Recent academic commentary on Sovereign Citizens by Christine Sarteschi

[DNetolitzky]

Hi folks,

I thought I'd drop a note that I recently spotted a couple publications from Chatham University Associate Professor Christine Sarteschi that focus on the US Sovereign Citizen phenomenon.

First, there is a paper on Sovereign Citizen violence directed to law enforcement:

Sarteschi, "Sovereign Citizens: A narrative review with implications for violence towards law enforcement" (2020) Aggression and Violent Behaviour: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 8920302135

Second, Prof. Sarteschi has recently published a book on the Sovereign Citizen subject with Springer:

Sarteschi, Sovereign Citizens: A Psychological and Criminological Analysis (2020): https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783030458508

It's nice to see more academics investigating the subject area.

Donald Netolitzky

[JohnPCapitalist]

First, there is a paper on Sovereign Citizen violence directed to law enforcement:

Sarteschi, "Sovereign Citizens: A narrative review with implications for violence towards law enforcement" (2020) Aggression and Violent Behaviour: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 8920302135

It's nice to see more academics investigating the subject area.

She has some very nice things to say about you in the paper:

The most expansive and thorough article was that of Netolitzky (2018), who serves as the Complex Litigant Management Council for Canada's Alberta Court of Queen's Bench. One might consider it a seminal article on the phenomenon of pseudolaw.

I'm not impressed by the journal's copy editing staff, however. I only took two years of conversational Canadian in high school, so I could be forgetting how this works, but I think you are the "Counsel," not the "Council."

Seriously, the article was reasonably well-written background, and it was interesting to see that someone in academia has created the "TRAP-18" inventory ("Terrorism Radicalization Assessment Protocol") that they claim has pretty good success in backtesting for predicting when SovCits are likely to turn violent. It's a copyrighted and licensed product, so it doesn't appear that there is any way to reproduce how it works here, alas.

I also learned that there is at least one Caucasian "Moorish American" SovCit.

[DNetolitzky]

Oh lordie, how I wish I was a council! Trying to keep a handle on a province's worth of "interesting litigation" sometimes means long hours.

Prof. Sarteschi's comments on the pseudolaw as magic and ceremony paper are very kind. I have had a lot of positive feedback on that publication, which is of course delightful, but to this day the paper's conclusions grate on me. I don't like the answer I came to, nor does it align with the way I'd like the world to be. But, data is data, and one has to follow through on that. Though it offends me deeply to think there are people going to courts and casting magic spells - and doing so sincerely - that appears to be what is happening.

Responding to that effectively is quite the puzzle.

Donald Netolitzky

[wserra]

Responding to that effectively is quite the puzzle.

Narcan.

[grixit]

Responding to that effectively is quite the puzzle.

Narcan.

[jackroe]

Responding to that effectively is quite the puzzle.

I first became interested in this stuff in the mid 1990s, when there were a lot fewer people on the Internet, and it was reasonably common to find self-rep reports of those who denied jurisdiction being taken for psychiatric evaluation/detention. Whether they were being conned by con artists, or conned by people with good faith beliefs is impossible to say, but, with the rise of the Internet, it seems like that sort of stopped being a thing, and the courts would just plough through, e.g. just ignore the claim of lack of jurisdiction. Then in the 2000s you start getting judgments taking up their arguments and branding them specious, mostly, it seems, for the purpose of tagging such folks vexatious litigants and for entrenching consequences in family law, etc.

Broadly, there's no evidence that imprisonment, loss of homes, etc. treat delusions, if you want to call this a sort of delusion about the facts of the matter of the legal system. People with delusions are best treated with pharmacotherapy, but the idea that people who challenge the jurisdiction of the court (which is listed in all the old authorities, e.g. Bracton, Fleta as completely acceptable) are mentally ill is likely not going to fly in a "free society," it has an air of the soviet "sluggish schizophrenia." That said, if someone persists in utilizing arguments that have not operated in his benefit, is that mental illness, or does he have a strong disagreement about the correct way to decide the case?

