I have the hilarious task of taking on a loon in our Court of Appeal in a couple of weeks. He has taken to adopting the affectations of the freeman movement, including spelling his name with colons in the middle, insisting that contract law determines his obligations with respect to criminal law and he can opt out of the criminal law if he chooses, and so on.
Of course his arguments on these point are doomed to fail under our law as well.
But I do like to read around the subject, and was hoping that there was a more up-to-date version of the impressive work done by Sussman at Idiot Legal Arguments.
Regrettably, his work is only up to date to 1999.
Is there any similar resource out there founded in US jurisprudence that is similar to Sussman’s but current?
James Brown’s wife was stopped in Georgia for DWI, speeding and criminal trespass.
When the case came to trial her lawyer argued that because Augusta, GA had held a “James Brown Appreciation Day” in which the Funk Godfather had been hailed as the state’s “No 1 Ambassador”, his wife was therefore covered by diplomatic immunity.
Obviously didn’t work but you know the lawyer was clutching at straws when he came up with that one!
We had one of those guys here on the Dope a long time ago. He was claiming that his selective service card was invalid because his name was spelled in all capitals.
And he kept saying “nom de guerre.” Is that one of the shibboleths for these guys?
Thank you all. And to njtt:- yes, even here, where cows go bong, the trees go ping and the teapots jibberjabber joo, these idiot arguments do not gain traction.
I wonder if this sort of thing is related to the idea that computers require unique usernames for identification. So there can be only one JohnSmith, only one John_Smith, only one JohnSmithLuvs269, and so on.
So if the courts have your username as John Smith, you claim no, your username is John:Smith. If a tax document has your username as JOHN SMITH, your username is John Smith. In other words, you get to specify the unique identifier that is your username, and if anyone else uses a different unique identifier, then it obviously isn’t you, and the procedure is a mockery of a sham.
Of course, the law doesn’t work that way. Names are not unique identifiers, and misspelling your name on a legal document doesn’t mean the case gets thrown out of court.
The funniest part about these guys is the notion that all the laws that the rest of us have to abide by are voluntary, we only have to abide by them because we took some random innocuous action that meant we voluntarily signed away our freedoms. And the cops and lawyers and judges all know that unless you sign away your freedom, they’re powerless.
Except why would the cops and lawyers and judges abide by the “real” secret law? After all, most people don’t know about the real law, they think the fascist fake law is the real law. But if people think and act as though the fake law is the real law, then why don’t the cops and lawyers and judges act that way too? I mean, if the real law says that if they get your unique identifier wrong they have to drop the charges, what happens if they just pretend that the real law doesn’t exist? Do they get in trouble? Do they get punished by the Illuminati?
It seems that if they applied the real law, that’s when they’d get in trouble with the Illuminati. Ignoring the the real law and railroading an innocent man is what gets you a trophy from the Illuminati. If Saddam Hussein wanted a man taken away in the middle of the night and tortured to death, he just ordered his thugs to do it. He didn’t pass a law making it legal to grab people and torture them to death. Actual jackbooted thugs in fascist police states don’t care that the law says that torture is illegal.
Even with user names there is wiggle room though. If you try to log in as lemur866 it will work just fine. very few applications use case sensitive user names.
I remember when I was younger and sitting in the backseat with my sister when the song came on. After a couple of seconds she asked me, “What about Mitch?” Many snickers. Then I respond, “Let’s do Chuck!”
One of my favorites quotations for dealing with the Tinfoil-Hat Brigade: “Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest.” Coleman v. CIR (7th Cir. 1986), 791 F.2d 68, 69.
I always thought it’s akin to magical thinking: like when you’re a little kid and you see your mother stick a little card into a machine and take money out, you think that’s all there is to it.
They see lawyers and judges using this mystical and hard-to-understand language and thereby effect changes in people’s legal status. So they become convinced the simple act of brandishing language has the power to alter their legal status, and accordingly if they can just figure out the right magic words to say, they can do the same thing that judges and lawyers do, and beat them at their own game. They suppose that the unfairness in society, with certain people acting above the law, must be due to them knowing the right “code” with which to escape their obligations.
Besides, people like to feel special. To a certain psychology, it’s completely plausible that you (you clever person you!) have figured out the super secret way not to have to pay taxes that is guaranteed to work but that nobody has ever tried before (those pathetic sheeple!)