OPCA as Magic!

[Burnaby49]

Actually, to be precise;

"Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments ["OPCA"] as Magic and Ceremony"

A new article by Donald Netolitzky, Alberta lawyer, very infrequent Quatloos contributor, and indefatigable OPCA author. Actually his job title is "Legal Counsel for the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench" which probably means he's a hit man for the dreaded Judge Rooke. He apparently fills an unusual function. As I understand it he's a lawyer working for the court itself rather than as a prosecutor or legal consultant.

Anyhow here's the paper.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... d_Ceremony

A manageable 58 pages if, like me, you skip the footnotes. Somehow I can struggle through my blank endless days without resorting to close examination of things like this;

6 Kaitlyn Compari, “The Moorish Science Temple of America and the Legal System:
Exploring the Need to Take Proactive Measures Against Radical Members of an
Incorporated Religion” (2014) 15:3 Rutgers JL & Religion 507; Spencer Dew,
“Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah: Counterfactual Religious Readings of the Law”
(2015) 19:2 Novo Religio 65; Spencer Dew, ““Moors Know the Law”: Sovereign
Legal Discourse in Moorish Science Religious Communities and the Hermeneutics of
Supersession” (2016) 31:1 JL & Religion 1:70 [Dew, “Moors Know”]; Bill Osinski,
Ungodly: A True Story of Unprecedented Evil (Macon: Indigo Publishing Group,
2007); Susan Palmer, The Nuwaubian Nation: Black Spirituality and State Control
(New York: Routledge, 2016).
7 Donald J Netolitzky, “The History of the Organized Pseudolegal Commercial
Argument [OPCA] Phenomenon in Canada” (2016) 53:3 Alta L Rev 609 [Netolitzky,
“OPCA History”] at 624-27; Barbara Perry, David C Hofmann & Ryan Scrivens,
“Working Paper 17-02: Broadening our Understanding of Anti-Authority
Movements in Canada” (Waterloo: TSAS, August 2017).
8 E.g. Angela P Harris, “Vultures in Eagle’s Clothing: Conspiracy and Racial Fantasy in
Populist Legal Thought” (2004-2005) 10 Mich J Race & L 269; Susan P Koniak, “The
Chosen People in our Wilderness” (1996) 95 Mich L Rev 1761 [Koniak, “Chosen
People”], Susan P Koniak, “When Law Risks Madness” (1996) 8 Cardozo Stud L & Lit
65 [Koniak, “Law Risks”]; Francis X Sullivan, “The “Usurping Octopus of
Jurisdictional/Authority”: The Legal Theories of the Sovereign Citizen Movement”
(1999) Wis L Rev 785; James M Vache & Mark Edward DeForrest, “Truth or
Consequences: The Jurisprudential Errors of the Militant Far-Right” (1997) 32:3
Gonz L Rev 593; Mark Edward DeForrest & James M Vache, “Truth or Consequences
Part Two: More Jurisprudential Errors of the Militant Far-Right” (2000) 35:3 Gonz L
Rev 319.

There is one interesting footnote however. Page 4 has this;

Post-Meads, appreciation of the social significance and illegal consequences of
pseudolaw has led to academic investigation, a growing collection of highly detailed
and responsive case law,12

And what's in footnote 12?

12 E.g. Fearn v Canada Customs, 2014 ABQB 114, 94 Alta LR (5th) 318 [Fearn]; Bank
of Montreal v Rogozinsky, 2014 ABQB 771, 18 Alta LR (6th) 1 [Rogozinsky]; Servus
Credit Union Ltd v Parlee, 2015 ABQB 700 [Servus]; Crossroads-DMD Mortgage
Investment Corporation v Gauthier, 2015 ABQB 703, 28 Alta LR (6th) 104
[Crossroads]; Fiander v Mills, 2015 NLCA 31, 368 Nfld & PEI R 80 [Fiander]; Bossé v
Farm Credit Canada, 2014 NBCA 34, 419 NBR (2d) 1, leave to appeal to SCC refused
36026 (11 December 2014) [Bossé]; Pomerleau v Canada (Revenue Agency), 2017
ABQB 123 [Pomerleau].

In other words Alberta Queens' Bench seems to have been supplying almost all of the cases that Donald, an employee of Queen's Bench, has been using for his academic research. Very convenient. Does he sit at home Saturday night banging away on his keyboard and saying to himself "Gee, I could really use a good case on fake banks in Britain to round this off, let's just check next week's docket"?

