to think the 'common law/freeman on the land' thing is a whole load of bollocks?

[qwertypop]

I've come across a few people over the last few years that take it very seriously and bang on at length about how the police and courts have no authority over them as they are self declared 'freemen'. Something to do with common law being the only true law in Britain, I think? And not having to wear bike helmets or pay for TV licenses or repay your debts also seem important to the ones I've had the dubious pleasure of meeting.

A couple I met at the weekend have taken the biscuit though and not registered their baby's birth because apparently this will mean said baby grows up to be a 'freeman' (she's actually a girl but the term appears to be freeman anyway). They believe quite firmly that to register her birth will mean that the law assumes her and her name (which is a fucking corker, of course) are one and the same and that only by NOT registering her birth can she be free to be a human being. Quite what this actually means is a mystery to me and tbh the mumbo jumbo they gave me by way of an answer leads me to suspect they don't really know either

I've tried to read up on it but all the info I can find is written in a style you'd expect of an paranoid, delusional, and possibly hallucinating chimpanzee let loose with a legal dictionary.

So AIBU to think this is bollocky woo of the most fucking ridiculous type? Or is someone going to come along and actually enlighten me as to wtf its all about, preferably in plain English with no pseudo-legalese?

well said mini

Yes, Spero, I don't see why not. It could be persistent delusional disorder (I think that's the right name).

I have just asked DP, he says that psychiatrists rarely use the term "delusion" it is like an umbrella term for a list of other more specific symptoms.

I tend to agree again Mini, what I said about delusions notwithstanding.

Take, say an African-American litigant in the US, challenging state authority in, say, Alabama. There is a whole historical and social context there that means, yes, actually, law and state power has been used as a tool of abuse, oppression and theft against African-Americans for centuries, and often still is (read this heart-breaking article).

Against that background, you might give the litigant a lot of leeway to challenge the authority of the court or the rightness of the laws being imposed.

I am thinking more in terms of my duty to my client and my court - if I am genuinely uneasy about how client is responding to legal argument, to extent I think he or she is going to mess up their case - what do I do ?

Would it ever help to go down the route of seeking psychiatric intervention?

As I said before, what are the limits of paternalism, particularly when you are talking about cases involving people's children?

That's interesting, doesn't that being us back to Denning again.

What was the Denning point? Sorry, I have read the while thread but I must have missed that.

Spero, I understand the dilemma. From speaking to DP who works in psych, recent additions to the DSM in regard to personality disorders and the row btw psychiatrists and psychologists about the causes of said disorders, should be considered. There are now so many amendments and additions, some of it quite ambiguous, that it would be possible to discredit virtually anyone on the grounds that they fit these wide ranging criteria. I certainly know some very sane people who fit the diagnostic criteria for a whole range of disorders And there lies the problem, once someone has been diagnosed, would it not be taken into consideration when deciding whether they are fit to parent their child. Again, now its not just a matter of a different perspective (which we might think is delusional) but a pathological immutable disorder that may effect their ability to parent.

I'm ambivalent about Denning. If you read the case about throwing the woman out of her teacher training college for having a male visitor in her room, his attitudes to women are revealed as pretty awful (Ward v Bradford Corp, 1972). He was reactionary for the most part, and more political than judges ought to be.

It was upthread someone mentioned Denning. Some of his judgements ran counter to the law, because he believed in taking into consideration individual circumstances, making changes to common law, it would seem on the hop! He launched some sort of campaign against the common law of precedent. I looked him up yesterday when someone mentioned him.

DenzelWashington, I seem to remember that. Now off to read your link, thank you

Yes I would be very wary of attaching a label to anyone - when its done to children I think it becomes a very lazy way of relating to them and treating them. One psychologist said - I wish I could remember who as I think this very sensible - don't worry about the label, look at the behaviours? What do they do that gets in the way of them living their lives and what can we do to help them?

I think that is very interesting when you recall that the Clifford bloke in one of SMS's links was ordered to attend 'life management skills' training, which certainly sounds less draconian than attaching a diagnosis of psychosis.

It seems there is an issue with people who are socially and economically marginal to the mainstream being conned. I think it would be quite wrong to pathologise the anti-social behaviour of people from marginalised groups. It would be like taking the DSM into Kenya and trying to diagnose a witch doctor with schizophrenia

Purely personally, again I have noticed that quite a reasonable number of these disaffected with society types are middle aged men, in reasonable but not highflyer type jobs, whose disappointment arguably flows from seeing those more talented out-earn and outdo them, so that they develop a bit of persecution complex. I'd be less concerned about them and more concerned about the more vulnerable or easily led types who fall under their spell.