On the other hand, the whole magic/ceremony/liturgical quality of law, it's not current anymore to the same degree, but a Bishop is an Ecclesiastical Judge, and the Bishop's office is to officiate at ceremonies, e.g. the eucharist. There's no hard and fast reason why we could not view legal proceedings as a sort of liturgy, in Greek liturgos just means "work of the people," so why should we not consider courts a species of liturgy? Of Justices, Bracton says in the Laws and Customs of England, that

"[jus] is called the art of what is fair and just, of which we are deservedly called the priests, for we worship justice and administer sacred rights." (https://amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/ ... 24+worship)

In this sense, the "sacred rights" are those administered in the temporal courts. And Justice, of course, is Justitia, a deity.

My view is that most of this is solved by a positivist understanding of law, law is a command backed by violence, questions of justice are irrelevant, you study a legal system by studying what it does. What it ought to do is like asking what a person ought to desire. Adults recognize that our desires are a product of our upbringing and our genetics and things like that, asking if desires are "just" or not is just a weird religious disposition, and it's completely irrelevant to the practice of law. The way law is presented to the public is that people ought to obey because there's something inherently good or just about obeying the law, not that they ought to obey because if they do not they will be coerced. The law is simply a summary of how the powerful will coerce you if you do not obey them, but from what I understand, this is not how law is presented to the general public, so they get stuck on the idea of some normative set of "magic words" that have force---they have the sense that the words come first, then the desires/dispositions of those with coercive power. First comes the desire to coerce people who, for example, don't wear seatbelts, the legislation comes after, as a means to realizing that desire.

That said, the glee some people seem to take in these people being stomped on, I don't agree with that, it seems to me like laughing at a mentally challenged person getting into trouble.

[Duke2Earl]

I take no delight in "stomping" on anyone. However, sometimes...in fact too often, the sov cit types become an actual danger to others and to us all. Their inability or unwillingness to conform to society becomes dangerous to themselves and to the rest of us and must be dealt with. I wish we had a more effective way to deal with them than prison ....a place where they could live as they want...but they don't really want that either...they want all the benefits of a organized society without any of the conformity necessary to maintain that society. It's a classic case of wanting it both ways.

[Foggy]

I do think sovcit beliefs are rooted in mental illness, but we can't cure mental illness, so there's a real question about what should be done for these people. It's been reported for years that when they are confronted with solid, irrefutable evidence that their beliefs are wrong, they don't change their minds, they double down.

Of course, the biggest mental health facility in any county in the US is the local county jail. Mental illness doesn't just result in sovcit beliefs, and the people who suffer from mental illness tend to make ... poor life choices.

I don't have a solution here. I think it's fascinating to watch the sovcits and their antics, but then you get an incident like the shooting in Florida this week. While part of me thinks "Wow, she really gave him notice to agent AND principal", it's really a tragic situation on all sides.

[MRN]

Hmm. I actually think I disagree. There are undoubtedly forms of mental illness that make people more susceptible to SovCittery: querulous paranoia for one, but I think it's actually the far end of a continuum with, for example, lawyers on the other.

I should say that my undergrad was in Anthropology of Religion, so I am hugely fascinated by Donald Netzolitsky's work here and that lens probably makes a difference to what I see.

So the thing is, everyone here has two disadvantages to understanding the appeal of SovCittery:

One, some of us are legal professionals and all of us are at least hobbyists. We have a high average level of understanding not just of what the law is, but of how laws, courts, etc., are structured, what makes something legal or illegal, the difference between a crime and a tort, and so forth.

In other words, we know that it proceeds from authorities, not internal logic. Is that workable as shorthand?

And, two, because we're professionals and hobbyists, we don't only pay attention to "the law" when we want or need something from it or when we have no choice.

So we're looking from a different angle than the average person who gets sucked in by SovCit thinking. And I don't know how much we realize that.

Our relationship to the whole deal is either willing participant or spectator. Theirs is supplicant, or involuntary participant, if they've been arrested.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that MOST people "know" several things about the law that aren't actually true. And most people won't find out that they were wrong until it comes back to bite them, if it ever does.

Obviously there's a big gap between, say, the person who confidently insists that they can't be about to buy drugs from an undercover cop because the guy just smoked a joint in front of him and Cops Aren't Allowed To Break The Law and a full-oh SovCit, but I think it may be more degree than kind, at least to a point (Full-on Gurus are another kettle of fish. They really are the extreme opposite of lawyers. There's obviously some kind of extra step there.)

Basically, the average person "knows" that the law isn't a magic spell: but that mostly means they've been told it and they believe it. You wouldn't want to make them try to prove it on the spot, necessarily.

