{"id":458,"date":"2023-11-24T16:13:47","date_gmt":"2023-11-24T23:13:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/?p=458"},"modified":"2023-11-24T16:13:47","modified_gmt":"2023-11-24T23:13:47","slug":"why-covenants-cannot-be-constant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/?p=458","title":{"rendered":"Why Covenants Cannot Be Constant"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"\">In <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.tenthamendmentcenter.com\/2023\/11\/the-founders-and-the-supreme-power-of-the-people\/\">my recent piece<\/a> over at the Tenther Blog, it wasn&#8217;t the focus of the essay, but I state:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\"><em>&#8220;even with the best intentions, the interpretation of a long-term compact like a constitution will drift over time, as its interpreters change and as the language changes&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">It would have made the essay too long to include the detailed reasoning behind that conclusion, so I thought a small supplemental post, explaining the reasoning, might be helpful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">I will quickly cover three reasons why long-term covenants are never going to hold the same exact meaning over time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li class=\"\">Even without the malicious influence of power-seekers, language changes over time and all such covenants and contracts must be interpreted by currently-living people.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\">In the same way that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.econlib.org\/library\/Essays\/hykKnw.html\">Friedrich Hayek observed<\/a> that economic knowledge is spread out over multiple people and there are so many details that it would be impossible to give them all to a central planner, the understanding of a covenant is distributed. Even if a judge wanted to pass on his understanding of the contract to a successor, the knowledge passed on could be incomplete.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\">In John Hasnas&#8217;s paper <a href=\"https:\/\/uwlaw-omeka.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com\/original\/1d98367dc355cc67cc6d32d14111a84c7f79bfe6.pdf\">The Myth of the Rule of Law<\/a>, he observes that large bodies of law may contain self-contradictions, and precedents are never perfectly applicable, such that two reasonably similar precedents may conflict when applied to a third case. As any judge of a covenant must rely on some combination of his own understanding of the covenant and precedent, it is impossible to guarantee that such interpretations will always be consistent.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">These three reasons mean that long-term covenants, which are expected to last longer than a person&#8217;s lifetime, will always shift somewhat in how they are interpreted. In fact, these changes are often significant over the life of a single person. Therefore, it is impossible to guarantee that anyone who joined a covenant will not find fault with some later interpretation and disagree with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\"><em>Therefore<\/em>, covenants must either recognize the ability of members to leave at-will or provide terms for exiting the covenant. Failing to provide terms implies that the covenant is at-will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Long-term covenants designed to function over periods longer than an average lifetime cannot avoid changes to their meaning and interpretation over those long periods. I provide three reasons why these covenants cannot be static and this leads to a conclusion about the implied ability for members to secede.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":416,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[86,19,72,17],"class_list":["post-458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-political","tag-freedom","tag-liberty","tag-politics","tag-secession"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/marginalnonhermit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/dan-mall-JsquWCJ4h9Y-unsplash-cr.jpg?fit=930%2C500&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":459,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions\/459"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}