The obligation stack | One official statement and one continuing-disclosure filing; a pension valuation; a vendor schedule | Who holds a claim, and in what order. |
| 06 | The treaty above | One model bilateral investment treaty in full; ICSID Convention, arts. 25, 42, 52–54 | Annotation set 2 due. Duplicates PPP 3 wk 8 by design. |
| 07 | Attribution | ILC Articles on State Responsibility, arts. 4–11, with commentary; two awards turning on the conduct of a subnational organ | Node portfolio 1 due. The territorial unit as an organ. |
| 08 | The necessity defence | Two awards on the same facts, the same treaty, and the same economic emergency, reaching opposite conclusions on necessity | The strongest session in the course. One record, two verdicts, read from the reasoning. |
| 09 | Debt architecture | One bond indenture in full; collective action and pari passu clauses; one holdout judgment with its enforcement record | Annotation set 3 due. Forum named for each instrument. |
| 10 | Conditionality at every tier | One multilateral programme document; one oversight-board enabling act; one rating-agency criteria publication read as de facto conditionality | Node portfolio 2 due. |
| 11 | The legitimacy defence counter-week | Depoliticised dispute resolution against the alternative of espousal and force; the respondent-state win rate; the reform record; the empirical weakness of the regulatory-chill literature | Argued to win. No rebuttal this session. |
| 12 | The register build week | Student-selected subnational unit; instruments assembled across weeks 1–11 | Annotation set 4 due. Register built in session. |
| 13 | Verdict week | Contested entries drawn from the class's own registers | Declined case due. |
| 14 | Defence | — | Terminal instrument submitted and defended orally. |
Terminal instrument. The exposure register. One subnational unit; every instrument that binds it, in a single table: what it is, who consented, on what date, whether the bound unit was a party, the forum of enforcement, the recourse retained, and a verdict tag. A mandatory final column records what the register does not establish. A register identifying six binding instruments and stating plainly that a seventh could not be established is worth more than one asserting eight.
| Author | Title | Edition |
|---|---|---|
| Gus Van Harten | Investment Treaty Arbitration and Public Law | Oxford University Press, 2007 |
| Stephan W. Schill | The Multilateralization of International Investment Law | Cambridge University Press, 2009 |
| Kim Phillips-Fein | Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics | Metropolitan Books, 2017 |
| Jerome Roos | Why Not Default? The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt | Princeton University Press, 2019 |
Note on the selection. Schill is assigned directly against Van Harten and holds that the regime is a genuine public-law order rather than a private one captured for public purposes. Phillips-Fein is the most important corrective in the list and is hostile to this course's own tendency: in the New York crisis the constraint was entirely domestic — banks, a state control board, an appointed authority — and no treaty appears anywhere in it. A student who leaves this course believing the international tier is the origin of subnational fiscal constraint has not read the assigned material. Roos runs with the grain and is assigned last.
Research operations · Sourcing, verification, verdict, and the refusal to assert
Every other course in this index assumes a set of operations it does not teach. A student is asked to establish what the record shows, to carry confidence as a graded object, and to submit one case investigated and declined — without ever having been shown the apparatus that makes declining possible. This course is that apparatus, taught directly and examined on its own terms.
It is not a research-methods course in the conventional sense. No statistics, no survey design, no instrument validation. The subject is documentary: how to descend from a claim to the source of record; how to classify what a source may be asked to carry and refuse it anything more; how to hold a verification queue with a production gate that does not open early; how to record an error rather than absorb it; and how to write a sentence that says exactly what the evidence supports and then stops.
This is the most audience-agnostic course in the index. It presumes no subject-matter background at all, and a student may bring any question from any field. What is examined is the handling.
The self-confirming frame. A totalising structural explanation accounts for every observation and is therefore incapable of being wrong. Students take a frame they personally find congenial, state what observation would disconfirm it, and — if nothing would — lose the right to use it in the course. Graded on candour about one's own commitments, never on the frame chosen.
Register as a technical requirement. Clinical neutrality treated as an engineering property of a sentence rather than as a temperament. Buried actors, the copular sandwich, the prepositional string, the passive that conceals who acted.
