International human rights law may serve as a language through which lawyers and others describe the harms resulting from corruption, but this approach has significant limitations as a legal framework. Despite a growing emphasis among scholars and practitioners on a human rights approach to the problem of corruption, this body of law does not provide a strong basis for addressing such conduct. International human rights treaties make no mention of corruption, and human rights treaty bodies have not brought conceptual clarity to the question of how corruption violates or undermines human rights. Given that human rights law binds States alone, it is also ill-suited to a phenomenon that typically occurs at the intersection of the public and private sectors. Even as a language for describing how corruption harms social and economic rights, human rights law has its limitations, some of which come into relief when compared with the field of development economics.

London's seventeenth-century goldsmiths are routinely said to have pioneered fractional-reserve banking in England by clandestinely lending coin they were supposed to store – that is, by embezzling their clients. I draw upon both contemporary testimony and contemporary English law to show that the goldsmiths were almost certainly innocent of the crime for which they are so often accused. I then go on to speculate that the myth of the embezzling goldsmith may have its roots in confusion of that crime with (1) crimes other than embezzlement of which goldsmiths were accused by their contemporaries and (2) embezzlement of stored coin not by goldsmiths but by the British crown and by some merchants' servants.

Fluctuating French media attention for Barroso's drama. Chirac's support for Manuel Barroso. Appointment of European Commission and French Constitution. French debate on candidacy Barrot and the assigned transport portfolio. Offer extreme right party to save Barroso's team. The unmentioned embezzlement.