Academic paper - After the Hammer: Five Years of Meads v Meads

[DNetolitzky]

Hi everyone,

I just had a journal article of mine accepted by the Alberta Law Review, which permits pre-publication of its papers, so I thought I'd link it here, as the paper might be of some potential interest to the Quatloosians:

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

Briefly, this is a retrospective investigation of Associate Chief Justice Rooke's Meads v Meads, 2012 ABQB 571 decision:

- Was Meads v Meads a complete survey of Canadian pseudolaw, as intended?
- Is Meads v Meads still relevant and accurate, five years later?
- Meads v Meads application by Canadian and foreign courts.
- Academic and public responses to the decision.
- OPCA gurus and populations responses.

I then comment that Meads v Meads may represent a novel class of court decision, 'review judgments', and illustrates how on certain subjects and issues trial courts are possibly the tribunals that are the expert bodies, rather than appeal courts and academia.

I suspect much of what is in this paper will be old familiar material to persons here on Quatloos, but I hope this publication offers at least a few interesting or amusing items.

Comments are very welcome! I will most definitely have an opportunity to fine-tune this paper, since its formal publication will be in 2019...

Donald

[notorial dissent]

Donald, congratulations on the paper.

[Burnaby49]

I started reading it but then I said to myself; does this Netolitzky character actually think that I've got nothing better to do with my time than read a forty-eight page paper confirming that Meads is still valid law? So I put it aside and returned to my very important busy schedule.

Five minutes later, that done, I got back to reading the paper.

[BoomerSooner17]

So I put it aside and returned to my very important busy schedule.

Five minutes later, that done, I got back to reading the paper.

How many pints did you consume in five minutes?

[JohnPCapitalist]

Dave,

Thanks for the work you've put in on the paper. I wanted to comment on the section beginning on page 17 about the continuing relevance of the Meads decision. In it, you raise the point that "that [an evolutionary contest of pseudo-law] has not happened. As previously indicated, the modest degree of innovation today is largely limited to new variations on 'money for nothing' schemes."

You suggest that this may just be due to the fact that creating pseudo-law is hard, requiring sustained intellectual effort on the part of one or more people. That is true, but after Meads, it required no more intellectual effort than before. I'd argue that this lack of creativity is perhaps more a function of demoralization and "battle fatigue" than the inability to mount a sustained effort on a complex project.

In reading about the sovereign citizen and pseudo-law community for the last few years, I am struck by the emotionally immature viewpoints that show through many of the Facebook comments apart from the legalistic incantations. It really seems as if many of these people are stuck at an emotional age of approximately eight years. That age is straddling the line between maturing cognitive ability on the one hand and a desire to try to cling to magical thinking of a much younger age on the other.

The quintessential example that I often use is a bunch of eight-year-old boys in a treehouse plotting to "take over the school." In their group fantasy, they talk about storming into the principal's office, demanding tw hour recesses, unlimited free ice cream at lunch and the right to choose their teachers. They'll egg each other on to ever-more outlandish details for their scheme, but at the end of the day they'll go home to dinner and move on to some other play activity the next day. They will act as if this fantasy is really going to happen, and that they are dead set on executing the plan tomorrow. But deep inside, they all know that this is just fantasy and they all know that, despite their bravado in private with each other, they wouldn't last a second in trying to actually implement their plan. In other words, part of them knows that it's just a fantasy at the same time that they work hard to believe this dream with all their hearts.

I suspect that the Freemen are in a similar situation. Once they see how easily and completely their arguments are shredded when they attempt to actually apply all of this dogma that they have created in a vacuum, and how fast real-world consequences are applied, the outward response may be to threaten to fight on forever, but the internal response is that at some level they understand it doesn't work. It's not as emotionally satisfying to hatch a plan to tie those mean old judges in knots when you have recent proof that somebody applying a similar scheme got shredded with no appreciable effort on the part of the legitimate court. It's just as how 8-year-old boys would not waste time dreaming about taking over their school the week after a report from someone's cousin at another school about how the kids got laughed out of the principal's office and suspended when somebody tried it there.

In that regard, I believe that the process for declaring individuals vexatious litigants is likely to be particularly effective. You're taking away access to their treehouse and depriving them of what they want most: to be seen as equals of the highly trained professionals that make up the other participants in the court system.

Naturally, my comment here is speculative and I don't have evidence that it would take to establish this as a scenario that explains the lack of innovation in pseudo-law in the last few years, but wanted to suggest this as an avenue that might be worth exploring.

Again, thank you for your research into this because. I'm enjoying your posts and certainly enjoying reading the papers that you are publishing.

[Siegfried Shrink]

What he said.

