Adam Daley Wilson — Unpublished Papers Repository
This site is an ongoing repository for Adam Daley Wilson’s unpublished papers, working papers, essays, research, and independently circulated theoretical writing, including work published on Medium. Formally published and forthcoming work is maintained separately.
Adam Daley Wilson is a conceptual artist, appellate lawyer, and emerging theorist. B.A., University of Pennsylvania in 1994; J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1999. His legal career has included a clerkship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; constitutional, appellate, antitrust, intellectual-property, white-collar, and complex litigation; art-museum strategy and legal work; and independent appellate practice. He is admitted to practice law in California, the District of Columbia, and Maine.
Wilson began making art in 2014 and was gallery-represented by 2017. He has been represented by ENGAGE Projects in Chicago since 2020. His solo exhibitions there are Already Gone (2021), This Is Text Based Art (2023), and This Is Post-Theory Art (2025), with two selected as Artforum “Must See” exhibitions. His work includes oil painting, text and inscription paintings, personal writing systems, the New Cave Paintings, installation, video, performance, appropriated images, and public documents. Works including Species Anosognosia (2019) and Some Feelings and Thoughts I’ll Have Any Second (2017) are part of a practice concerned with language, abstraction, communication, theory, human mark-making, meaning, and the movement of thought into physical form.
Wilson's art and legal practices increasingly began to operate together. He developed Artist-Placed Public Document Art (APPDA), in which a viable legal or other public document is placed into the institution for which it was created. The placement is an artwork and an operative procedural act. The institution's required response becomes a second performance and produces a public record of institutional conduct. Related work addresses the local rule of law, courts as human institutions, institutional judgment, and answerability.
His writing developed alongside this work. In 2024, Conceptual Theory Art as a Method for Interdisciplinary Research, Hypothesis, and Critical Analysis Both Within and Beyond Traditional Western Social Sciences proposed conceptual art as a method for interdisciplinary research. Subsequent papers developed APPDA and post-theory art and examined the use of public institutions as sites for artistic, legal, and civic inquiry.
APPDA then led to Citizen-Placed Public Documents (CPPDs). The artist is no longer necessary to the method. A citizen places a document into a public institution through an authorized procedure; the institution acts; its treatment and reasoning become observable; and the resulting public record can be preserved and compared with other responses.
Wilson's 2026 paper The Citizen Methods: What a Citizen Can Do extends this work beyond public-document art. It proposes a taxonomy and methodology for understanding certain rights and civic practices as concrete citizen methods: acts available to citizens that are actionable, observable, repeatable or scalable, content-neutral, and capable of causing additional public action. CPPDs are proposed as one such method. Their function is answerability: making the treatment and reasoning of public power sufficiently observable for citizens to examine it over time. The paper also considers whether citizen methods continue to function when public decision-making is partly exercised by AI.
The Citizen Questions: What Can Government Still Do? adds a second methodology. It asks how citizens can distinguish a failure of a particular government from a possible limit of the present conception or organization of government, and ultimately from a possible limit of government itself. It does not presume that such a limit exists. Together, Citizen Methods and Citizen Questions form an act-evaluate process: citizens act, observe what follows, evaluate what the result may show, and use that evaluation in deciding what to do next.
The progression is therefore from artworks to actions, from actions to institutional responses, and from those responses to methods that can be used and evaluated by people other than Wilson. Art remains part of the work rather than an earlier stage of it. The paintings and writing systems continue to examine human language, inscription, communication, meaning, and experience, while the public-document and citizen work examines human action, institutions, judgment, government, and public power. AI increasingly intersects with both because it raises questions about human meaning and creation in the art and about human judgment, responsibility, answerability, and institutional capacity in the civic work.
Current and developing work includes continued New Cave Paintings, including When Will You Want the New Human Language; further work on APPDA and answerability; a forthcoming book chapter concerning the public-document work; further development of The Citizen Methods; and We The Human. The work may next extend through independent use and testing of CPPDs, Citizen Methods, and Citizen Questions; comparative research across institutions; teaching; further public-interest legal work; and continued art concerning language, human meaning, judgment, and human-machine relations.