And they kind of don't need to: if you need some law done you can hire a lawyer or a guru. Obviously the lawyer is a much much better plan, but most people don't have the specialized knowledge, when it comes right down to it, to actually explain why of their own knowledge and without resorting to authority. If the lawyer actually WERE using ritual, chanting, and magic, most of the people in the courtroom wouldn't really notice a difference. They recite a bunch of stuff and the judge either does, or doesn't, answer their prayers.

(I also used to do road service. Equally, the average lawyer "knows" that their car doesn't run on magic. But to be honest, their cars wouldn't start, they'd call me, and I'd either explain the correct ritual to perform or send them a more potent magician, err, mechanic.

I mean, obviously not really. But if you replaced all of the engines in the world with magic boxes, and all the mechanics in the world with magicians a lot of people would never notice any practical difference. Including a lot of lawyers and brain surgeons. I did Infiniti and Jaguar road service among others, and it taught me that you can be incredibly smart and well-educated and also completely incapable of understanding why you have angered the vehicle gods flooded your engine.)

The thing about cargo cults is, "primitive people" aren't. Primitive, I mean. They just have a very different database to draw conclusions from. I mean, heck, how were they meant to know about all the factors that led to the planes arriving? It's not like anyone really bothered to explain...

This is also true of the law. It's one of those things that comes of living in a complex society run by specialists: "any sufficiently advanced technology" and all, but actually not just technologies but also systems.

Anyway I have no idea if that makes any sense, but it's already too long. I swear, there's a thesis in it.

(edited to fix some of my awful typing)

[noblepa]

MRN, I think that the late, great author and scientist Arthur C. Clarke summed up your point very well, when he said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

That's kind of what you were saying, isn't it? The Jaguar/Lexis owners didn't understand how their cars worked, so it was all magic to them.

The sovcits don't understand how the law works, so its all magic to them.

[Foggy]

... the late, great author and scientist Arthur C. Clarke summed up your point very well, when he said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
...

The sovcits don't understand how the law works, so its all magic to them.

Well, except the law isn't a sufficiently advanced technology, or any kind of technology at all.

Perhaps, like my hero Rudy G., I'm just using normal scrutiny.

[wserra]

Perhaps, like my hero Rudy G., I'm just using normal scrutiny.

Whatever degree of scrutiny you're using, it is clearly designed to ensure opacity.

[Foggy]

But which definition of opacity, Rudy's or the judge's?

[DNetolitzky]

I'm wearing my microbiologist hat in making this comment, but I think the magical vs structural characteristics of law operate on a number of different levels.

First, I completely agree with noblepa's invoking Clarke's Axiom: from the outside law looks mysterious and ceremonial because it is complex.

What aggravates that is the practice of law is, functionally, ceremonial. People dress up in weird outfits. They go to a special room. People stand, sit, exchange documents, and so on in a ritualistic manner. The manner of speech is stilted, using unnecessarily obtuse language. Yeah - it does look like a ceremony. And that's not such a bad thing, either. Arguably, there is a very real value to conducting legal proceedings in "a strange place", because that may shift people's behaviour towards the cautious end of the spectrum.

The court where I work has rules about judges wearing formal dress. Judges only gown where evidence is being heard from witnesses (or potentially heard from witnesses). Other hearings, primarily "Chambers" procedural hearings, do not require the judge to be gowned. However, quite a few of our judges now gown - unnecessarily by the rules - when they hold family law dispute chambers matters. Why? The consensus is that self-represented family dispute litigants respond differently to a man or woman wearing business attire vs someone wearing a magic costume. The more alien the environment, the more the litigants listen to instructions and operate in an orderly manner.

Now that's purely ceremonial magic, but it works. When I've spoken in law classes about this phenomenon I've characterized judges' formal attire as "a skunk suit". Like skunks, judges' formal appearance denotes they are outside normal social structures, and that's a useful warning sign. Don't piss off the skunk. They spray.

Now, as MRN observed, once you have enough knowledge/training, the magic drains away, and it becomes apparent that law, like automobile mechanics, does follow rules. Is that a "technology"? Call it a mechanism, and a mechanism that has rules. Its function and operation, and how to interact with it, can be taught, explained, and learned. Most who use pseudolaw have a very incomplete and often false understanding of law's mechanisms and rules. That is why they fail, beyond simply being goofy and greedy.

