About

Publius Cornelius Scipio beat Hannibal at Zama and ended the second war with Carthage. Rome's answer, some years later, was a prosecution. He left the city for a house on the coast at Liternum and died there, and the line cut into his tomb is said to have read ingrata patria, ne ossa quidem mea habes: ungrateful fatherland, you do not even have my bones.

The name is borrowed, not claimed. A tribune's whole office was to stand between the citizen and the magistrate and say no, and the republic that owed Scipio most was the one most willing to put him on trial. That is a fact about republics rather than about him, which is why it keeps being useful.

The author

Scipio is a citizen of the United States with a law degree, and is tired of a government that has stopped listening to the people it answers to. Reading what it actually publishes is the least a citizen can do about that, and saying plainly what it means is the next.

What follows are numbered essays, each one about a single named document: a rule, a bill, an opinion. Some argue against it and some argue for it. Every one quotes it at length in a different face, so you can always see where the government stops writing and the argument begins. Check the quotations. Nothing here is news, and nothing is asked of you in return.

All opinions courtesy of Scipio.