[Burnaby49]

I suspect that the Freemen are in a similar situation. Once they see how easily and completely their arguments are shredded when they attempt to actually apply all of this dogma that they have created in a vacuum, and how fast real-world consequences are applied, the outward response may be to threaten to fight on forever, but the internal response is that at some level they understand it doesn't work. It's not as emotionally satisfying to hatch a plan to tie those mean old judges in knots when you have recent proof that somebody applying a similar scheme got shredded with no appreciable effort on the part of the legitimate court. It's just as how 8-year-old boys would not waste time dreaming about taking over their school the week after a report from someone's cousin at another school about how the kids got laughed out of the principal's office and suspended when somebody tried it there.

I would disagree with this to some extent. Some, for example Michael Millar and Keith Lawson, ended up with jail sentences for tax evasion and counseling fraud without putting up any kind of reasonable defense. They employed pure freeman type defenses at trial, particularly Millar, even though they were clearly hopeless to an outside viewer. Millar has even carried his strawman, jurisdiction, and capitalization arguments forward as the basis of his appeal. I sat through his entire trial and as far as I could tell he was a true believer with no doubts whatever. His attitude at trial was largely smug superiority tempered by impatient exasperation that the judge was too dense to understand and agree with him.

[JohnPCapitalist]

I suspect that the Freemen are in a similar situation. Once they see how easily and completely their arguments are shredded when they attempt to actually apply all of this dogma that they have created in a vacuum, and how fast real-world consequences are applied, the outward response may be to threaten to fight on forever, but the internal response is that at some level they understand it doesn't work. It's not as emotionally satisfying to hatch a plan to tie those mean old judges in knots when you have recent proof that somebody applying a similar scheme got shredded with no appreciable effort on the part of the legitimate court. It's just as how 8-year-old boys would not waste time dreaming about taking over their school the week after a report from someone's cousin at another school about how the kids got laughed out of the principal's office and suspended when somebody tried it there.

I would disagree with this to some extent. Some, for example Michael Millar and Keith Lawson, ended up with jail sentences for tax evasion and counseling fraud without putting up any kind of reasonable defense. They employed pure freeman type defenses at trial, particularly Millar, even though they were clearly hopeless to an outside viewer. Millar has even carried his strawman, jurisdiction, and capitalization arguments forward as the basis of his appeal. I sat through his entire trial and as far as I could tell he was a true believer with no doubts whatever. His attitude at trial was largely smug superiority tempered by impatient exasperation that the judge was too dense to understand and agree with him.

You're absolutely right. The true believers will not only handcuff themselves to the deck rail of the Titanic but they'll double down when anyone challenges their delusions. This belief system is a cult, albeit one without a single strong and charismatic founder (typically a defining feature of cults). There are gurus, but in much SovCit stuff, the relationship between the creation of dogma and the emergence of a strong founder of a group is not as absolute as it was for, say, Scientology or the Moonies. But even without a leader, many of these people relate in a cultic manner.

I didn't state it clearly in my original post, but I was focused more on the either marginally committed believer or the moderately committed believer. Those may be passionate on the surface but have not managed to suppress all doubts. For many who are short of the True Believer level, a couple of crushing court defeats will cause them to lose faith and drift away.

A good example in the US is the "Continental Marshals for the Republic," a group of pretend marshals who made up fancy badges and ID cards, and held weekly self-congratulatory conference calls. They were all quite impressed with themselves until four of their number attempted to take pretend paperwork to a real jail in rural New Mexico to try to spring one of their number in early 2017. They honestly believed that they could do this. Since they thoughtfully faxed all the paperwork ahead, and called to confirm a pickup time, the real cops were there and arrested them.

Though the foursome got off with relatively light punishment, the organization basically imploded almost immediately. Even the pretend "chief marshal" quickly walked away from the organization. Several of the True Believers in the Colorado pretend judge/pretend grand jury crowd (Bruce Doucette, et. al.) continued to try to insist the group was legit, and were arrested themselves several months later. This was covered in detail at TheFogbow: http://www.thefogbow.com/forum/viewtopi ... =26&t=9527

So that's a case where the True Believers hung on, to their detriment, while effective law enforcement dissuaded many times the number of true believers.

[JohnPCapitalist]

BTW, Dave, the English major in me can't help point out that "disdain" is spelled wrong at the end of the second paragraph on p. 40 of the paper. Sorry about this mild OCD necessity.

[Burnaby49]

I didn't state it clearly in my original post, but I was focused more on the either marginally committed believer or the moderately committed believer. Those may be passionate on the surface but have not managed to suppress all doubts. For many who are short of the True Believer level, a couple of crushing court defeats will cause them to lose faith and drift away.

That was the Carol Volk and many others who got on board because of promised financial benefits and bailed when it was obvious the sovereign song and dance was just bullshit. Volk and her husband, suddenly, out of nowhere, became ministers in Belanger's fake church and fervid believers in his moronic proselytizing that being a Christian, on his terms, exempted them from paying their mortgage. When that failed they bailed on Belanger and immediately moved over to a fervid belief in OPPT. Just venue shopping.

