Making a forever promise enforceable.
A law-reform program of Oregon Advocates for School Trust Lands: scholarship, a model act, a pro bono bar, and a docket of test cases.
How does a promise survive the people who made it?
For 240 years, America’s school trusts have run the experiment every long-lived institution must face: how does a promise survive the people who made it? The honest answer from the record is that today’s law doesn’t protect forever promises well enough — the duties are real but scattered, the books are closed, the courthouse door sticks, and the remedies are weak. The Renewal exists to fix that, for school trusts first and for every forever-institution being chartered now — sovereign funds, climate trusts, endowments for people not yet born.
Four rooms, one repair.
The scholarship
A hornbook — a lawyer’s one-volume guide to a whole field of law — for the school trusts, and a book in progress, Stewards of the Republic, that turns the 240-year record into design lessons.
The law
A Uniform Public Trust Enforcement Act — model legislation that codifies duties which already exist and supplies the procedures, transparency, and remedies that don’t.
The bar
A pro bono panel of trial and appellate lawyers, researchers, and law students — the gift’s next generation of defenders, equipped so no one starts from scratch.
The docket
Test cases that turn principles into precedent, beginning in Oregon.
Start with the diagnosis → · or read the program charter →
If you are a lawyer, the law is already built.
School-trust law is real, winnable, and two centuries deep — and a promise survives only if every generation supplies its defenders. The law is gathered and organized; the hornbook is in progress; the cases are coming. There’s room for allies who aren’t lawyers, too. Write to Dave Sullivan, president of OASTL, at drdavesullivan@gmail.com.