More broadly, Wilson's recent work is beginning to address human agency and meaning-making in relation to human-made systems and in relation to AI. The recurring questions concern what humans can make, communicate, do, cause, observe, know, judge, and evaluate; how institutions and other systems respond; and what forms of human agency, meaning, judgment, and responsibility remain necessary as those systems change. This is a developing direction rather than a completed theory.
He was diagnosed with the mental illness of Bipolar I shortly after law school, in 2000. It is not the subject of his art or writing. Its relevance is to his ideation-execution process, including the formation of relational and associative connections among subjects accumulated over time and the movement from those connections into execution. The substantive work concerns the subjects described above rather than Wilson's mental illness or personal experience.
Abstracts - Most Recent Pre-Published Papers:
The Citizen Methods: What a Citizen Can Do
68 Pages Posted: 20 Aug 2026 Last revised: 14 Sep 2026
Adam Daley Wilson
Stanford Law School
Date Written: August 19, 2026
Abstract
This paper proposes “the citizen methods”: content-neutral civic acts by which citizens help a constitutional republic comport with its constitutional principles. First, citizen methods distinguish rights that protect, rights that express ideas, and rights that codify concrete citizen acts. Second, their common function is to assist the constitutional nation itself, not merely the individual citizen. Third, a citizen method is an act-tool that is content-neutral, physical-actionable, observable, repeatable-scalable, and capable of causing further public action. The paper surveys them, evaluates them against constitutional and democratic theory, and asks which remain effective when public decision-making may be exercised by AI. It also proposes an additional citizen method: filing a citizen-placed-public-document (“CPPD”) that causes public power, under institutional rules, to reveal how it reasons relative to agreed constitutional principles. Its function is not expression or a desired substantive outcome, but “answerability”: public power must act on the CPPD and make its reasoning observable, intelligible, and sufficiently articulated for citizens to evaluate over time. In aggregate, CPPDs create content-neutral public data about how public power—human or AI—comports with governing principles. The paper concludes that citizen methods answer “What Can A Citizen Do?” and ground civic and citizen hope through content-neutral stewardship of constitutional democracy in combination with Step 2 of the author's related methodology, in the related paper "The Citizen Questions."
Keywords: The Citizen Methods, Constitutional Republics, Constitutional Democracies, Constitutional Rights, Human Rights, Physical-Actionable, Observable, Public Power, Stewardship of Constitutional Democracies, Citizen-Placed Public Document, CPPD, Answerability, Reasoning-Path, Comport-Behave, Local Rule of Law, Micro-Jurisdiction, Courts as Our Last Human Place, Empty Intelligence, AI Public Power, Civic Hope, Citizen Hope
Citation:
Wilson, Adam Daley,The Citizen Methods: What a Citizen Can Do (August 19, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7314184 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7314184
The Citizen Questions: What Can Government Still Do?
34 Pages Posted: 13 Sep 2026 Last revised: 14 Sep 2026
Adam Daley Wilson
Stanford Law School
Date Written: September 12, 2026
Abstract
This paper proposes “The Citizen Questions”: a content-neutral, outcome-neutral methodology by which citizens can ‘ask-evaluate’ whether an observable problem reflects failure of a ‘particular-government’ or a possible limit in ‘government’ itself as humans presently conceptualize it. The method does three things. First, it distinguishes among (a) failures of ‘particular-governments,’ (b) limits arising from present conceptions of government, and (c) possible limits inherent in ‘government’ itself as a conceptual idea. Second, it isolates and removes ordinary explanations for particular-government failure—people, parties, resources, information, law, jurisdiction, cooperation, and other variables—and asks what explanations remain. Third, it tests whether ‘government,’ even under other conceptions, can do what humans may need ‘government’ to do. The paper applies the methodology to nuclear weapons, natural pandemics, engineered biological threats, and artificial intelligence, examining whether developments beyond apparent governmental abilities reveal not particular-government failures but conceptual limits in ‘government’ itself relative to real-world developments over the past century and decade. The paper then self-critiques the methodology. It concludes that “The Citizen Questions,” used with the author’s prior methodology and paper, “The Citizen Methods,” provides an omnibus, content-neutral two-step methodology for evaluating the concept of government: an objective, repeatable “act-evaluate-act process” in which citizens act, ask and evaluate, use the answers to inform further action, and evaluate again.