I do agree that psychological assessments are overused, but for the avoidance of appeals they are I suppose a lesser evil.

I wouldn't get too bogged down in Denning either. While he was undoubtedly an unusually lateral thinker for a judge and came up with some brilliant judgments, unless they actually formed part of the precedent and weren't simply obiter, of what value are they other than mildly persuasive? There are many other good judgments around, Edmunds was always a reliable one if I remember rightly.

Denzel - the website legalcheek sell t-shirts that say "Lord Denning is my Homeboy" which I think is ironic given that he resigned in the end over his racism.

I think he was a brilliant lawyer, but very much of his time (not a great time for BAME people or women), which led to issues at the end of his extremely long career. He served in WW1 so it's no huge surprise that his attitudes were of the first half of the 20th century.

spero

The difference is that witch doctors aren't conspiracy theorists. They just make their decisions according to their own beliefs, which are very traditional in their culture.

Compare freeman-on-the-land types. These are pretty much entirely people who have grown up and been educated in Western culture, who make a Matrix-type discovery that things aren't quite what they seem and to their astonishment realise that they aren't obliged to pay their tax, child support, dog licence, car licence or so on.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories going round in the West. Here are some others: evidence that smoking causes cancer is manufactured, so is evidence of climate change, the UN is an attempt at one-world government, fluoride in water is poison, wifi is bad for you, governments are conducting chemical experiments on us all, as evidenced by funny-shaped clouds. And I can think of a couple of very topical political ones too, albeit not quite in the same league, e.g. an independent Scotland would be a utopia, and London drains the UK's resources like a vampire. There is also the belief that Osama Bin Laden is still alive, and the US government bombed the World Trade Centre, not Al Qaeda.

The tenacity of these theories exists because the more evidence that is put up against them the more the conspiracy theorists claim that the truth is being surpressed. In my experience, many of these people are members of fundamentalist religious groups, most typically American-style churches, and I don't think that is any coincidence.

Spero - Please feel free to cannibalize anything you like. I know the folks at Quatloos would not object to using anything you might find there as well, though that’s often more of a ‘news report’ type forum. I’ll send you a Mumsnet private message so we can discuss whether something more structured may be useful.

Law Societies:

In Canada the legal profession is self-regulating; the government has delegated to provincial law societies the authority to certify, monitor, and discipline lawyers. I could rant at great length on how this is ridiculous, as a self-regulated monopoly probably is not such a great idea, but I’ll leave that for another time! Suffice to say that’s how things are done here.

McKenzie friends:

We too are having issues with those. The rules of whether or not a person can represent another in court vary jurisdiction to jurisdiction and court to court. In some instances the rule is strict – a lawyer or nobody. But others are more flexible.

On the Freeman-type front that is less of an issue since now that the courts know what to look for, when a suspect agent appears the judges intervene and exclude that person. That’s been going on for over a decade – our judges are pretty aggressive on that point, but so far the process is rather informal. Again, the proliferation of written judgments seems to help since the stereotypical ‘bad agent’ is often a former vexatious litigant. Point to the judgment that declared that person vexatious, and you have grounds to remove the problematic McKenzie friend.

General commentary:

As I previously mentioned our most useful Freeman commentary is in the reported jurisprudence. There are a very few other useful resources - to date academic commentary has not been very helpful, but there are a few exceptions. In my opinion this couple of papers by a Canadian sociologist offer some useful overview and background:

Stephen A. Kent & Robin D. Willey, “Sects, Cults and the Attack on Jurisprudence”, (2013) 14 Rutgers Journal of Law & Religion 309: lawandreligion.com/sites/lawandreligion.com/files/2013%20Vol.%2014%20Kent.pdf

Stephen A. Kent, “Freemen, Sovereign Citizens, and the Threat to Public Order in British Heritage Countries” (seminar paper)): griess.st1.at/gsk/fecris/copenhagen/Kent_EN.pdf

There is more U.S. commentary – let me know if that may be of interest. We often see American concepts simply imported into common law jurisdictions without much modification but from my very limited data it seems that the most common schemes in the U.K., Ireland, and Scotland are simply derivatives of the Canadian Freeman ideas, more than anything else.

Freemen in the family law context:

This is an evolving phenomenon. It seems the most common ways in which Freeman/OPCA type ideas appear are:

1. as an excuse to evade payment of child and spousal support,
2. as a mechanism to challenge child custody, and
3. as a response to child seizure by state authorities.

