Critical Skills

What would the Founding Fathers think about excessive fines, court fees, and financial punishment that can ruin a life without a jail cell? In Federalist #84, Hamilton argued the Constitution was already a kind of bill of rights—but the ratification fight also exposed a quieter danger: punishment that becomes profit. In these imagined letters, Madison, Jefferson, Mason, Hamilton, and Adams trace how money can become a chain—how penalties, forfeitures, and fee-driven justice can turn law into a revenue engine. Neither prison nor pardon is needed when the ledger can do the work. Read, disagree, and measure our modern practices against the old constitutional warnings.

What would the Founding Fathers think about the vanishing civil jury trial? In Federalist #83, Hamilton defended the Constitution’s silence on civil juries—but privately worried that “efficiency” might someday justify their abolition. Federal Farmer warned that without juries, government would cease to be republican and become merely “managerial.” Brutus predicted that courts would erode jury rights “in the most certain, but yet silent and imperceptible manner.” Two centuries later, civil jury trials have declined from over eleven percent to less than one percent of federal cases. The founders feared we would lose this right by conquest. They did not imagine we would sign it away in the fine print.

Many people ask me about AI protocols now. They want to know what an AI Protocol is and what it actually contains.
A protocol is not a better prompt. It is a governing document—a written agreement that defines how human-AI collaboration will work before execution begins.
I learned this building The Federalist Papers podcast, where AI assists with research and script development for episodes examining the eighty-five essays that defined American constitutional government. The challenge: producing episodes that were consistent in format but different in content, without drift, fabrication, or wandering tone.
A prompt could not solve this. A protocol could.
This article walks through what protocols actually contain—purpose, invariants, constraints, verification—using a real case study. No theory. No jargon. Just the architecture that makes AI output trustworthy.