He checks and Quatloos gets Parlee;

viewtopic.php?f=48&t=10878&p=216604

Coincidence?

[notorial dissent]

Coincidence?

I think not, it is Alberta after all, such fertile ground.

[JohnPCapitalist]

Actually, to be precise;

"Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments ["OPCA"] as Magic and Ceremony"

A new article by Donald Netolitzky, Alberta lawyer, very infrequent Quatloos contributor, and indefatigable OPCA author. Actually his job title is "Legal Counsel for the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench" which probably means he's a hit man for the dreaded Judge Rooke. He apparently fills an unusual function. As I understand it he's a lawyer working for the court itself rather than as a prosecutor or legal consultant.

Anyhow here's the paper.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... d_Ceremony

This is a great find. A really nice piece of work. There are two fascinating parts that everyone should read. First, he discovers a plausible origin for the practice of putting stamps on documents, coming from days when court filing fees were paid by "law stamps." Second, he advances a theory for the origin of the "straw man" fantasy, where everyone who spells their name in upper/lower case has an invisible doppleganger whose name is all upper case, and who has to pay your bills. He finds parallels between this idea and the idea of demonic possession.

[Siegfried Shrink]

That was a good read. I think he gives Kate of Geia too much credit, a nitpick, and he does not comment on the ramifications of the CQV trust myth and its modern variant, the TDA account frenzy, but the message really does not need these details, it is clear and convincing without them, even if they are my favourite nonsense.

What is good is that concerted and citable sources for rebutting psuedo-legality theories are multiplying and provide a resourse and response to anyone teetering on the edge of swallowing the red pill (or the blue one, I don't know which is which so if faced with a choice will take both and see what happens.)

Commended to all who, like myself, have thought most of this stuff but been too busy or lazy to make the effort to write it all down. Purge your guilt, it has all been done for you.

[Judge Roy Bean]

...
Commended to all who, like myself, have thought most of this stuff but been too busy or lazy to make the effort to write it all down. Purge your guilt, it has all been done for you.

I wish that kind of thing would advance us toward a more sane field of play, but the invention of "CTRL C / CTRL V" has doomed us all to a world where any twit with a machine and net access can rehash the already rehashed hash into something "new & improved" that the gullible will consume and/or even pay for.

I'm old enough to have seen these kinds of conspiracy theories and "secrets exposed" schemes reproduced with carbon paper and even mimeograph machines, then came talk-radio, cassette tapes and pamphlets and in some cases actual books. It took money to produce those so fund-raising efforts were organized, typically with the purveyor as a guest speaker in someone's house. The photo-copier advanced things somewhat then the personal computer and word processing added fuel to the fire. Modems and bulletin boards - remember those? Now here we sit with the ultimate tools for both sides - but the game is still the same.

[Siegfried Shrink]

Most behaviour needs some sort of positive feedback to catch on. The limiting factor with this crap through the ages is that it usually destroys those who feed on it, and often those who feed from it.

[morrand]

...
Commended to all who, like myself, have thought most of this stuff but been too busy or lazy to make the effort to write it all down. Purge your guilt, it has all been done for you.

I wish that kind of thing would advance us toward a more sane field of play, but the invention of "CTRL C / CTRL V" has doomed us all to a world where any twit with a machine and net access can rehash the already rehashed hash into something "new & improved" that the gullible will consume and/or even pay for.

And yet you have this from a different tax protestor case, from back when Ctrl-C was how you kicked yourself out of your programs, mostly:

Wojtas' motion is obviously one prepared for another case, with Wojtas' name inserted in place of the original defendant's at the appropriate places in the motion—thus demonstrating the utility of white-out compounds.

United States v. Wojtas, 611 F.Supp. 118, 119 (fn. 2) (N.D.Ill. 1985)

Kingdoms rise and fall, yet stupidity remains the same.

[notorial dissent]

Stupidity is a universal and infinite constant.

[DNetolitzky]

Thanks folks for the positive comments on the paper. I suspect it comes as no shock that I had quite an assortment of theories and motifs which could have been incorporated as examples of rule-based pseudolaw and Otherlaw, but sadly I was limited by the typical length for legal academic papers, at least here in Canada. The items selected were hopefully, at a minimum, interesting.