These are ways that Freeman concepts are used ‘offensively’.

The first one is kind of basic – a parent claims they have some magic method to exclude themselves from the usual support enforcement procedures. The most comic variation is where the delinquent parent/spouse claims to make their payments from a huge secret bank account operated by state actors. This is a U.S. concept called “Acceptance for Value” (“A4V” for short) or “Redemption”. There’s a nice commentary on that in the Meads decision as Dennis Larry Meads (oops - sorry, :::Dennis-Larry :: of the Meads Family::: ) tried to use that mechanism to pay off his spousal and child support obligations.

In theory, a Freeman should not say “I opt out of my obligations that flow from marriage”, because Freemen say they honour contracts between people – and marriage is usually seen as a contract or contract-like. Well, that’s not to say Freemen don’t still try to work around that. Here is quite a recent example of that:

Curle v. Curle, 2014 ONSC 1077: canlii.ca/t/g360p

At para. 8 it explains how the father in this case claims his marriage never existed because the state’s authority over him was fraudulent.

This case is also a good example of the second category – where Freeman/OPCA ideas are used to claim a superior interest by one parent in children. Here the father claims he has “full title (legal and equitable)” to his children, which trumps the interest of the mother.

Another example of that is found here:

A.N.B. v. Hancock, 2013 ABQB 97: canlii.ca/t/fwx39

If you look at paras. 60-64 the father invokes old U.S. slavery-period legal principles to claim his children as property!

The third category is probably the most alarming. Canada has seen a significant number of parents who lose custody of their children to the state and then adopt Freeman/OPCA tactics in court. In a way it’s understandable, as these are desperate, desperate people, who understandably may grasp at any straw. But it’s not helping them. Here are some examples of that:

A.N.B. v. Hancock, 2013 ABQB 97: canlii.ca/t/fwx39

A.R. v. Alberta (Child, Youth and Family Enhancement Act Director), 2013 ABQB 280: canlii.ca/t/fxkb8

J.A. v New Brunswick (Minister of Social Development), 2013 NBQB 137: no public domain copy

This is a growth area and a very troublesome one. Freeman theory says you can opt out of state authority or somehow have rights that trump everyone else. The logical endpoint of that is that if the state takes your child and does not comply with your demands then it is the state that is acting unlawfully – not you. The remedy? Litigation or force. In the A.N.B. v. Hancock matter that is exactly what happened. A second decision discusses A.N.B. trying to get bail after he began threatening family services lawyers and personnel:

R. v. A.N.B., 2012 ABQB 556: canlii.ca/t/g203r

I’m pretty certain I have read A.N.B. ultimately pled guilty and received an eight month sentence – the decision is not reported.

There is a new development on the family law/Freeman front – courts are starting to use Freeman affiliation against those who advance it. There are a couple trial level Canadian judgments where courts have determined that holding Freeman-type anti-government and anti-authoritarian belief is a basis to restrict child access and custody. Basically it comes to this; if you tell your child they are not subject to state and court authority then you are a bad parent.

S.H. v G.J., 2013 BCPC 242: canlii.ca/t/g0pqs

M.D.C. v T.C., 2012 NBQB 376: no public domain copy

This is a new trend, so we’ll see how far our courts take things.

I hope that is of interest! The vast majority of cases of this kind are not reported, but from what I know these are typical of the Canadian experience. One other significant factor is that to date the promoters of Freeman/OPCA concepts have not really specifically targeted the ‘family law marketplace’. They instead focus more on ignoring government obligations like motor vehicle legislation, not paying taxes or fines, and miracling away debts – though another growth area is the use of these concepts to evade criminal sanction. (It doesn’t work.) There’s a review of that in this decision at paras. 128-130.

Fearn v Canada Customs, 2014 ABQB 114: canlii.ca/t/g5bx8

I believe someone asked whether it is possible to go after the promoters of these schemes? The Fearn decision suggests that is the case, see paras. 215-256. The Canada Revenue Agency is also aggressive in pursuing criminal fraud and counseling charges against those who promote OPCA schemes to evade tax.

One more thing – I thought I should mention a Hero to the Cause you have over in the U.K. One of the more popular Freeman-type promoter/gurus runs a website called “Get Out Of Debt Free”: www.getoutofdebtfree.org/ It promotes the idea that you can use what are commonly called “foisted unilateral contracts” to miracle debt away. The legally incorrect basis for these schemes is one sends a “contract offer” that states “if you do not respond and reject this within X days then you agree”. GOODF has a set of template letters for that. You send them one after another, and unless the creditor jumps through all the hoops you impose on them your debt is miracled away. It’s an old U.S. Sovereign Citizen scheme that has now spread world-wide. Of course, it doesn’t work.

