'Freemen,' 'Sovereign Citizens,' 'Moorish Law' & Other Movements (& The Crackpots Who Peddle Them To The Desperate Looking To Dodge Debts, Taxes, Criminal Charges)

Legal blogger Adam Wagner writes in the UK Human Rights Blog:

• Almost a year ago, I and some other legal bloggers wrote about a phenomenon known as the Freemen on the Land movement. I called the post Freemen of the dangerous nonsense, for that is exactly what the movement is, for those desperate enough to sign up to it.
  
  Now a Canadian judge has done many judges around the world a huge favour by exploding the movement’s ideas and leaders (or “gurus”) in a carefully referenced and forensic 192-page judgment, which should be read by anyone who has ever taken a passing interest in this issue, and certainly by any judge faced by a litigant attempting the arguments in court.
  
  The Freemen, alongside other groups with similar creeds, believe that if you change your name and deny the jurisdiction of the courts, you will be able to escape debt collectors, council tax and even criminal charges. As this member of the Occupy London movement, “commonly known as dom” wrote in guardian.co.uk (of all places) “if you don’t consent to be that “person”, you step outside the system“.
  
  As you may have guessed, this magical technique never works in the courts, but judges are often flummoxed when faced with the arguments, which are odd and in many ways risible. But what has been lacking is an authoritative, systematic judgment explaining, in detail, why that is. Until now, that is.
  
  Associate Chief Justice J.D. Rooke in the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta, Canada has published a ruling which deals exhaustively with the movements’ (there are a number of similar ones of varying craziness and scariness) history and arguments.
  
  He groups the various movements including the Freemen under the title “Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument litigants” (OPCA).
  
  Clearly, this is Judge who has had enough. After “[o]ver a decade of reported cases” which “have proven that the individual concepts advanced by OPCA litigants are invalid”,
  
  "What remains is to categorize these schemes and concepts, identify global defects to simplify future response to variations of identified and invalid OPCA themes, and develop court procedures and sanctions for persons who adopt and advance these vexatious litigation strategies."
  
  His aim? To “uncover, expose, collate, and publish the tactics employed by the OPCA community, as a part of a process to eradicate the growing abuse that these litigants direct towards the justice and legal system we otherwise enjoy in Alberta and across Canada“. Good for him. Somebody needed to do it.

***

• What the judgment says
  
  This is a long judgment, on the scale of a reasonably sized book. I will try my best to point out a few interesting bits but I would recommend that you read it. It is well set out and easy to follow. My numbered references are to paragraphs.
  
  Justice Rooke begins with a fascinating summary of the (surprisingly recent, only beginning in the last 20 years or so) history of movements such as the Freemen [172], Detaxers [169], Sovereign Men/Citizens [176], the Church of the Ecumenical Redemption International [183], and Moorish Law [189].
  
  One thing which is crucial to understand is that despite its anarchical tone, the movement has leaders or “gurus” who peddle its ideas to people. This is (you might have guessed) usually for a fee. The gurus focus on people who are at crunch points in their lives, such as those facing bankruptcy, foreclosure on their home or difficult litigation involving access to their children.

For more (including a very useful set of questions for the targets of these scams to ask of those gurus peddling the ideas to them), see Freemen on the Land are “parasites” peddling “pseudolegal nonsense”: Canadian judge fights back.

For the ruling, see Meads v. Meads, 2012 ABQB 571 (includes links to case law cited therein; go here for .pdf version - sans links to cited cases).