Glossary

atheist
n. a person who does not believe in the existence of a deity, esp. a conscious, almighty creator god, i.e. God (the Father), Allah, Brahma, etc. who rules the cosmos. Sometimes expressed as an outright denial of the god's existence or even the possibility thereof. Atheism is often conflated with the denial of all non-secular worldviews.

common law
n. the court-made body of law first developed in England and which is the basis of U.S. federal law in all states except Louisiana, and in most of Canada except Quebec; also called case law.¹ The common law is derived over time through judicial decisions rather than through legislation as is statute law. The common law system is older than the U.S. Constitution, and it's often claimed that the common law is based on precedent, stare decicis, and general principles. Stare decicis is supposed to assure consistency in how the law is applied whenever and wherever a case is brought to court, but it could not have become an established principle without first using human reason, a precedent in its own right. There also exists a long-standing practice of reversing previous decisions in order to correct deviations from the older and more important principle of reason.

In fact, the early-17th century lawyer and statesman Lord Edward Coke of England made it a maxim that judges must use reason to "iron out the kinks"² in their cases. This general principle remains nominally true today, yet it's still asserted in legal dictionaries, law schools, and throughout the legal "profession" that stare decicis, not logic, mathematics, ethics, etc., is a basis for the common law. Multiple nations could, in principle, share a single common law so founded while retaining local sovereignty with respect to the passage of statute law, enforcement, and selection of the judiciary.

corporate personhood
n. the common law doctrine in the United States, Canada and other nations that the artificial legal entity known as the corporation is a real person and so possesses real civil rights. It can be traced at least as far back as the U.S. Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R. Co., 118 U.S. 394 (1886), and is a straightforward violation of the Law of Identity. Civil rights since seized by corporations include free speech, the right to petition government for redress of grievances, freedom from random searches, the right to a trial by jury without risk of double jeopardy, and so on. This practice is being aggressively exported to the rest of the world under the rubric of free trade and the "rule of law." More

corporation
n. an invisible, intangible, and artificial creation of the state that exists as a voluntary chartered association of individuals (shareholders) who themselves enjoy limited liability for the deeds and debts of the corporation. These collectives presently enjoy most of the rights of natural persons but have perpetual existence and the ability to be in many places simultaneously, among other non-human features.³ The most popular types in the United States are the C corp, S corp, and LLC; elsewhere they operate with designations such as Ltd. and GmbH (Society with limited Liability) in the U.K. and Germany, respectively. Since the late 19th century, courts in the United States, Canada and elsewhere have claimed that corporations are entitled to many of the civil rights which inhere in living people. Limited liability was bestowed via statute law and is a form of state-subsidized insurance that ownership would otherwise have to purchase.

fascism
n. a system of government usually characterized by rigid one or two-party control, suppression of the opposition, rigged elections, private economic enterprise under centralized governmental control, government favors for corporations and their owners, fervent nationalism, avid militarism, imperialism, poorly-checked police powers, an obsession with crime and punishment, anti-intellectualism, a controlled mass-media, bread and circuses for the masses, rampant cronyism and corruption, close ties among religious and secular elites, etc. Also, a political or social movement which seeks such domination. So-called Communist China is the modern prototype among the world's large nations.

plutocracy
n. government by and for the wealthy and the greedy. Systems exhibiting this feature are neither a democracy nor a republic. Likewise, they lack the conditions necessary for free trade.

private property
n. the common law tradition of respecting a living person's desire to possess real and personal property, i.e. real estate (land and the things moving on it or still attached to it such as crops, buildings, resources, etc.) and things readily moved (cars, computers, etc.), in order to sustain life and earn a modest living. There is no proof that private property is more than a necessary social evil.

right reason
n. the doctrine that decency, justice and—most importantly—thinking which is coherent, shall prevail in all judical decisions without regard to precedent. It is superior to stare decicis. Well-understood fallacies of reasoning include arguments from tradition, questionable authority, arguing in a circle, attacking a straw man, poisoning the well, and so on. As is true of mathematics, logic and science, right reason is neither proprietary nor subject to definition by government, i.e. the judiciary, a legislature, the executive branch, militaries, government-created entities (like the Port Authority (PATH) of New York and New Jersey), and so forth. Few, if any, lawyers, law school professors or judges adhere to right reason, a phenomena manifested in verbose, obscurantist court opinions and bizarre practices.

republic
n. a state or nation in which supreme power originates in all the citizens (the electorate) and is exercised by representatives elected, directly or indirectly, by them and responsible to them. In this type of democracy, powers are delegated but never surrendered by the citizen and may be recalled whenever misused or abused. Furthermore, according to the principle of delegata potestas non potest delegari, powers once delegated to and vesting in one agency (e.g. Congress) may not be further delegated. The U.S. Supreme Court has ignored this republican principle since the days of Velvel v. Nixon, 396 U.S. 1042 (1970), and Massachusettes v. Laird, 400 U.S. 886 (1970) when the citizen was denied the right to test Presidential war-making without a Congressional declaration. Mohandas Ghandi described the ideal form of republic as swaraj: When there is no gulf between the ruler and the ruled. In other words, people behave themselves thus making big government superfluous.

stare decicis (star-ay de-SEE-sis)
n. Latin for "to stand by things that have been settled"; the doctrine in common law systems under which courts adhere to precedent on questions of law in order, it has been argued, to insure certainty, consistency, and stability in the administration of justice. Like cases are to be decided in like ways, with departure from precedent permitted for compelling reasons (as to prevent the perpetuation of injustice)⁴. Short-term certainty and stability are all well and good objectives, but they hardly justify a perpetuation of irrational jurisprudence such as violating the Law of Identity. Stare decicis itself is a hybrid of the fallacious argument from history and the is-ought fallacy.

With vertical stare decisis, a decision by a superior court will bind a lower one, while horizontal stare decisis compels a court to hew to previous decisions at that court's own level. Decisions from outside a given jurisdiction are considered instructive but non-binding.

Stare decisis originated centuries before logic, mathematics and the physical sciences experienced their renaissance in the 16th and 17th centuries. It's analogous to Scholasticism, a medieval system of thinking based on Aristotelian logic, writings of early Church fathers, and the authority of tradition and theological dogma—in which case the academic study of law is in roughly the same position as physics before Gallileo (1564-1642). See also right reason and a History of Precedent.

tyranny
n. possession or exericse of power that cannot be held rightly by any individual or institution. God, the Father, if He existed, would be one such anti-republican individual.

usurpation
n. seizing and holding of power that is rightly held by one or many others.

The law is too important to be left to lawyers.

1. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law, (Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, Inc., © 1996), p. 88, 543.
2. Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life - 1500 to the Present, (New York : HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2000), p. 266.
3. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law
4. Ibid.