Keywords: citizen questions, citizen methods, particular-government, particular-government-failure, government as concept, present conceptualizations of government, content-neutral, outcome-neutral, act-evaluate process, act-evaluate methodology
Citation:
Wilson, Adam Daley, The Citizen Questions: What Can Government Still Do? (September 12, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7456359 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7456359
MORE INFORMATION
Conceptual Artist and Art Theorist
Adam Daley Wilson works as a conceptual artist, appellate lawyer, and art theorist. His art includes conceptual painting, text-based art, writing systems, installation, performance, and public documents. His writing examines language as a means of communication, an art medium, and a theoretical medium, including questions concerning cognition, semiotics, meaning-making, and the communication of human meaning.
Wilson's work connects the making of text-based art with research concerning language, writing systems, and their possible development in relation to artificial intelligence. As a self-taught, gallery-represented artist and appellate lawyer, he writes research papers, essays, theories, and criticism while maintaining an art practice.
Histories and Theories of Text-Based Art
Wilson's writing proposes a broader history and theory of text-based art than accounts centered on modern Western word art. It considers prehistoric cave markings, petroglyphs, non-Western traditions, writing systems, personal writing systems, and combinations of sound and text as parts of the history of visual communication.
His artworks examine related questions in physical form. Paintings and writing systems move between semantic language, nonsemantic marks, and geometric form, including points at which writing can function as communication, image, inscription, and abstraction.
Law-As-Art and Artist-Placed Public Documents
Wilson's work also develops law-as-art and Artist-Placed Public Document Art (APPDA). APPDA uses appellate briefs, complaints, and other public-interest documents that function both as operative legal documents and as text-based conceptual artworks.
The artist's placement or filing of the document constitutes one performance. Applicable procedural rules can require judges, lawyers, or other institutional actors to act in response, producing a second performance. The institutional response becomes part of the artwork and, through the public record, can become available for observation by citizens, researchers, and the press.
APPDA therefore combines the placement of a proposition within an institution with observation of what the institution does in response. The legal document is the initiating work, the procedure supplies part of the structure, institutional actors participate through their required roles, and the resulting record documents the process.
Art and Law Traditions
Artist-Placed Public Document Art operates within two sets of existing practices. In law, it draws on the use of test cases to present open legal questions through actual disputes and procedures in the public interest. In art, it draws on conceptual art, post-conceptual art, text-based art, performance, activist art, institutional critique, and related practices.
APPDA combines elements of these practices within courts and other public institutions. The same document can function as legal advocacy, text-based art, a procedural act, and an institutional test. The resulting institutional conduct can then become part of the work and part of the public record.
The Local Rule of Law
Wilson's local rule of law hypothesis examines differences in the operation of the rule of law among jurisdictions. Rather than treating the rule of law only as a national condition, the hypothesis considers whether its operation can vary among courts, jurisdictions, and other legal environments.
The inquiry concerns observable institutional conduct. Differences in procedure, judicial conduct, legal practice, access, enforcement, and institutional response can provide evidence concerning how the rule of law operates within a particular jurisdiction.
Human Judgment and Artificial Intelligence
Wilson's art and writing also examine human judgment in relation to artificial intelligence. This work asks what happens to institutions built around human interpretation, judgment, responsibility, and attribution as machine systems assume functions involving language, analysis, recommendation, and decision-making.
Courts provide one setting for this inquiry because their procedures assign decisions, reasons, and responsibility to identified institutional actors. Artist-Placed Public Document Art provides a method for placing a question or proposition into that system and creating a public record of the resulting institutional conduct. The work therefore connects questions about human judgment and AI with Wilson's work on courts, the rule of law, public documents, institutional behavior, and answerability.