The case of the Calgary Freeman on the land Andreas Pirelli, who declared his rented property a sovereign embassy, is both hilarious and sad. Funny in that it involves a comically delusional dickhead whose bizarre understanding of contract law and massively misinformed personal philosophy led him to violate his lease with the owner of the property on the grounds that he had claimed the duplex as his sovereign territory. He later attempted to bill the landlady for the “improvements” he had made to the house, by means of an invoice issued by his phony corporation.
Fortunately, the real law doesn’t recognize ridiculous crackpot legal theories as a defense and the man was evicted. It transpires, this particular jack ass has a history of this kind of behaviour, including an assault charge against him for an incident involving a former landlady in Montreal.
For those who don’t know about the spectacular lies of the Freeman-on-the-land movement, I invite you to visit Wikipedia to learn more about their conspiratorial beliefs. Basically, If I can oversimplify their childish theories, these folks try to shirk their legal obligations by claiming that there is a distinction between natural persons and their legal persons. While the latter is subject to all the laws you and I are because of their birth certificate ( wtf?!?) the former is not, because he (they’re almost invariably angry white males) has the status of a sovereign person or Freemen-on-the-land and doesn’t enter into contracts with the state or abide by its laws.
This has been used to justify all kinds of crazy stunts, such as driving without a license, stiffing your ex-wife on child support and, most alarmingly, keeping illegal firearms. Is it any wonder that the FBI consider them to be a terrorist organization?
Sad in that it represents a growing phenomenon of what one judge in Alberta charitably dubbed Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument Litigants (OPCAs) in the case of what law nerds now regard as the legal equivalent of a cult classic of Canadian Jurisprudence. Meads vs. Meads was a more or less typical case of divorce, with an unusual twist: one of the litigants Mr. Meads was a so called Freeman-on-the-land (like our weirdo in Calgary) and refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the court (or, for that matter, Canada) over him.
In his wonderful opinion, the judge tried in vain to comprehend the logic of Mr. Meads. He also shed light on a major source of headaches and frivolous lawsuits for courts especially in Common Law countries. These idiots try to bring down the state, at great cost to the taxpayer and themselves, with a wide variety of invalid legal tactics and claims.
The one thing that all of these half-baked legal schemes seem to have in common is that they are promoted by self-styled legal gurus who sell their pseudo-legal crap online and at conferences. Meanwhile, the unsuspecting fools that lap up their nonsense make life miserable for legal professionals by contesting every aspect of the legal system.
It should be said that the arguments made by Freeman-on-the-land closely resemble those of their now mainstream and equally obnoxious political brethren the American Tea Party. In fact, the judge in Meads vs. Meads observed that “the memberships focus is strongly anti-government and has libertarian and right wing overtones. Christian rhetoric is common”.
Doesn’t it sound like he’s describing the current GOP and its leading dim bulbs in a nutshell? It’s downright scary to think that many of them support politicians like Republican congressmen and presidential hopeful (thank God he repudiated his Canadian citizenship) Ted Cruz in his quixotic quest to defund and destroy Obamacare. These people, whether tea baggers or Freeman on the landers, hate government and will do everything in their power to see it fail.