The main point for my posting here on Quatloos is that this paper and my other projects are not really intended for a Freeman and Sovereign audience, though I do hope my documenting those people and their beliefs helps their source communities 'fill in' some of the gaps in their own record. Burnaby49 has noted this elsewhere, but at least here in Canada the pseudolaw phenomenon is quietening down, if not dying. The online loci where their ideas were developed, nurtured, and communicated are blinking out, one by one. That leaves us on the outside as the primary, if not only record-keepers, which is a kind of peculiar twist on the 'victors write history' motif.

Again back to my main objective - I'm writing for conventional organization and professional audiences who have a restricted exposure and understanding of pseudolaw groups.

There's a couple issues. The first is those of us who are familiar with pseudolaw are terribly jaded by the weirdness which we encounter. There's a real need to guide those new to the phenomenon through that transitional 'here be dragons' threshold and to show that while the space past the frontier is damned strange, it's not unstructured. Anyone who knows pseudolaw is familiar with that. When you started off you read pages of what seemed to be gibberish, but after a critical point that translates into an odd but comprehensible alternative context. There are comparatively few resources to help through that transition. I'm trying to facilitate that process so that Freemen, Sovereigns, and Moors are not simply discounted as 'nuts', but as a kind of system.

The second major problem with resources which comment on pseudolaw is that there are comparatively few that meet a threshold which establishes trust from official actors. Bluntly, government and academic officials like to cite journal articles and books, not website pages. This is less a question of content than formalities and conventional information verification structures. To be explicit, I am not negating or minimizing the value of resources such as Quatloos. These were the critical references which got me up to speed years ago. The problem is that online forums and websites are viewed with caution by 'the mainstream'. To be fair, there's a basis for that. The peer review process does have a purpose, as does the marketplace filtering of mainstream publishing.

A third issue is permanence and stability. Whatever its faults, conventional professional and academic publishing creates effectively permanent data sources. Loss of information is a big issue for those who study pseudolaw. I know there's a history going back decades, as Judge Roy Bean observed, into the modemland era, and earlier, but there's very little of that which is accessible to present day investigators, let alone persons within the pseudolaw community. Because no one (that I know of) documented all that we're left with guesswork after a certain point. The past dissolves into a cloud. That's even true of what one would think would be relatively stable resources. For example, it looks like Mark Pitcavage's Militia Watchdog has been dropped from the Anti-Defamation League website. There goes a critical mainstream historical resource. It's to the great credit of Sooltauq, Webhick, and the Quatloos moderators that Quatloos is a very real, tangible, and functional repository and archive. Still, it's foreseeable these resources too will disappear.

It's damned hard putting together where this alternative world came from. Speaking personally, I think this systematic amnesia is a major problem. That denies government and professional actors the opportunity to learn from past successes and failures, and to calculate the plausible risks and possibilities that come from something as strange as people deciding they are subject to a different scheme of law. This loss of history is also problematic for those who are being tempted by pseudolaw. They can overlook the decades of failures and the substandard intellectual foundations for their concepts. Now in making that comment I fully appreciate and agree that most pseudolaw is propagated in an echo chamber where the flakier the concepts are, the more likely they will be accepted. Still, it helps when the skeptical spouse or family member can find critical resources to challenge someone diving down the rabbit hole.

The point of all this? Write. I strongly encourage those who've been in this world to write about what you know, to fill in the history and personalities, the concepts, show how we got where we are. Yes, I know that Someone Has A Book Coming, but in my opinion there is a deep need for these resources. Like it or not, pseudolaw is here to stay, though hopefully barricaded out there on the hungry margins. I'm pretty comfortable I understand what has happened in Canada and am documenting that, but there really is a need for a deep history of legal conspiracy and pseudolaw in the US. What's going on in the UK is pretty much unknown outside a few highly specialized circles, mainly here on Quatloos. The UK isn't even generating much case law on the subject.

There is an audience. Some are just curious. Others find the weirdness fascinating. Then there are the luckless souls who have to deal with the pseudolaw phenomenon on a professional basis. I've talked to enough legal professionals, judges, and people in law enforcement that I can confirm they very much appreciate resources to help them understand this very strange land and its inhabitants. The information you know can provide a critical context.

