Freemen on the land

"Freemen-on-the-land" are a loose group of individuals who believe in a conspiracy theory that they are bound by statute laws only if they consent to those laws. They believe that they can therefore declare themselves independent of the government and the rule of law, holding that the only "true" law is their own interpretation of "common law". Freemen are active in English-speaking countries: the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.

In the Canadian court case Meads v. Meads, Alberta Court of Queen's Bench Associate Chief Justice John D. Rooke used the phrase "Organised Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments" (OPCA) to describe the techniques and arguments used by freemen in court describing them as frivolous and vexatious. There is no recorded instance of freeman tactics being upheld in a court of law; in refuting one by one each of the arguments used by Meads, Rooke concluded that "a decade of reported cases, many of which he refers to in his ruling, have failed to prove a single concept advanced by OPCA litigants."

Freemen-on-the-land are also called "Freemen-of-the-land" and the "Freemen movement". They may be an offshoot of the sovereign citizen movement. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) classifies sovereign citizen extremists as domestic terrorists, and states that these groups may refer to themselves as "freemen".

"Freemen" believe that statute law is a contract, and that individuals can therefore opt out of statute law, choosing instead to live under what they call "common" (case) and "natural" laws. Under their theory, natural laws require only that individuals do not harm others, do not damage the property of others, and do not use "fraud or mischief" in contracts. They say that all people have two parts to their existence – their body and their legal "person". The latter is represented by the individual's birth certificate; some freemen claim that it is entirely limited to the birth certificate. Under this theory, a "strawman" is created when a birth certificate is issued, and this "strawman" is the entity who is subject to statutory law. The physical self is referred to by a slightly different name – for example "John of the family Smith", as opposed to "John Smith".

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Wikipedia