| Wk | Session | Primary text | Instrument |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | The claim and the source of record | One widely repeated figure, traced live in session from press to aggregator to issuing body to underlying series | The descent performed once, in front of everyone. |
| 02 | The sourcing tier | Four tiers and an exclusion list applied to a mixed dossier: statute, filing, peer-reviewed article, client alert, wire copy | What each tier may be asked to carry, and nothing further. |
| 03 | The verdict taxonomy | A published analysis with every claim untagged; students tag it | Annotation set 1 due. Confirmed · converging · estimated · projected · revised · diverging · unconfirmed. |
| 04 | The queue and the gate | One live unresolved question; students build the queue and classify each item blocking, non-blocking, or cuttable | No drafting before the blocking items close. |
| 05 | The case against the apparatus counter-week | Hersh, Reporter; the argument that protocol produces false precision, that tier systems encode deference by treating a government's account of itself as first-tier, and that the confidence tag launders judgement as measurement | Argued to win. No rebuttal this session, and none later. |
| 06 | The nameable absence | One sealed record with a named keeper and a release schedule; one pending request with a closing window; one question never put | Node portfolio 1 due. Evidence about the keeper, not the contents. |
| 07 | Custody, not causation | Four to six dated public texts in a resemblance chain | Annotation set 2 due. Each joint marked declared or inferred. |
| 08 | Floors, not ceilings | One dataset supporting two true and opposite-sounding statements; the published commentary reporting only one | The conservative reading, and what survives it. |
| 09 | The self-confirming frame | One totalising structural explanation, chosen by the student for being congenial | Annotation set 3 due. State the disconfirming observation or surrender the frame. |
| 10 | The corrections log | The student's own work, weeks 1–9 | Node portfolio 2 due. Graded on completeness and candour, never on the count. |
| 11 | Register | Lanham applied in sequence to one advocacy document, one agency document, and the student's own week-one draft | Annotation set 4 due. Neutrality as an engineering property. |
| 12 | Advocacy is the honest form counter-week | The argument that clinical neutrality is itself a position; that it advantages incumbents by leaving the status quo unmarked; that the memorandum is the register of power; and that prose written to persuade is more honest than prose written to appear not to | Argued to win. No rebuttal this session. |
| 13 | Closure build week | The student's live question and its queue | Declined case due. Closure memorandum built in session. |
| 14 | Defence | — | Terminal instrument submitted and defended orally. |
Terminal instrument. A verification closure memorandum on a live, unresolved question of the student's own choosing, submitted with their corrections log for the full term. The memorandum states the question, presents the queue with every item classified, records what closed and what did not and why, tags every claim with a verdict, and reaches the production gate — a stated judgement as to whether the question can be written on yet.
A memorandum that closes with "not yet, and here is precisely what is missing" is a passing memorandum and may be the best one submitted. Nothing in this course rewards reaching a conclusion.
| Author | Title | Edition |
|---|---|---|
| Marc Bloch | The Historian's Craft | Knopf, 1953 (any printing) |
| Richard A. Lanham | Revising Prose | 5th ed., Longman, 2006 |
| Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner | Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction | Crown, 2015 |
| Seymour M. Hersh | Reporter: A Memoir | Knopf, 2018 |
Note on the selection. Bloch supplies the tradition of the criticism of evidence and is the oldest thing in the index. Lanham supplies the register. Tetlock supplies the case that confidence can be scored and that most expert judgement is not. Hersh is the standing objection — a career of consequential work done with no tier system, no verdict taxonomy, and no closure memorandum — and he is assigned at week five against the course's own apparatus and is never answered.
Each course is built so the spine survives compression and the counter-weeks are never the thing cut.
| Format | Method | What holds, what goes |
|---|---|---|
| 16 weeks | Add two workshop sessions | One instrument clinic at the midpoint and one peer-review session on the declined case. The best version of all three; the declined case improves enormously with a workshop. |
| 14 weeks | As written | Reference build. |
| 12 weeks | Pair two adjacent sessions in each course | Retain both counter-weeks, the build week, and the verdict week. Drop: IGR 5 wk 02 (comparative); FIS 6 wk 05 (obligation stack, folded into 09); MTH 7 wk 08 (folded into 03). |
| 10 weeks | Spine only | Retain the primary-text weeks, both counter-weeks, one build week, the verdict week. Reduce node portfolios by one. The declined case is never cut, in any format, in any course. |
| Five-day intensive | Non-credit, MTH 7 only | Only MTH 7 survives this format. Weeks 01–04, 06–08, 10 and 13, with the week-05 counter preserved as a half-session. Terminal instrument submitted thirty days after. The natural firm-training version. |
Two further bodies of material were examined and are not being built. Recorded so the decision is visible rather than implied.
O1 · Jurisdictional anchoring of IGR 5. The schedule is written jurisdiction-neutral so the course travels, but the primary documents at weeks 03, 05, 06, 07, 08 and 10 must be pinned to a named legal system before a syllabus can list them. A second jurisdiction as a comparative spine would strengthen the course and cost two sessions.
O2 · Named awards for FIS 6, weeks 07 and 08. The paired-necessity session is the strongest hour in the program and depends on two specific awards on one record. Both must be identified and verified from the tribunals' own published text, never from commentary, before the syllabus names them.
O3 · MTH 7 question policy. A single class-wide question makes sessions comparable and grading calibrated. Free choice makes the terminal instrument portable and the course genuinely audience-agnostic. Free choice is the better fit for the design; a common question is the better first delivery.
O4 · Catalogue copy. The duplication statement needs a sentence written for the catalogue rather than for the memorandum.
Gate. O1 and O2 are blocking. Nothing else downstream is waiting. On their closure, production opens and the three syllabi build directly from these panels in the house format.
The program does not teach students what to conclude. It teaches them to open a document, isolate what is claimed, measure it against what the record supports, name the distance between them, and say plainly when there is not enough to say anything at all.