He's also mentioned as some kind of legend

Mercer Boffey...has been fighting a two-year legal battle against paying property tax, called council tax in the UK.

He said it was 'the absolute right of every Englishman', or American living lawfully in the country, not to have to pay council tax.

He claimed a citizen should have 'free use, enjoyment and disposal of all his acquisitions, without any control or diminution, save only by the laws of the land'.

So he wants his trash collected and disposed of for free. He wants police for free, road maintained for free.

He lost the case.

A recent Australian trial court decision caught my eye despite the comparatively minor pseudolaw component to the litigation. The decision is a lengthy defamation claim analysis where a lawyer was criticized by her ex-clients for various alleged bad conduct. The end award was substantial, $160,000 in total.

The primary defamation dispute isn’t terribly interesting to me, but if you want a demonstration of why you might not want to be a lawyer? That aspect makes interesting reading. Clients can be “a challenge”. But since I’m retired and out of the trade (HA!) that’s not so interesting to me. Anyways, to the pseudolaw hook.

The lawyer/client and defamation disputes appear to have started out “normal”, but part way through the defamation lawsuit some of the defendants incorporated a pseudolaw aspect. It appears a Strawman Theory defence was deployed:

... The absence of any factual or legal foundation for their claims provides an explanation for the second defendants seeking refuge in various pseudo law concepts (exemplified by their references to themselves as 'executors and beneficiaries') of the nature frequently invoked by those described as 'sovereign citizens'. Unsurprisingly, these included the proposition that they were not subject to the jurisdiction of the court.

... On 10 January 2024 the second defendants filed a document headed 'Notice of Divine Special Appearance' the contents of which were an incoherent collection of pseudo law assertions including an assertion the court did not have jurisdiction over the second defendants. ...

The lawyer was allegedly suing their StrawPeople estates, rather than the flesh and blood human beings. The “Special Appearance” language is imported from the US, where that identifies a person appearing before a court to say the court has no jurisdiction. “Divine”? Well, your guess is as good as mine, because normally trusts/estates aren’t something handed down from God, Cthulhu, whatever.

Here's the part I find especially interesting. During calculation of damages, the penalty was increased for using pseudolaw in the defamation lawsuit itself because pseudolaw is implicitly inherently abusive, so anyone who deploys these ideas does so to inflict harm and impede legitimate litigation:

... the second defendants' conduct has significantly aggravated the injury to the plaintiff. In publishing the 31 July 2023 email the second defendants acted unreasonably and with an absence of good faith and in relation to these matters I refer to the observations made earlier in these reasons. The second defendants have maintained their accusations of criminal conduct against the plaintiff and have maintained that her legal advice and assistance has caused them and the third defendant significant losses when there is no foundation in fact for those accusations. I infer from the fact that the pseudo law concepts espoused by the second defendants during these proceedings did not appear to form any part of their thinking when they were instructing the plaintiff to pursue the third defendant's claim for damages, that they invoked them as part of a strategy to make it more difficult for the plaintiff to pursue her claim against them. I find the second defendants' conduct aggravated the injury suffered by the plaintiff.

A useful principle. I think it’d be fair for anyone who is in litigation, and the other side engages pseudolaw, to point to this case for an explanation of why pseudolaw being deployed should be a basis for increased damages. It’s bad faith conduct intended to disrupt the court and defeat legitimate claims.

That’s actually pretty uncommon in case law so far, as usually courts just toss pseudolaw arguments and maybe increase costs on that basis. Additional damages? That’s perhaps something new.

The full case is here:

Michelmore v Brown [No 3], [2025] WASC 9 - http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/wa/WASC/2025/9.html

So, Trump issued an Executive Order to try to undermine the 14th Amendment's grant of citizenship to all persons born in the United States by claiming that they're not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. How the hell does that work? Because when you're physically in the United States, you're SUPPOSED to be subject to its jurisdiction with a couple of very notable exceptions: namely, diplomats and heads of state.

But yeah, how long do you think it'll take for the people who deny the fact that they're US citizens to claim that they're not subject to the US' jurisdiction and thus, are not US citizens? I mean, it's a stupid argument, but SovCits use stupid arguments all the time.

In my old days working as photographer we used to ask models to signs waiver for commercial work.

If someone shoot a video of me, specifically of me (not me in the background) isn’t a violation of my privacy if they publish it on youtube to make money?

Free Land Holders file rambling response to lawsuit seeking to bar group from seizing public lands in ColoradoFree Land Holder Committee files response to feds' public land lawsuit

Pipkin opens the legal brief, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver on Tuesday, by describing himself as “the spiritually discerned man using the graciously-gifted name :patrick:-Leroy:Pipkin.”

On behalf of the Free Land Holders, Pipkin claims rights not only to the publicly owned land, but all surface water, irrigation ditches, cattle grazing areas, fences and roads within the San Juan National Forest just outside the town of Mancos, northwest of Durango.

“This claim is perfected under the maxims, doctrines and principles of Exclusive Equity, whereby all the free land holders are entitled to assert these rights according to the laws of justice, as governed by the Creator’s Usufruct Law and the Exclusively equitable maxims, doctrines of the well-settled land law,” the document reads in neat, handwritten script.

The judge tries to call him a "Sovereign Citizen" but he declines so he quotes Lewis Carroll's "Jaberwocky" to basically call out his BS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YdaOz76S6M