I just can't watch college football anymore because it's unbearable
Robin Taboni
@robintaboni.bsky.social
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Assistant Professor at UT Austin | Judicial politics, American political institutions, Formal theory | Please ask me about birds | robintaboni.com
![Abstract for the paper, "Systematic Corruption," to be published in the Columbia Law Review.
The American political economy faces a familiar but newly dangerous threat: systematic corruption. Unlike garden-variety graft, “systematic corruption” refers to the manipulation of economic privileges by politicians to secure political loyalty and thereby entrench their political power. This practice defined much of the early American republic, when state actors routinely handed out corporate charters and other valuable privileges based on partisan allegiances. But today’s version is different—and much more alarming. Instead of being dispersed across many local, state, and federal actors, it is concentrated in the hands of an increasingly powerful, centralized, and unrestrained federal executive. If left unchecked, this fusion of economic and political power threatens to both hobble the American economy and drive the nation toward autocracy.
To chart a way out of this crisis, this Essay recovers the lessons of the legal reforms that earlier generations devised to curb systematic corruption. It focuses on reforms in four key areas during the nineteenth century: corporate chartering, government personnel, government contracts, and public debt. I argue that successful reforms generally shared three key features: constraints on the discretion of those making decisions, insulation of the decision-making process from partisan control, and countervailing power structures. Constraints on discretion helped to stop officials from dispensing economic privileges based on political favoritism, insulation from partisan control served a similar purpose by altering the incentive structure for decision-makers, and countervailing power structures created ways for other actors to counteract ambition with ambition.
Applying these insights to the current political moment, [. . .]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:frfua6pa4zqhnotidbcqqlai/bafkreiddfwmyudaou4m2jjvw4b73ieheji5cxdxf4gbw62wlmznakg22gy)
