Bill of Attainder

Bill of Attainder is a term from English Common Law that refers to a tool of government that is no longer in use by modern constitutional democracies.

The word “attainder,” meaning "taintedness", refers to an edict, issued without due process, either by a monarch or by a parliament, to summarily declare a named individual to be an outlaw, without respect to the violation of any specific law that applies uniformly to everyone.

Article I of the US Constitution Prohibits Bill of Attainder

When the Founders crafted the United States Constitution — a covenant between the government and the citizenry — they expressly excluded Bill of Attainder because that tool of government was at odds with the type of government they envisioned for the new Constitutional Republic.

The main problem with Bill of Attainder that worried the Founders was the long-standing historical relationship between Bill of Attainder and such corrosive and troubling political phenomena as discrimination, persecution, alienation, and scapegoating of disfavored parties whilst avoiding of the real issues of the day.

The name "Bill of Attainder" comes from the word "taintedness" which corresponds to giving someone a "black mark" or stigma. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a novel about that entitled The Scarlet Letter.

The main problem with Bill of Attainder is that it deprives someone of their unalienable human and civil rights. Similarly, banning or blocking a scholar without just cause interferes with their unalienable human and civil rights to engage with their peers in the discovery learning process, which we all hold as the highest value of an authentic learning community.

Relationship to Blocking in Online Learning Communities

In Online Learning Communities, blocking acts to forcibly disempower and disengage scholars from around the world from the mission of constructing, developing, and disseminating educational content that the Internet was expressly created and developed to embrace.

For these reasons, the troubling and unbecoming practice of silencing and disempowering scholars in online learning communities is one that enlightened individuals would be wise to eschew, deprecate, and exclude from the tools of governance for the same reasons the Founders wisely ruled it out when they crafted the US Constitution: it is a corrosive and corrupting tool of government that predictably dishonors and sinks any regime foolish enough to employ it so cavalierly as we have often witnessed.

Shortly after Bill of Attainder was outlawed in Article I of the US Constitution, England followed suit and abandoned the practice as well. Today, only a handful of tyrannical governments retain fatwahs comparable to the English Bill of Attainder.