ZadekpediaChapman University enters The Bob Zadek Show not as a topic but as an institutional marker attached to guests and to the scholars those guests invoke. It appears three times, each time identifying where a person teaches, taught, or works: John Eastman in connection with birthright citizenship, Tom W. Bell as a professor of law, and Bart Wilson as a former teacher at the university and its law school. The episodes supply no founding date, no location, no enrollment, no description of the university’s governance, and no account of its curriculum or mission. What they do supply is a set of arguments made by people the show identifies with Chapman, and it is on those arguments that the article must rest.
John Eastman and the citizenship debate
The earliest treatment comes in a discussion of the 14th Amendment’s phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Sheldon Gilbert, describing the state of the debate, refers to “some pretty smart scholars, including a good friend of mine, John Eastman at Chapman,” who argues that the 1898 case does not settle the question of children born in the United States to parents who entered illegally. On Eastman’s account, Wong Kim Ark’s parents were present legally, so the decision does not answer what happens when parents have entered unlawfully; such individuals, he argues, are in a different category because their allegiance does not run to the United States and they have not given up allegiance to their mother country. Gilbert frames Eastman’s position as asking whether the 14th Amendment contains a loophole for parents who have not sworn allegiance through a formal mechanism such as a permanent resident visa or naturalization Revenge of the Pen and the Phone (2018).
Bob Zadek pushes back in his own voice, not the guest’s. He observes that the amendment says nothing about a formality of swearing allegiance and speaks instead of being subject to the jurisdiction of the United States; he reasons that a person present in the country is subject to its jurisdiction, can be prosecuted for crimes, and is not immune as a foreign diplomat might be. He characterizes the opposing reading as looking for the slenderest of technicalities to find wiggle room in the 1898 case rather than adhering to the plain language of the amendment. Gilbert then presents the counterargument, attributing it to Jim Ho, whom he identifies as former Texas Solicitor General, a former clerk for Justice Thomas, a former staff member for Senator John Cornyn, and an appointee to the Fifth Circuit, noting that Ho debated Eastman on the issue and published an op-ed in 2011 in the Wall Street Journal. On that account, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” must mean being legally required to obey US law, with diplomats as the only exception; otherwise the exception swallows the rule and undermines enforcement of all laws, not merely immigration laws Revenge of the Pen and the Phone (2018).
The excerpt breaks off at a caller segment, so the exchange is not carried further in the source.
Tom W. Bell and private governance
In a later episode on private governance, Bob Zadek introduces Tom Bell as a lawyer who earned his JD from the University of Chicago, practiced law in Silicon Valley, and studied copyright law, and identifies him as a professor of law at Chapman University and author of Your Next Government? From the Nation State to Stateless Nations. The episode’s stated topic is the market for governance: Special Economic Zones, seasteading, and ZEDEs in Honduras, with Joe Quirk of the Seasteading Institute as the other guest.
Bart Wilson and the study of property
The third appearance comes in an episode on the foundations of property. Bob Zadek, introducing Bart Wilson, says Wilson is an economist who teaches economics and is also an attorney, that he has taught at Chapman University and at the Fowler School of Law, and that he founded, with Vernon Smith, the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy. Wilson’s own remarks in the excerpt concern experimental economics: bringing undergraduates into a computer laboratory, creating virtual worlds, paying participants to make decisions, and observing whether markets grow from the ground up when no one enforces ownership. He describes a world in which participants could discover trade and could move goods to and from one another, and reports that things flew all over the screen and the result was very unstable. The excerpt ends mid-sentence as he turns to what experimental economics has found about gains from trade, so the account stops there The Foundations of Property (2021).
Across episodes
Three episodes touch Chapman, and the episodes show no development in how the university is treated: in each it functions only as an affiliation attached to a guest or to a scholar a guest cites, with no episode returning to the institution itself.