According to Fr Barker, Law's canonists drew up the original proposal for the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision in a 1980 Chicago meeting. Under this scheme, US Episcopal parishes would be received in dioceses and under the supervision of diocesan bishops. However, most Anglican Use parishes eventually began de novo, and very few proved viable, though most of the few that survived became quite successful.
But then we find Cardinal Law facilitating the 1993 meeting between Clarence Pope, Jeffrey Steenson, and Cardinal Ratzinger, into which Steenson appears to have carried an already-drafted proposal for an Anglican "personal prelature" along the lines of the Bishop of the Armed Forces. According to Fr Barker, this idea had already been mooted by Law's canonists in 1980 but dropped when the US Catholic bishops opposed the idea. The problem was that the original Anglican Use Pastoral Provision foundered spectacularly with the opposition of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. I think we must assume that other bishops were quietly applauding the resistance of Cardinals Manning and Mahony, who had the prestige to take the heat. (Mahony, a liberal, was very popular with the press, and the press generally took his side of the issue.)
I've got to conclude from the record we have that, with the "corporate reunion" movement a damp squib by the late 1980s, Law used an existing set of contacts with Episcopal Diocese of Forth Worth clergy to revive the earlier idea of taking Anglicans in as a "personal prelature", which would have the advantage of bypassing recalcitrant diocesan bishops. I would guess that he dusted off his canonists' mooted 1980 proposal and passed it on to Bp Pope and Fr Steenson, with the idea of raising it again with Ratzinger, where it might get a more favorable response.
The problem was that St John Paul had already issued his Pastoral Provision, already knew where Bernard Law stood, and likely had a good sense of how things eventually went over. When Ratzinger brought him the renewed "personal prelature" idea in 1993-4, he punted and told Ratzinger to go through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where everyone involved appears to have understood it would be voted down. So, rather than have it die on a vote, Ratzinger dropped it.
It's worth noting that not only did Cardinal Law receive Jeffrey Steenson as a Catholic in 2007, but he ordained him a transitional deacon in 2008. This was almost certainly because Law understood that, with Ratzinger succeeding to the Pontificate, Anglicanorum coetibus would in fact finally emerge whatever the CDF or the diocesan bishops thought, and Steenson would be Law's protégé for US-Canadian Ordinary once it was established that Clarence Pope was unstable and in poor health.
But the result of the "corporate reunion" movement, under whatever jurisdiction, has proved to be no better than that of the cognate "continuing Anglicanism". For that matter, a good many Ordinariate priests are not associated with Ordinariate groups and are, as a practical matter, doing diocesan work as school and hospital chaplains or fill-ins for diocesan masses and are de facto Anglican Use, not Ordinariate, priests. By 2014, with the designation of Bp Vann as Delegate for the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision, the cycle appears to be repeating itself.
