Renewal · Model Law

A law that says nothing new

Twenty states. One recurring failure. One portable fix.

Every school-trust state already owes its schoolchildren the same things: loyalty, prudent management, fair value when trust land is sold, honest books. Those duties were accepted at statehood — they come from the granting acts, the state constitutions, and centuries of ordinary trust law. No state disputes them in principle.

And yet the same failures recur, state after state, decade after decade. Never a failure of the promise. Always a failure of machinery.

The Renewal program's answer is a model act — a complete piece of proposed legislation any state legislature could adopt, the way states adopt uniform business or probate laws. Its name is the Uniform Public Trust Enforcement Act (UPTEA). Its legal posture is in its working title: it says nothing new. It creates no duties. It builds the machinery the existing duties have always lacked.

The six gaps it closes

The gap is on the face. The fix opens below it.

01 Nobody is sure who may sue.
The act says who may sue in a sentence: beneficiaries, parents, school districts, and membership organizations.
02 No one must keep open books.
The act requires a complete public annual accounting, certified by a named officer, posted where anyone can read it, with trust law's classic rule for the trustee who fails to keep books: all doubts resolved against him.
03 The trust's lawyer is also the trustee's lawyer.
The act gives the trust a conflict-free enforcement path whose only client is the trust.
04 Nothing stops the cheap insider sale.
Competitive disposition becomes the default; government-buys-from-government is treated as what trust law has always called it: self-dealing, requiring the highest scrutiny.
05 Immunity gets aimed at the remedies.
The act restores the ordinary remedies of trust law — accounting, restoration, surcharge — waived narrowly past sovereign immunity, with every recovery going to the trust, never to plaintiffs as damages. And it answers the question every would-be enforcer asks first — who pays the lawyers? The act puts the cost of enforcement on the wrongdoer: a prevailing beneficiary's reasonable fees are paid by the breaching officials or the State's general fund, at market rates, and never out of the children's corpus. The trust keeps every dollar it recovers, and the people and firms who do the work can still be paid. And enforcement is firm but fair: personal liability is reserved for disloyal, self-interested, reckless, or clearly-established breaches — an honest trustee facing genuinely unsettled law corrects the trust rather than facing personal ruin — and the trust is made whole either way.
06 No one teaches the trustees they are trustees.
The act requires fiduciary education for trustees and senior managers, and scheduled independent review — because a forever trust needs maintenance, not occasional rescue. And on completing that education, before taking office, each trustee signs a short fiduciary oath — naming, in their own state's terms, the duty they already carry — filed with the public accounting. (See the recommended provision below.)

Gap 06, continued · Recommended bracketed provision

A fiduciary oath of office

Before assuming office, and on completing the fiduciary education required in Gap 06, each trustee and senior manager signs and files with the next certified annual accounting a written oath in substantially this form:

“I, [name], entrusted with land granted to this State in trust for its public schools, acknowledge that I owe its beneficiaries — [as identified in the State's Enabling Act and Constitution] — the undivided loyalty, the prudent and productive management, and the honest, open accounting that the law of trusts has always required of a trustee, and I will discharge those duties faithfully and to the best of my ability. [So help me God.]”

Drafter's note

This provision came from within the coalition, and it earns its place — it may be the most “nothing new” idea in the act. An officer already swears an oath of office to faithfully execute the office; this simply names the fiduciary content that has sat inside that duty since statehood. A few choices explain why it reads as it does, and why it is offered as an option rather than written into the core:

  • Bracketed, not mandatory. A cautious legislature can take the enforcement machinery alone, or the machinery and the oath together. Keeping the oath optional widens the door without softening the message.
  • It binds officials to their own state's terms. The oath points to each state's Enabling Act and Constitution to name the beneficiaries, rather than asserting one universal rule across twenty states. The trust was made state by state; the oath should bind an official to the promise their own state actually made — where it cannot be picked apart.
  • It does not restate the “all doubts” rule. Trust law's rule that doubts are resolved against a trustee who fails to keep books is an evidence rule, and the act already states it where it belongs, in the open-books provision (Gap 02). Written into a personal oath it would turn a courtroom presumption into a standing duty — and the act's whole posture depends on creating none.
  • Certification can grow on top of this, later. Once there is a curriculum and an accreditor, a formal professional credential builds naturally on the education requirement and this oath; it should not be hard-wired into the model text today.

Why "nothing new" is the strategy

The act is declaratory on its face: it states that the duties it enforces already exist, and that nothing in it may ever be used as evidence the duties were new or that past conduct was lawful. A legislature that adopts it confesses nothing and concedes nothing. It is the rare reform bill with no admission inside — which is precisely what makes it adoptable.

It also travels by demonstration, not persuasion. The same text works in any of the twenty states, adapted through bracketed blanks each state fills in. The first adopting state becomes the argument for the second.

What it does not do

It does not create private damages. It does not put judges in charge of land management. It does not unwind any past transaction by legislative fiat or decide any pending case. It does not displace stronger protections a state already has. It respects the trusts, the institutions, and the courts exactly as they are — and supplies the procedures a faithful trust requires.

The tradition

A familiar path

Offering the states one carefully drafted text is how American state law has repaired itself for a century. The Uniform Declaratory Judgments Act of 1922 gave courts a way to declare what the law is before harm becomes irreparable; more than forty states adopted it, and declaratory relief is the very tool the Oregon school-trust cases rely on today. The Uniform Trust Code of 2000 gathered the law of trusts into a single text now enacted in thirty-six states and the District of Columbia. A shared text pools the best drafting, lets each state's courts learn from every other state's decisions, and delivers more predictable justice at lower cost than fifty separate improvisations. This act is offered in that tradition — a model text for the twenty trust-land states. It is not a product of the Uniform Law Commission.

Where it stands

Plainly

The act is a public working draft, developed within the Renewal program and published for study under the title A Law That Says Nothing New — readable by anyone, with its sources shown and its open questions flagged rather than hidden. It has not been introduced in any legislature. It will receive formal legal review before it is. It is offered for study and discussion; no organization's board has been asked to adopt or endorse it, and none has. The full working draft — ten articles, forty-nine sections — is published directly: read the full text or download the current Word draft.

How to engage

Four doors into the model-law work.

Advocates

Read the draft against your own state's statutes; the gaps list above is a checklist. Start with your state's page on the State Tracker.

Open the State Tracker →

Legislators and staff

The act is built to be marked up. Bracketed choices identify exactly the decisions a state must make. The working draft is published — read the full text, download the Word draft, and ask for the drafter's crosswalk.

Read the full text →

Lawyers

The says-who appendix matches every legislative finding to the cases and statutes behind it, from Cooper v. Roberts (1855) to Oregon's beneficiary-standing decision in January 2026. The act's fee provision (Section 706) is built so enforcement can sustain itself — market-rate fees from the wrongdoer, never from the trust.

Open the hornbook →

Funders

Equipping twenty states with the enforcement machinery their school trusts have lacked for a century is a program with a document, a per-state plan, and a measurable outcome.

Open Renewal →

Source shelf

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Idaho Admission

Idaho admitted with sections 16 and 36 of each township granted in trust for schools. Idaho's Endowment Fund Investment Board continues to manage the proceeds today.

Idaho state page →