The examiner’s bookshelf — a canon check (24 August 2026)

The maintainer asked the supervisor’s question: what is this project missing that is foundational — invisible from inside, obvious to any outsider trained in the adjacent fields? This file is the answer of a first pass: the works an examiner from each neighboring discipline would expect to find engaged, checked against the repository by search, with the misses stated plainly. House rules govern everything below. No work listed here is relied on anywhere in this project until it is in hand and read (E22/E32); citations given are best-knowledge and flagged for verification on retrieval; entries move from this file into the argument files only after reading, and only if reading bears them out.

I. The name on the title page

Sayre, “Public Welfare Offenses,” 33 Colum. L. Rev. 55 (1933) (cite to verify). This Act is titled Frontier AI Public Welfare Offenses. The category “public welfare offense” has a birth certificate — Francis Bowes Sayre’s article, which Morissette itself engages — and the repository does not cite it. This is the single most examiner-visible omission in the project: a statute named after a doctrinal category should cite the work that named the category. Action: retrieve, read, and give it a place in the case’s lineage.

II. The premise’s own literature — corporate punishment

The Act’s premise — fines are absorbed while the decision-maker stays insulated — has a canon, and the repository states the premise without citing it:

Coffee, “No Soul to Damn: No Body to Kick”: An Unscandalized Inquiry into the Problem of Corporate Punishment, 79 Mich. L. Rev. 386 (1981) (verify) — the most-quoted formulation of the problem this Act exists to solve.
Khanna, “Corporate Criminal Liability: What Purpose Does It Serve?,” 109 Harv. L. Rev. 1477 (1996) (verify) — the classic argument that entity criminal liability is largely redundant. Read carefully, it is half an ally: it and this Act agree the entity fine is not where deterrence lives. (Note: the “Khanna” already in the repository is Rep. Ro Khanna — a different person entirely.)
Polinsky & Shavell, “Should Employees Be Subject to Fines and Imprisonment Given the Existence of Corporate Liability?,” 13 Int’l Rev. L. & Econ. 239 (1993) (verify) — the law-and-economics treatment of precisely the individual-versus-entity sanction choice. The companion already cites Shavell’s Judgment Proof Problem; this is the same literature aimed at this Act’s exact question.
Stone, Where the Law Ends: The Social Control of Corporate Behavior (1975) (verify) — the ancestral statement of why external sanctions fail to reach internal decisions.

III. The code whose aesthetic this project borrows

The site is styled on the American Law Institute’s register, and the sentencing architecture already engages MPC § 7.06 (aggregate caps, disclosed ⚠). But the two sections squarely on point are unengaged:

MPC § 2.05 — the ALI’s own position against strict criminal liability (relegating it to violations). This is the standing scholarly objection to the Act’s family of doctrine, held by the very institution whose typography the project echoes. The Act’s answer exists — the due-care floor (SEC. 6(c)) means nobody is imprisoned on strict liability — but the answer should be addressed to § 2.05 by name, in the case file or known objections.
MPC § 2.07(6) — the Code’s rule for liability of persons acting on behalf of corporations, and the “high managerial agent” architecture many states enacted. SEC. 4’s final-material-authority design should be located against it: what § 2.07(6) reaches, what it fails to reach, and why authority-attachment differs from agent-attribution.

IV. The doctrine’s academic layer

The practitioner and case spine is already strong (Hustis & Gotanda; Lyness; the FDA Regulatory Procedures Manual’s Park-referral criteria at table-of-authorities n.6; DeCoster, Iverson, Hong). The academic layer above it is thin:

Brickey — the corporate criminal law treatise author, whose food-and-drug officer-liability articles are the RCO literature’s center of gravity (specific works to identify on retrieval).
Norman Abrams, “Criminal Liability of Corporate Officers for Strict Liability Offenses,” 28 UCLA L. Rev. 463 (1981) (verify).
Aagaard on the responsible-relation doctrine (work to identify); Sepinwall on officer moral responsibility (work to identify). Ferzan is already on the retrieval list.

V. The regulatory-theory shelf

The Act’s records-certification-reporting design is, in regulatory-theory terms, management-based regulation backed by criminal law — and the theory shelf is absent:

Ayres & Braithwaite, Responsive Regulation (1992) (verify) — the enforcement pyramid; where criminal liability sits atop escalating engagement. The Act’s commencement-and-standards sequencing is pyramid-shaped and should say so or say why not.
Fisse & Braithwaite, Corporations, Crime and Accountability (1993) (verify) — the accountability-model argument for reaching individuals inside organizations.
Coglianese & Lazer, “Management-Based Regulation,” 37 Law & Soc’y Rev. 691 (2003) (verify) — names the genre SEC. 12 belongs to; Coglianese has also written directly on AI-era regulation.

VI. The other side of the aisle — the AI-governance canon

The project engages the legal canon deeply and the AI-governance canon barely. An examiner from that field asks first:

Anderljung et al., “Frontier AI Regulation: Managing Emerging Risks to Public Safety” (arXiv, 2023) (verify) — the paper that consolidated the frontier-regulation frame this Act’s title inhabits. A project named Frontier AI … that does not cite the paper named Frontier AI Regulation has a visible hole regardless of what the reading yields.
Sastry, Heim et al., “Computing Power and the Governance of AI” (2024) (verify) — the compute-governance literature under the Act’s own 10²⁶ trigger.
The International AI Safety Report (2025–26 editions) — the standing scientific-consensus document; among its contributors is a reviewer this project has already approached, which makes non-engagement doubly visible.

These are not decoration: each will either support a design choice (the compute threshold, the records duties) or sharpen an objection, and either outcome strengthens the file that absorbs it.

VII. The objection registers to pre-hold

Husak, Overcriminalization (2008) (verify) — the academic form of “not another crime.” The Act’s answers (one offense family, due-care floor, no prior restraint) should be put against Husak’s criteria explicitly, in known objections, once the work is in hand.
§ 2.05 (above) is the other half of this register.

VIII. What the check found already present — so the credit is recorded

Deterrence economics is cited and worked (Becker 1968; Gneezy & Rustichini 2000; Shavell 1986 — companion n.19 and audit record §D). MPC § 7.06 is engaged with its retrieval limits disclosed. The Park-referral criteria, the modern case spine, and the state environmental-RCO literature are held. The gap is not the doctrine’s plumbing; it is the scholarly canon around it — the difference between a brief that wins and a brief the profession recognizes as one of its own.

IX. Standing rule for this file

Entries leave this list in one direction only: retrieved → read → engaged in the owning file with the reading’s actual result (support, complication, or refutation — all three are wins), or retired here with a note that the work proved inapposite and why. Until then, nothing above is cited anywhere else in the repository. Retrievals: the browser list, item 15. Next pass: after the current retrieval queue clears, run the same question against the fields not yet swept — insurance law (the indemnification ban’s literature), whistleblower-law scholarship (SEC. 11), and legisprudence on model-law uptake (ULC practice).

The instrument-status ledger this file reports to: the verification record. The self-review this file extends: the pre-review pass.