Take Heather's crew. I doubt many even believed but were willing to give her free money BS a shot if there was no true cost or risk to them. They sat back and let Heather, a real true believer, lead the way while the majority of her support was just internet postings. The gibberish postings on I UV almost stopped completely when she was convicted.

[HardyW]

BTW, Dave, the English major in me can't help point out that "disdain" is spelled wrong at the end of the second paragraph on p. 40 of the paper. Sorry about this mild OCD necessity.

Dave who?

[Burnaby49]

If, like me, you ignore footnotes those 48 pages become far less daunting. The footnotes are so extensive that Page 28 has only 14 lines of text. Page 18 has only 3 lines. I didn't even notice that I'd read it. If you read all the footnotes you've got a long haul ahead, particularly page 18 which has ten footnotes that fill almost the entire page.

[eric]

Footnotes and bibliography are often the best part of an academic paper. Usually on almost any book or paper I read the notes first and if even better the bibliography is referenced by chapter I will glance at it also. Gives one a better idea if the author of the paper really has some data to back up his thoughts or is just winging it. Besides, notes often give the author the opportunity to throw in interesting asides that may not be particularly relevant but are often interesting. Back when I was actually serious about studying certain topics I would grab whatever book, check the bibliography and notes, and then order them up, gradually tunelling down until I located the original primary reference.

[Burnaby49]

So I put it aside and returned to my very important busy schedule.

Five minutes later, that done, I got back to reading the paper.

How many pints did you consume in five minutes?

Show some understanding of the issues faced by the elderly. It takes that long to get to the fridge, make my choice (I generally have a varied selection), pop it open, take that first satisfying sample, then go back to the computer and try and remember what the hell I was doing. That last step consumes most of the time.

[JohnPCapitalist]

BTW, Dave, the English major in me can't help point out that "disdain" is spelled wrong at the end of the second paragraph on p. 40 of the paper. Sorry about this mild OCD necessity.

Dave who?

Whoops. I meant Donald, as in Netolitzky. Senior moment, and wrote the last post under pressure to run out for a meeting.

[DNetolitzky]

... In it, you raise the point that "that [an evolutionary contest of pseudo-law] has not happened. As previously indicated, the modest degree of innovation today is largely limited to new variations on 'money for nothing' schemes."

You suggest that this may just be due to the fact that creating pseudo-law is hard, requiring sustained intellectual effort on the part of one or more people. That is true, but after Meads, it required no more intellectual effort than before. I'd argue that this lack of creativity is perhaps more a function of demoralization and "battle fatigue" than the inability to mount a sustained effort on a complex project. ...

Hi John,

First, my observations are also anecdotal, too. If there really are good population-based studies on Freemen in Canada, I have not seen them. The social scientists whom I have spoken to about the community are unanimous that they are a difficult to study and document group.

Is some of the pseudolaw population here in Canada demoralized and has given up? Very, very likely. To the best of my knowledge, the consensus among Canadian courts is we crested a wave in the early 2010s and now fewer OPCA litigants are appearing in court. My observations of Freeman online social communities parallels that. The websites like ThinkFree and the World Freeman Society, where these communities developed, are either down or inactive.

But there is a hardcore remnant left, and some of those are still scheming. We have seen a kind of evolution of some concepts. Probably the most impressive example is a guru named John Spirit, who is documented here on Quatloos. Spirit accepts the basic core concepts of pseudolaw, but attempted to develop a new caselaw-based explanation for the Strawman and how to get rid of it. He combined international treaty law with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, saying that provided the authority to stop having or being a "person".

Another development that is not so well documented on Quatloos is the emergence around 2013 of claims that one can opt to be governed by Equity, rather than legislation and/or the Common Law. I believe a fellow named Michael G.A. Gaboury is the one promoting this variation on pseudolaw. Persons who use this argument might, for example, be the accused in a criminal proceeding. They then say that the Law of Equity is superior, and demand that their action be transferred to a Court of Equity on that basis. Lawyer Glenn Bogue seems to be using a variation on this theme.

These two developments definitely represent an evolution of pseudolegal thought in Canada. Both concepts have appeared in a substantial number of reported cases, so there are people willing to take up these ideas. However, neither represents a substantial change in the direction of pseudolaw. Rather, it's a tinkering activity. Spirit is still stuck on the Strawman fallacy. Gaboury believes you can opt into a different kind of law, it's just the old school Freemen had got the name wrong.

