Joseph Kirchner is an independent researcher in legal history, political philosophy, and the separation of powers, working from the Twin Cities of Minnesota. He is the author of the papers collected on this site and of a forthcoming history of immunity built on a seventeenth-century Star Chamber file that no one had transcribed in four hundred years.
Kirchner entered the University of Minnesota Duluth in 2009. In his first year he took fourth-year philosophy courses, and it was philosophy that held him. He left the university in 2011 after a family tragedy. The credits followed him to Normandale Community College, where he completed an Associate of Arts with an emphasis in philosophy in 2016. From that year the research was his own, part time beside his work until 2025, and full time since.
Research
From 2016 to 2020 the study ran chiefly in linguistics, ethics, and social contract theory, with Hobbes and Kant at its center. In May 2020 Kirchner was living a few blocks from the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue where George Floyd was murdered, and he watched his city erupt and burn. He turned to the immunity doctrine at once, beginning with Minnesota's Peace Officer Discipline Procedures Act, Minn. Stat. § 626.89, the state's bill of rights for law enforcement officers, and with Harlow v. Fitzgerald, the 1982 decision that gave qualified immunity its modern form.
The killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minnesota in January 2026 are what compelled him to get to the bottom of the matter. Within months the research had become a complete genealogy of the doctrine, from Floyd v. Barker in 1607 to Trump v. United States in 2024, and had recovered the doctrine's primary source: The National Archives file STAC 8/203/38, the surviving record of the Star Chamber proceedings that Sir Edward Coke reported as Floyd v. Barker. Kirchner commissioned its first professional transcription from Christopher Whittick, MA FSA, former County Archivist of East Sussex, who verified it against the originals at Kew. In a declaration filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Whittick stated that, so far as he was aware, no transcription of the file had previously been made or published, and that its transcription, verification, and preparation for publication "constitute a serious scholarly undertaking."
The genealogy is the subject of a book, The Subject's Unanswered Plea: A Restorative and Comparative History of Immunity. The leaf images, transcriptions, and working papers for the file, and for the second manuscript account of the case at Harvard Law School Library, are published on this site under Research. Kirchner is a member of the Selden Society, the learned society for the history of English law.
Between 2023 and 2026 he also catalogued the discrepancies among the Hebrew, Septuagint, and Vulgate accounts of the Genesis narrative, which raise hard questions about the narrative's chronology and about the patriarchal structures read out of it. That reading, A Restorative Reading of Genesis 1–3, is planned for pre-publication on this site later this year. It will stand beside a second book, The Holy Seed: The Fall of Babylon and the Making of Jewish Identity, a history of how the returned exiles at Jerusalem, in the century after 539 BC, came to define their community by descent, and of the three channels through which that idea might have reached them; it too is planned for release this year. The question both books put to their sources is the one set out in the Codified Democratic Order papers, published here.
Work
Kirchner has worked in property management since 2019 and has worked through every layer of the trade. He began in leasing and community coordination in the Twin Cities, then spent two years as a lease renewal specialist, running the market analyses behind renewal increases and securing authorizations from third-party owners. From late 2022 the work was HUD-assisted housing: Section 8 and tax-credit compliance, resident recertifications, HUD and city inspections, annual budgets, and delinquent-rent collection. He did it first as a property manager in St. Paul, then as regional manager of twenty-four PRAC 202 and 811 properties, 525 units across five states, and finally as manager of more than two hundred units across Minnesota until that portfolio's sale in 2025. Along the way he hired and trained on-site staff, wrote policy and procedure, and ran the portfolios in AppFolio, Yardi, and OneSite.
Since 2021 he has also owned Operations Consulting LLC, a small consultancy for small businesses: daily operations for a bar and restaurant, a food truck, a salon, a warehouse, and a pizzeria, with operational analysis, licensing, fundraising, payroll, hiring, training, business organization, and website construction. The two lines of work reinforce each other, and both reinforce the research. Compliance with a federal housing program is the close reading of a regulatory text against a live record. A portfolio budget or a licensing file is a document that must survive an inspector. The consultancy taught him to walk into an unfamiliar operation, find where it is actually failing, and repair the system rather than the symptom. Those are the habits the research runs on: read the primary record, state exactly what it says, and build the procedure that lets someone else check it.
Before any of this, in 2017 and 2018, he taught English and wrote curriculum for primary and secondary students at the École Française in Hurghada, Egypt. The post was brief, and it remains one of the most fulfilling he has held.
Character and Ethic
Kirchner brings a strong work ethic to complex, interdisciplinary problems, and he thinks and decides clearly when the stakes are high. When the work requires that no stone be left unturned, he turns every stone. He has a passion for history, culture, and language, and a firm belief in the character their study builds. And he holds it true that justice is a physical property of our world, subject only to the will of those who advocate for it.