To my Texan friends:

This trenchant analysis by a property-tax lawyer I respect, John Brusniak, confirms that the proposed Texas Constitution amendment that supposedly will provide "relief" and "reform" for all Texans is chimerical:

---> https://cdn.lawlytics.com/law-media/uploads/963/343244/original/The-Great-Texas-Property-Tax-Switcheroo.pdf?1761020465

The Texas property tax was the only way for governments in the state to raise money in the 1800s, but all efforts to replace it subsequently have failed. (The best effort was made by Gov. Dan Moody in the 41st Lege, 1929.) The property tax is regressive, unfairly hitting hardest the low-income Texan who owns real estate (and the sales tax is the other regressive tax) and makes it harder for her or him to hold onto it. 

But rather than truly fix this ancient tax, replacing it with modern taxes, Texas leaders have always preferred to be able to tout, "We don't have an income tax" as one of the key pitches for out of state capital to come into the State. I. believe that capital will continue to gravitate to Texas even when, someday, Texans have demanded and obtained a fair state tax system.

A lesson from David McCullough's posthumous book of essays

     Finished reading this just-published book of essays: David McCullough, History Matters (Simon & Shuster, 2025). Among many relevant observations and admonitions with present applicability, the late historian quotes John Adams from 1765:

"Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people who have the right to that knowledge and the desire to know. But besides this, they have the right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge–—I mean of the character and conduct of their rulers."

Ibid. at 94.

I condemn the current administration's repression of knowledge, science, and institutions of higher education. That includes stopping and impeding certain medical and scientific research and efforts to preclude the diffusion of knowledge about the history of slavery and mistreatment of black and brown people over the course of America's past. Despite cover-ups, diversions, and obfuscations, Americans—today as back then—have an absolute right, per the Founder, John Adams, to learn and acquire such knowledge as well as to see and understand "the character and conduct of" the Executive Branch's officials.

About footnotes in law-review literature

The topic again is FOOTNOTES, one of the best means of protecting against false information and fabricated history.
Today and tomorrow I wish to compare and contrast HISTORY-BOOK FOOTNOTES and LAW REVIEW FOOTNOTES.
  Starting with the latter brings us immediately to the BLUE BOOK which is the form book for legal-journal citations of authorities. It is available in print or online (which I prefer), and its 22d edition is now out.
The Blue Book's goal is to create a lingua franca for legal scholars and authors. But the Blue Book provides a far more complicated regimen for legal citations than historians' style of footnoting (tomorrow's topic).
The law-student editors of the law reviews know and wield these complex rules ruthlessly when working over article drafts accepted from legal authors.
And one thing I have experienced with publishing in law journals and continue to challenge is OVER-FOOTNOTING. The student editors will say that their charge is: "EVERY FACT AND EVERY LEGAL ASSERTION MUST BE FOOTNOTED." I disagree. For instance, there are matters of general, undisputed knowledge that need no footnote, such as "The sun always rises in the east" and "The Supreme Court comprises nine justices." 
And then there is the problem of whether specific clauses or phrases within a sentence need to be footnoted in law articles. Traditionally there was a preference for all footnotes at the ends of sentences, but a casual review of recently published articles in major-league law journals shows mid-sentence footnotes.

In praise of footnotes

Footnotes are, here in the third decade of 21st century, generally disfavored.

But for something like 150 years now, footnotes have played a big role in deterring fake information and fabricated history. Footnotes force the author to provide his sources right there, on the same page (or, in the case of endnotes, within the same covers).

As one historiographer put it:

"The critical reader requires a more explicit guarantee of the truth of a statement in the text than is afforded by the blanket authority or reputation of the author. THE FOOTNOTE AFFORDS THIS GUARANTEE BY INDICATING THE SOURCES OR AUTHORITY ON WHICH THE TRUTH OF THE PARTICULAR STATEMENT IS BASED."

GILBERT J. GARRAGHAN, A GUIDE TO HISTORICAL METHOD (N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 1946) (emphasis added).

Podcasts are great, but there are no footnotes accompanying them. Ditto for tweets. And for all written or printed material, we need not only footnotes but also a whole lot more "critical readers"!

A small point in the deep legislative history of municipal bankruptcy law

 I am finalizing my article on the history of the genesis of municipal bankruptcy law, and I realized the following point is not significant enough to include, so I am posting the passage here sans its footnotes (copyright Josiah M. Daniel, III, 2017-2025):

A source who ought to have known, Sanders Shanks, Jr., editor of the Bond Buyer, credits Florida's Senator Duncan I. Fletcher with filing the first-ever municipal-bankruptcy bill. For instance, in a letter two years later Shanks asserted: 

In February, 1933, during the closing days of the last "lame duck" session of Congress, Senator Fletcher of Florida introduced an amendment to the federal bankruptcy law under which insolvent municipalities might arrange a special composition of their debts with the consent of holders of a majority of such debts. This bill was introduced at the instance of officials of certain Florida municipalities. At about the same time, and in ignorance of the introduction of this bill, representatives of creditors of Florida and other municipalities [the Florida Bondholders Group] visited Washington with the express purpose of investigating the possibility of securing federal legislation of this very nature. . . . 

His memory is incorrect, inaccurately conflating the promulgation of Wyman’s Draft with a “visit [to] Washington” by the Florida Bondholders Group that occurred a month later. Moreover, although he was a member of that group and a contemporary actor, Shanks’s account is not borne out by the Congressional Record. In the dame duck Congress, Fletcher never introduced either an amendment to H.R. 14359 or S. 5551 or any standalone bill. Rather the record indicates for this period that this Senator submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee something “intended to be proposed by him,” but he acknowledged that it was never filed.  Only in the opening weeks of the new Congress, the 73rd, or New Deal, Congress did Fletcher file his own municipal bankruptcy bill, S. 403, and later an update of it. These texts were based on the Wyman Draft but Fletcher’s two bills lacked features Wilcox had added to his first bill. Fletcher’s bills died, and the Senator had no responsibility for the creation of municipal bankruptcy.

Hurrah for the Alliance for Texas History

I attended the first annual conference of the new organization for those who are serious about Texas history, the Alliance for Texas History. It was excellent. Here is a good report about the meeting:

www.texasobserver.org/new-mccarthyism-alliance-for-texas-history/

About my new paper, "The Historiographical Problem of Municipal Bankruptcy Law" -- Part Four

Here is the heart of it, at pages 6-7 sans footnotes:

        "Applied to municipalities, the L&E scholars argue that bankruptcy process ought to enable the creditors to intervene in those Chapter 9 debtors’ customary, state-law-based, and locally-situated political decision-making in order to “to collect taxes to pay preexisting debt; to order reductions in expenditures; to sell municipal assets; and perhaps even to reorganize the boundaries of or to dissolve the debtor municipality”—in order to increase recoveries on the creditors’ debt claims as much as possible and, more generally, for the sake of economic efficiency and wealth maximization.  Moreover, the L&E critics of municipal bankruptcy have recently taken a “turn to history” in an effort to buttress their prescriptions for a more muscular, creditor-centric municipal bankruptcy process; but in doing so they are asserting a forensic and factually flawed version of the story of the inception and early years of Chapter IX. 

        That creates the instant historiographical problem: how to find, understand, and then tell the story of the origin of municipal bankruptcy."

-Josiah Daniel

(c) 2025