But there's another layer of irrationality underneath the apparent mechanical structure of law. Theoretically, law produces useful social results by having rules that predict dispute outcomes (kinda), and that the outcomes created by those rules are socially functional (very questionable). It's the latter point where magic returns. A great deal of legal rules have never been evaluated in a functional sense. This makes my microbiologist component crazy. I read all this theoretical musing about balancing sentencing factor A vs sentencing factor B, and it's coming from nowhere. The effects of sentencing factor A and B have never (or minimally) been evaluated in relation to their social outcome. There are scads of material that test legal rules within the conceptual infrastructure of law, but very little that validates these rules work, in the physical world.

Then when you get to "rights" and "justice", many results - at least to me - appear to be philosophical musings, rather than grounded in measurable, tangible effects.

My job tends to involve a lot of litigant and litigation management questions. I read learned appeal judges and academics saying this factor or that factor should trump another and should determine how courts conduct their processes. I know they have absolutely no data on which to evaluate whether their starting points on what they imagine is going on in the courts is correct or not, or that their proposed solution or principle will have a beneficial or deleterious effect. They have no data. These are thought experiments.

In that sense the "science" of law is currently operating at a level about equal to ancient Greeks musing about the interactions of the four elements and humors, rather than modern experimental procedure where hypotheses are tested by quantitative measurable observations, and knowledge and improved mechanisms builds on that.

So in conclusion I'd say law is a ceremonial-looking rules-based procedure whose principles are built off of fluff.

Merely my own likely quite jaded opinion. There is an alternative explanation that I am too stupid to comprehend the substance of law's foundation. I accept that too may very well be correct.

Donald Netolitzky

[MRN]

There is an alternative explanation that I am too stupid to comprehend the substance of law's foundation.

I'm not convinced it HAS one. I mean, Hammurabi gets tossed around nearly as much as Magna Carta, though by a different crowd and they're not trying to actually use it in court, but there's almost nothing noticeably related to either left in there.

The law as I understand it is a vast, patchwork structure that actually doesn't really have a foundation. It's in a more-or-less continual state of disintegration, but that's okay because people are perpetually bolting new bits onto it so, in aggregate, it stays approximately upright. Ish.

Which is just completely OFFENSIVE to many logical, sensible, right-thinking people. You know the joke about observing that X works in practice and demanding proof that it will work in theory?

How, they quite reasonably demand, can anything so important and with so much power behind it turn out to be basically a Rube Goldberg machine with people as the moving parts?

There must be an alternative explanation, one that actually makes sense ...

Thinking that way -- and lots of careers NEED you to think that way -- will make you terrible at anthropology and, actually, extremely vulnerable to a lot of scams/cults/conspiracy theories/SovCit groups.

Because they tend to offer One Theory To Rule Them All, and that's very attractive to a certain kind of genuinely intelligent person who is absolutely convinced they can't be scammed because they're MUCH too smart to fall for that stuff.

Add to that that I can quote you off the top of my head at least five recent court cases that made me sit straight up and say "Ok, that is some seriously jacked-up unjust bullshit" and I'm sure you all can too, and actually I'm kind of amazed there aren't MORE conspiracy theories about the legal system.

This is also true of the law. It's one of those things that comes of living in a complex society run by specialists: "any sufficiently advanced technology" and all, but actually not just technologies but also systems

So, yes, Clarke's law, but maybe with a few corollaries he didn't get to.

Man, this is an incredibly long way around to say "if you're looking for an explanation of SovCittery, it's probably worth remembering that any theory of human behaviour that uses 'people are stupid' as a starting axiom is not going to explain human behaviour very well."

[Foggy]

I was in a book club a few years back and one of the books we read was about pre-Revolutionary War America, and during the course of the book there was a trial of a lady for murder. In about the year 1770. In Massachusetts, IIRC.

And the main thing I noticed was that a modern day attorney who tried criminal cases in court -- which I used to do, many years ago -- would have felt perfectly comfortable with the procedures and structure of the trial. 'Course, nobody had a laptop, and nobody filed documents online, and nobody showed evidence to the jury on a projector. But they did have voir dire, and direct and cross-examination, and rules of evidence, and opening statements and closing arguments, so that any attorney today would have known exactly what was going on.

I used to say, back in the day, that we have the worst system of justice anywhere, except for all the others.