So that's the point of my editorial. There are topic experts here whose brain I'd love to be able to pick by any means, but, when operating professionally, 'conventional' references are the easiest for me to actually use.

And again, thanks for the nice compliments about my paper!

Donald J. Netolitzky

[Burnaby49]

I'd question one of Donald's comments, this one:

Burnaby49 has noted this elsewhere, but at least here in Canada the pseudolaw phenomenon is quietening down, if not dying.

Perhaps it's "quietening down" in Alberta, always a core source of OPCA practitioners, But it's dead and buried in British Columbia as far as I can tell. Alberta still has a few fitful outbursts. Belanger seems to have settled into senescence but he could have a final burst of activity before he totally burns out. Boisjoli's trial is coming up, I believe, next year and he may be still fulminating somewhere. The Northern Watchmen have disappeared from public view but it doesn't mean they are gone. Adam Gauthier AKA Eiricki Ragnarok might still be up to something or another but not enough that he breaks the surface.

But here? Absolutely nothing. Chief Rock seems to have dropped his OPCA connections totally (including me!) and is now pursuing a career in music as part of the band Enter-Tribal. Wally Dove apparently gave up after his loss at the Federal Court of Canada where he tried to get the government to cough up $300,000,000 because he wanted it. Same with Charles Norman Holmes, our most prolific litigator, who is now officially a vexatious litigator at the Federal Court of Canada. The Poriskyite hard-core have all appealed their convictions but they're finished. David Kevin Lindsay, the favorite of our ex-poster Hilfskreuzer Möwe, also seems to have dropped out of the life. He's currently embroiled in a non-OPCA lawsuit I've been following but not reporting because it has nothing to do with his sovereign issues. I don't really consider Dean Kory to be a Freeman or sovereign. He's just a work-averse Ontarian who burned his bridges in his home province and is trying to get on welfare in my province. The Nanaimo Three gang and their followers including Gregor Fpic Jahn and Rory Hawes have also disappeared. Strangely enough Rory Hawes changed his name to Rory Ho then changed it again to Rory D Fpic, obviously adopting Jahn's middle name as his last name. No doubt there are others I've forgotten but none active.

I used to attend Freeman and sovereign trials, I went to their meetings, talked with them, discussed their legal woes with them. Now nothing. If there are any fragments of the movement left here in B.C. they elude me. As I said in the Brian Alexander discussion, the "where are they now" newspaper article on Brian was, for me, just the coroner signing the death certificate.

[The Seventh String]

It’s an interesting article.

It’s not an easy job describing FOTLism and related cults from any aspect, never mind try and work out how they came to think what they do or what might have inspired some branch of their fantasy or another. So well done for doing it.

One thought I have is that there may be another factor in the stamps mystique besides the ones you raise. I suspect many people in the UK simply believe that “for something official to be valid it has to have the correct official stamp or seal of approval”. I’ve only anecdotal evidence based on work experience in the civil service and local government, but that’s something a surprising percentage of the UK population seems to “just know” by some kind of osmosis, even though it often isn’t the case. It’s not a new or recent idea either, it’s been around for many decades.

In the same way I wonder if more “knowledge gained by osmosis” is a factor in thinking only something signed in wet ink is valid, all contracts and legal agreements have to have the signature of all parties and that all official documents, such as court warrants, have to have the personal signature of the issuer.

As for the lack of case law from the UK, I think one reason is that by and large our FOTLers aren’t functioning in courts that set precedent or make any judgements with implications beyond the case at hand. To get a case before those courts often requires first getting leave to proceed. Getting leave requires presenting a well-founded legal argument indicating the person requesting leave has a reasonable chance of winning their case if it gets a hearing.

While I’m not a lawyer, I suspect FOTL concepts might have a little difficulty passing that test. It probably helps if the request for leave is even capable of being understood at all, another hurdle our FOTLers might have problems clearing.

I feel for judges and other decision makers who have to somehow try to put together a professional, fair, reasoned and considered decision when faced with the typical FOTL submission. It must be torture.

[Siegfried Shrink]

In the UK 'stamp magic' is not all that out of date. I remeber when a purchase receipt would be signed over a 2d stamp (I have no idea why) and many years after that died out, cheques had a revenue stamp on the top corner, I think this died out in the 70s. This was grass roots stuff, and that is what tends to be passed on as 'what to do' without having attached any 'why to do it' information.