Well, last year I was browsing the GOODF forums and something very curious happened – a person who identified him/herself as a mortgage litigation lawyer appeared and said “ask me stuff – I’m here to help!” This individual, who had the alias “tm169”, then very carefully and politely refuted absurd arguments and offered careful, succinct advice and information. This went on for months until eventually tm169 was booted out by the GOODF administration as being bad for business.

tm169 visits Quatloos on occasion and has a message thread there about those adventures: www.quatloos.com/Q-Forum/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=9382 tm169 also has as a blog on that subject: opcablog.wordpress.com/author/tm169/ This may be a person who could be helpful to better understand the local U.K. Freeman ecosystem.

I’ll end things there for today. I have some thoughts on the psychology of the typical Freeman (actually I think there are three main subtypes) and hopefully I will have time to share that in the not too distant future.

All the best!

SMS Möwe

I'm definitely uncomfortable with the idea that people with different opinions can just be dismissed as mentally ill. I suppose it has to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis ie if you believe in UFOS or gods or the Lizard Overlords, whether anything needs to be Done About You has to depend on how much your beliefs - or the way your beliefs affect your behaviour - is impacting on other people. So if you are one of these FreePerson types and confine yourself to living off homegrown veg, heating and lighting your home with earwax candles and a methane-powered bog, curing your illnesses with woo and/or just recovering from them naturally and leaving your neighbours alone then the state should not bother you. If you neglect your children's health or trespass on your neighbours' property or claim the right to assault people who disrespect you, then the state is going to intervene.

But I am not talking about 'dismissing' people as mentally ill - I am worried about leaving people who may be mentally ill on their own in a courtroom, irrevocably destroying their own case because they are presenting in such a way to make others think they are delusional.

I think particularly when a case is about how and where your children will grow up, it is important that all participants are enabled to play a role. But if someone has decided the family court is just a 'legal fiction' I agree that attaching a label to them of 'psychosis' or anything else, doesn't address the problem.

On the website someone linked to way back, they have a forum with a large number of people asking for help in court proceedings...

www.fmotl.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=97&sid=46ec9de275aad74d558e8f6af82472fb

This is really worrying. These are care proceedings!!! He is going to lose his child. And the 'advice' is to link him to a page of mumbo jumbo about common law. This is worse than I thought.

'A few of you may be familiar with my fight after my 'legal' team abandoned my case due to 'professional embarrassment'. I tried to arrest 3 magistrates, who were 'perpetrating as magistrates' who refused to confirm they were under oath, unlawful administration of their oaths etc, this resulted in the 999 'emergency' armed police response I have talked about.

One of these Judges at my last hearing, directly after me NOT confirming the legal fiction they had as my name and informing I was commonly known as ....... stood up immediately, walked out of court and then immediately returned, some people stood up, other weren't sure what to do, the other 2 judges remained?

Was this a change of law or something, were they abandoning court? I don't know what the purpose of this was, I suspect it was incredibly dodgy though!

Anyway, my point, I'd be interested in talking to someone who would be able to attend a directions hearing, at a county court, relating to a care order appeal.

I am also interested in the process of filing 'commercial liens' or 'torts' against the local authorities, judges, and legal teams, guardians etc for anything I can think of, from failure to adhere to legal procedure during the emergency protection order execution, (failure to advise a parent) slander, deformation, and general wrong doings relating to not allowing a father/son relationship where there is /was never any evidence of harm, in any manner whatsoever, but I guess that's another thread?'

I've looked through that thread but I can't see anywhere where this has actually worked in anyones favour?

Spero - that is so worrying.

Although interesting that they are using the law against the court system that they do not recognise as applying to themselves.

I think that is what is interesting about the Canadian movement - SMS Mowe says it is dying off there now as people finally twig that they are wasting their time and money.

But that quote from 'Welsh Father' was from February this year. So I think we are still a way off from the Canadian experience here, which is why I would like to encourage a more unified response from the judiciary, rather than just walking out of court, which isn't going to be a very helpful response, I would imagine.

The Canadian Judge had it spot on, he spoke of such people as wanting to recognise obligations only when they felt like it - and typically, they do not.

that is absolutely spot on Spero.

Certainly the experiences of 'freemen' I have had.

Happy to eat your food, sleep on your sofa, use your facilities but then insist they 'live without money'

two of my most recent ones insisted they were going to live in a tree house - in Britain!