So despite the complexity and formality and opacity (or lack thereof), there was a continuity between that trial and a criminal trial today that speaks well of the system, because if the system just plain didn't work, you'd think we'd have noticed and implemented something new over the past 250 years since 1770.

[JamesVincent]

There are several entries now in this thread that are well thought out and written essays on the mechanics of law, obviously written by intelligent and reasonable personages who seem to desire to understand the complexity of the legal construct.

Which means that they will mean absolutely nothing to the average Sovrun Joe as he argues that the gold fringed flag means that he's being tried under Admirality Law and refuses to stand under the judges jurisdiction.

I think that we, as adults capable of reason and thought, will never actually understand what makes someone have the beliefs they have. I, for one, have a very simple understanding of law in general:

If I does this I will go to jail. If I do THIS I will probably be hurt quite a bit and what's left of me will go to jail. If I act in such and such a way I will find people with black suits and no sense of humor knocking on my door.

Hardly Voltaire but I have found that it generally keeps me a free man.

[DNetolitzky]

So I’m going to push back on you Foggy concerning the functionality of the common law legal tradition. Your observation is that the system has remained pretty much unchanged - and I agree with you there - does not necessarily mean it works well. It just means it works to a minimum threshold that is tolerable by its host society.

Putting on my biologist hat again, the fact a cumbersome, inefficient, inelegant biological apparatus works does not necessarily mean it’s a good solution in the long term. Working is enough to get you by. What we see today are yesterday's survivors and breeders. The absence of change suggests a stagnant ecosystem where the lack of meaningful competition means a pretty ill-engineered solution continues to dominate the playing field. The proverbial dodo on an isolated Mauritius seemed to work rather well too, until conditions changed. Now, I’m not saying the dodo wasn’t efficient for what it was, it just was ill-designed to respond to environmental changes, and thus became a dead-end.

I think it’s also fair to say we know that other radically different judicial and law-making apparatus work just fine. The European civil law tradition where law is codified and not invented by judges, and judges actively direct litigation, is almost the polar opposite of the common law approach. Countries that host civil law systems appear to manage their dispute resolution and social control at least as well as the common law alternatives.

That challenges that the common law approach is uniquely effective. I’ll home in on one aspect of the differences between these systems, one that is relevant to this forum. Common law jurisdictions allocate control of litigation to the parties. The judge is a passive observer and ultimate decision maker. That’s one reason why pseudolaw litigants are such a challenge in common law courts. The courts are sharply restricted from being active participants, and so they must lob back hopeless application after hopeless application, lawsuit after lawsuit. All this because “your day in court” - and on your own terms - is sacrosanct. This same problem exists for abusive litigation as a whole.

One surprise for me was learning vexatious litigation is pretty much unknown in civil jurisdiction states. The judge directs litigation as the inquisitor, and abusive litigation is snuffed out in a summary manner. It goes further. The kinds of abusive litigation behaviour that we in common law jurisdictions tolerate, or exult as the ultimate expression of individual rights, is usually considered a mental health problem in civil law jurisdictions, and intervention occurs right away.

There are a couple good papers by psychiatrist Benjamin Levy that compare how the two court structures respond to the stress caused by abusive litigation, but, unfortunately, I only see part 1 (https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... law_Part_1) is currently available online. In any case, very interesting reading.

Justice Yves-Marie Morissette of the Quebec Court of Appeal has made similar comparative law observations concerning managing abusive litigants, including pseudolaw litigants, in a paper published last year in the Canadian Criminal Law Review (“Querulous and Vexatious Litigants as a Disorder of a Modern Legal System” (2019) 43:3). I don’t see that available online either, but I recommend it for Justice Morissette’s digging into the structure of legal systems and their resulting procedural vulnerabilities.

That’s not to say that there aren’t legal systems that work even more poorly than the civil and common law traditions. Islamic law, for example, has significant weaknesses that reduces social efficiency, such as the complete absence of the concept of corporations. That badly impedes operating businesses over longer periods and on a larger scale.

But the challenger to the conventional court edifices and institutions that I really wanted to highlight is the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal (https://civilresolutionbc.ca). This new approach is the competitor that may replace the way law, courts, and lawyers have operated for centuries. The BCCRT is an entirely online dispute resolution body that initially was restricted to small claims and condo disputes, but its functions are now expanding to some motor vehicle accident claims, and other things. I fully expect the experiment will extend further.