Some of those reading this may still have a piece of folk wisdom in their heads without knowing it. If you have ever said, about some non-working clock or watch "I think it is overwound" you have used a piece of nonsense that stopped being useful when the fusee and chain vanished from clocks and watches in the 19th C. Just about nothing has been 'overwound' for more then 100 years, but as a watch specialist I still hear it.


Maybe the universal use of electric watches will eventually kill off this idea, and maybe 'wet ink' will go the same way, but it is pretty tough being a more authoritive source than someones grandmother.

[DNetolitzky]

Burnaby49:

I don't think BC is dead and buried quite yet. Take the recent R v White, 2017 BCPC 380 decision for example. This is pretty clearly Mr. White attempting to implement John Spirit's international treaty 'traveling' arguments. Mr. White made a substantial effort to develop those concepts in his interactions with the Court.

Another interesting example is Montana Freeman Dale Jacobi is appearing in the BC Court of Appeal (Docket CA44599) sometime in 2018, presumably challenging his own 'traveling' convictions. Unfortunately I can't tell the exact date of that appeal from the online records. That could be a very interesting proceeding, given Jacobi's been at this for over twenty years.

I'm sure there are others.

What I would agree with is that there doesn't seem to be much organized or community activity. We have a number of solo resisters, with varying degrees of commitment. The larger-scale 'community' appears to have dissolved.

The Seventh String:

I agree that some pseudolaw concepts are a kind of formalization of 'just so' tales that circulate in the general population. One might even call that a kind of 'procedural' magic.

Formalities seem to be a real focus. It's pretty notorious that pseudolaw practitioners will attempt to get their documents formalized in all kinds of ways, even when there is no need. Seals are a good example. Notarial seals show up in the strangest of places. In Canadian courts documents are usually just ink stamped when they are accepted by the clerks, but the Federal Court instead marks at least some documents with a fancy gold-coloured embossed foil seal. I've seen comments by Freemen that they think this formality is very significant.

One might approach this as a kind of layperson's verification process. Trained legal personnel test the validity of a court action or order via its content, which involves a complex set of rules that are less accessible to the general public. How then does the fellow on the street tell whether a court order is 'real'? Why, it should look real, with fancy stamps, seals, signatures - the things that make a document look 'important'.

I have a ":Federal-Postal :Court" order by David Wynn Miller which sure looks important! Unfortunately, I can't share it, but it's a fine illustration of the point.

Writing judgments which respond to pseudolaw is an interesting process. Admittedly, we in Canada have the advantage of some really nicely developed case law on the subject, but a lot of the materials received in these actions are really not particularly coherent, even when you know the lingo. A big issue is catching what the actual argument(s) are, and at least showing an attempt to respond to those. Simply saying "The Plaintiff's arguments were absurd and unworthy of response." really does open a judge up to a potential appeal. It's not only more correct to parse through what has been argued, but also it's simply what is fair to anyone who appears in court. Personally, I think judges should try to provide a meaningful response; Canada's jurisprudence speaks for itself on that point.

Donald

[wserra]

Simply saying "The Plaintiff's arguments were absurd and unworthy of response." really does open a judge up to a potential appeal.

Not in the U.S., and I think I prefer it that way. In fact, the clearest statement of the idea comes from an appellate court. In ruling on a taxpayer's appeal of a Tax Court dismissal of his typical TP arguments, the Fifth Circuit wrote:

We perceive no need to refute these arguments with somber reasoning and copious citation of precedent; to do so might suggest that these arguments have some colorable merit.

Crain v. CIR, 737 F.2d 1417 (5th Cir. 1984).

It's not only more correct to parse through what has been argued, but also it's simply what is fair to anyone who appears in court. Personally, I think judges should try to provide a meaningful response; Canada's jurisprudence speaks for itself on that point.

Yes, Donald, you have more patience than we do. That's frequently a good thing. But it's not as if these guys would accept a "meaningful response"; they wouldn't accept the Hand of God emerging from the clouds and writing "You owe income tax" on their foreheads. After the point is clearly made and repeated several dozen times, the most punctilious desire for due process is satisfied.

Anyway, we have more fun. After all, sovs are like Slinkies - not really good for much, but you can't keep from smiling when they fall down the stairs.

[Siegfried Shrink]

Anyway, we have more fun. After all, sovs are like Slinkies - not really good for much, but you can't keep from smiling when they fall down the stairs.