An analogy I like is that we are watching legal alchemists, rather than legal chemists. There is no rational methodology underlying these microevolutions. They accept the same basic rules: there's a Strawman glued to you which can be removed and thereby deny state authority, there's another kind of law you can escape into with the right paperwork. As legal alchemists, Canada's Freemen accept that you can, somehow, turn lead into gold. And so they keep tinkering with procedures intended to achieve that objective. They lack the intellectual and methodological foundation to step far enough back to say "You know, this model of law and society as a whole is flawed. I'm going to try something new."

For whatever reason, Freemen just cannot progress from transmutation of elements to the periodic table.

(Yeah, I trained as a scientist. I just cannot get out of that mode of analysis. Oh, how the sociologists roll their eyes when I insist on modelling pseudolaw as a pathogen...)

That's what surprises me. I would expect a willingness to engage in bolder invention, so my hypothesis is that making pseudolaw is hard. Now, in a couple papers I presented at a symposium earlier this month I suggest that the remarkable lack of pseudolegal innovation can be attributed to pseudolaw really now being a distinct separate legal system, and it's been that way since 2000. That's not just a few rules, tricks, or loopholes, but instead an integrated set of concepts and associated mythology. That mutually supportive complex of ideas, what I call the Sovereign Citizen Pseudolaw Memeplex, is far more persuasive than the sum of its individual bits. It tells a story, and provides a scheme.

What has deeply surprised me is that this Pseudolaw Memeplex is both stable and consistent, but also very adaptable to new communities and nations. All it needs is a legal hook - why a particular government does not have the authority it purports to possess.

If you're interested, those two papers are also on my Researchgate website. I'd be delighted to hear your thoughts on those.

Donald

[DNetolitzky]

I suspect that the Freemen are in a similar situation. Once they see how easily and completely their arguments are shredded when they attempt to actually apply all of this dogma that they have created in a vacuum, and how fast real-world consequences are applied, the outward response may be to threaten to fight on forever, but the internal response is that at some level they understand it doesn't work. It's not as emotionally satisfying to hatch a plan to tie those mean old judges in knots when you have recent proof that somebody applying a similar scheme got shredded with no appreciable effort on the part of the legitimate court. It's just as how 8-year-old boys would not waste time dreaming about taking over their school the week after a report from someone's cousin at another school about how the kids got laughed out of the principal's office and suspended when somebody tried it there.

I would disagree with this to some extent. Some, for example Michael Millar and Keith Lawson, ended up with jail sentences for tax evasion and counseling fraud without putting up any kind of reasonable defense. They employed pure freeman type defenses at trial, particularly Millar, even though they were clearly hopeless to an outside viewer. Millar has even carried his strawman, jurisdiction, and capitalization arguments forward as the basis of his appeal. I sat through his entire trial and as far as I could tell he was a true believer with no doubts whatever. His attitude at trial was largely smug superiority tempered by impatient exasperation that the judge was too dense to understand and agree with him.

I have observed this phenomenon first-hand. For example, in Edmonton we have a modest-sized cell of David Wynn Millerites who have been trying to get someone to accept their peculiar paperwork for the past five or more years.

The Clerks won't accept their documents, but they keep coming back.

Donald

[DNetolitzky]

BTW, Dave, the English major in me can't help point out that "disdain" is spelled wrong at the end of the second paragraph on p. 40 of the paper. Sorry about this mild OCD necessity.

Thanks! It's annoying how those typos escape literally dozens and dozens of reviews.

[DNetolitzky]

If, like me, you ignore footnotes those 48 pages become far less daunting. The footnotes are so extensive that Page 28 has only 14 lines of text. Page 18 has only 3 lines. I didn't even notice that I'd read it. If you read all the footnotes you've got a long haul ahead, particularly page 18 which has ten footnotes that fill almost the entire page.

At least they're not endnotes. Few things I enjoy less than flipping back and forward through a text.

Donald

[DNetolitzky]

Footnotes and bibliography are often the best part of an academic paper. Usually on almost any book or paper I read the notes first and if even better the bibliography is referenced by chapter I will glance at it also. Gives one a better idea if the author of the paper really has some data to back up his thoughts or is just winging it. Besides, notes often give the author the opportunity to throw in interesting asides that may not be particularly relevant but are often interesting. ...

Something great about the Alberta Law Review editors is that they clearly enjoy the esoteric and bizarro aspects of this subject domain. One of the later steps in the pre-publication process is they ask me to identify additional information citation sources, or to provide more details or explanations to assist the reader. This has resulted in exactly the little interesting additional explorations that add a lot of colour and, I think, value to the publication.

I know when I was asked essentially "tell us more about this Wilfred Emonts guy", well ... there was a lot more to say. Hopefully someday I can work in the tale of the rise and fall of the Alberta Court of Kings Bench [sic].

It's important for the novice in the subject area to see specifics like that illustrated. We're lucky in Canada that there is some detailed jurisprudence which helps bridge that gap.

Donald