There are many fascinating aspects of the BCCRT, but one that I would like to highlight is the interface. Everything is done online, and by dispute participants who use web forms to provide information, upload documents, receive and send communications. The system has five steps:

1) initiate a dispute and provide information, which triggers,
2) the responding party having a chance to do the same, then
3) voluntary and binding negotiation between the parties, and if that is unsuccessful,
4) a case manager tries to facilitate a binding agreement, and if again that does not work,
5) a civil resolution tribunal member makes a binding decision.

There is still court oversight in the form of judicial review of those final tribunal decisions. I’m not sure if BCCRT decisions are always reported, but if so in 2019 there were a little over 2000 decisions issued by that body’s tribunal members. Judging from a recent statistics report, it looks like the input of new disputes is about 5000 per year, so only a fraction of disputes gets to stage five. Most disputes are resolved at an earlier stage. Again, this process is entirely online. Lawyers are usually not permitted.

Surveys of users are largely positive, for example a 2019 monthly survey had 75% of users recommend the BCCRT. It was “easy to understand” (72%) and “easy to use” (80%). 82% said the procedure was fair, and 73% said it was timely. I’d be surprised to find self-represented litigants in any court saying that.

I see only 21 reported judicial reviews of the BCCRT since 2018, but that plausibly is an incomplete sample. In any case, it’s pretty clear most disputes are concluded in the BCCRT itself.

I’ve attended discussions of how this system operates “under the hood”, and how its designers from the start built the process and interface to match user needs, skills, and knowledge. This is a system for people, not lawyers. The usual court and document formalities are gone. User feedback is used to drive improved interfaces, which are continually updated on that basis.

If you are interested in how that looks, here is the “Solution Explorer” (https://civilresolutionbc.ca/how-the-cr ... g-started/) that is the entry point to finding what kind of dispute is in play, then drilling down to provide additional information and guidance. In my opinion, this approach is really impressive. The people who designed and implemented this system have my admiration.

I fully expect other Canadian jurisdictions will mimic the BCCRT and that our provincial courts will have their jurisdiction reduced. Can this model be applied to other kinds of disputes? I’d certainly like to see someone try this approach with family law litigation, and I’d not be surprised if that occurs.

This is the dodo meeting the knobby end of the club, and I, for one, won’t be sad to see the dodo go. We can and should do better.

Donald Netolitzky

[AnOwlCalledSage]

The system has five steps:

1) initiate a dispute and provide information, which triggers,
2) the responding party having a chance to do the same, then
3) voluntary and binding negotiation between the parties, and if that is unsuccessful,
4) a case manager tries to facilitate a binding agreement, and if again that does not work,
5) a civil resolution tribunal member makes a binding decision.

I think you have just described Judge Judy (albeit without awards being made from a fund maintained by the producers)

[Foggy]

Putting on my biologist hat again, the fact a cumbersome, inefficient, inelegant biological apparatus works does not necessarily mean it’s a good solution in the long term. Working is enough to get you by. What we see today are yesterday's survivors and breeders. The absence of change suggests a stagnant ecosystem where the lack of meaningful competition means a pretty ill-engineered solution continues to dominate the playing field. The proverbial dodo on an isolated Mauritius seemed to work rather well too, until conditions changed. Now, I’m not saying the dodo wasn’t efficient for what it was, it just was ill-designed to respond to environmental changes, and thus became a dead-end.

Oh darn it, I don't have a biologist hat! I'm at a distinct disadvantage here! Where's the fairness?

'Course, I understand and agree with much of what you say, but if our legal system was a proverbial dodo, then I would argue that there have been far more environmental changes in our society in the past 250 years than there ever were on the island of Mauritius before the dodo departed this mortal coil.

I used to have a daydream about having George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others from our distant past come to life for just a week or a month, with me appointed to show them around and explain what had happened to their little republic they left for us. And it hit me that old George would be terrified of our tech. He never traveled any faster than a horse could carry him. The idea that we could drive in 5 hours from Raleigh, NC to our nation's capital would be impossible for him to conceive. In a month, you couldn't really begin to fully explain all the changes that have occurred in this great land of ours. The world today would simply be unrecognizable.

Except for the common law. That would still be recognizable.

OK, now I gotta get a little more coffee and start moving, or I'm never gonna find a biologist's hat today.