Super simile.

[DNetolitzky]

WSerra:

Then that's a distinction in law between Canada and the United States. In R v Sheppard, 2002 SCC 26, our Supreme Court made responsive functional reasons, either oral or written, mandatory for any court judgment, and particularly where there are disputes of fact, evidence, and/or law. Sheppard was a criminal matter, but the same rule has been applied in civil litigation.

Beyond being the law, is the Canadian approach more useful? No one is going to get a debate from me that there are pseudolaw practitioners who cannot be reasoned with, but there seem to be other more rational actors who get caught up with pseudolaw.

One tangible bit of first hand evidence I can offer is that I have observed multiple instances where a person has employed pseudolaw and been explicitly planning to appeal what the pseudolaw litigant anticipates (correctly) will be an unfavourable result. However, that combativeness then evaporates when a developed reasoned decision is received. No appeal occurs; the matter ends. This certainly does not happen 100% of the time, but it does occur often enough that Rooke ACJ and myself in publications we have authored for Canadian judges advise that responsive written reasons should be a standard approach for Canadian judges who face OPCA litigation.

There's another factor too. Pseudolaw causes great harm to those who use it. Any decision-making apparatus will want to end pseudolaw disputes in its processes in a quick and efficient manner. If the method in which that occurs also reduces the chance that these kinds of disputes reoccur, then there is both an institutional and social 'win'.

Different philosophies, I suppose.

Donald

[DNetolitzky]

Hi everyone,

Just a quick update that this paper has now been published in its final form:

Donald J. Netolitzky, "Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments as Magic and Ceremony" (2018) 55(4) Alberta Law Review 1045: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... d_Ceremony

The content is essentially the same as the pre-print edition, aside from the meticulous citation scrutineering of the journal editors.

Donald J. Netolitzky

[Siegfried Shrink]

As the man in the street I would have been quite happy without the citations, and in my opinion they do nothing I'd miss, the general thrust of the argument is quite convincing and tends to be reinforced in my mind by the general behaviour and apparent mindset of OPCA users.
Maybe papers get scored on the number of citations, not the sense they make?

There is always a lot that people simply do not understand, and a belief in supernatural and magic is a far easier explanation than finding out what really happens is.

[DNetolitzky]

Citations in academic sources a matter of professional academic ethics. Now, the version I'm going to give is the standard in the sciences, which is where I 'grew up' as a professional. Legal scholars may have a different perspective, but this is the one I follow.

So there are a number of basic rules for any proper academic paper. One is that you need to show your work so that anyone can reproduce the research to test whether or not the reported outcome is correct. In the sciences reproducibility is what proves something is true, not the initial claim. As a consequence it's important to identify specifically where data or procedures come from.

In studying pseudolaw there is a problem that many resources are not readily identifiable. It's not easy to find the relevant court cases, online resources are obscure or transient, books are published in tiny print-runs. As a consequence it's important to provide as many pointers as possible to those who are seeking to reproduce research, or build off of it.

A second basic principle of academic ethics is don't take credit for someone else's work. Therefore, if you say something but you got that information, procedure, or idea from another author or publication, you should acknowledge that. This process is how the merit of academic research is often tested - authors are evaluated by how often their publications are cited by someone else. It's pretty much the same way Google ranks results. The more people point to something, the more important, relevant, and reliable it probably is.

These two rules combine as another reason for why academics point to their sources - to minimize the downstream influence of bad data. Every so often it turns out that an academic publication gets things wrong (or worse, is faked) and that is only discovered sometime later. In the meantime the original result and data may have been used as the foundation for more work, which is now potentially suspect. Citing sources means that if a paper is retracted or otherwise identified as problematic then the 'downstream' effects of that bad data can be identified and contained.

I tend to overbuild pretty much anything I write, but there is a particularly strong reason to do that in this subject area. There simply isn't that much out there for resources, and most people, including legal professionals, do not have much knowledge or exposure to the subject. When discussing pseudolaw it is therefore important, in my opinion, to point out as many links to other resources as possible to provide the readers additional context, resources, and background. In that sense a paper is less a single resource, tested on its logic, but instead is a node in a larger information structure. Sure, it has to hold together on its own, but citations are the mechanism to give that research further context.

Donald

[notorial dissent]

Congratulations, glad to hear It.