In a previous discussion, I addressed the appallingly deficient definitions of "law" as found in the ironically titled "Law Dictionaries". The definitions commonly offered in legal dictionaries are conspicuously inadequate: they tend to identify law by source, enforcement, or institutional recognition while declining to state the conditions under which a coercive rule is valid. A dictionary of law that cannot define Law in that sense leaves its central term unresolved.
In that previous discussion, pursuant to remedying this most inexcusably dolorous circumstance, I endeavored to generate a rigorous, objectively correct, complete, clear, and consistent definition of law, which I proposed be rendered as “Law” to distinguish it from the arbitrarily capricious statutory pablum commonly referred to as “law.” While a noble effort, further consideration on the matter left me unsatisfied and prompted additional cogitation and synthesis.
To that end, I have devised the following two related definitions which I believe fit the bill.
1.0 Canonical Definition of Law
Law is a principled rule of conduct whose sole justifying purpose is the protection, definition, adjudication, restoration, or enforcement of the equal rights of individual human beings.
Rights are either inherent or synthetic. Inherent rights are rights axiomatic in humanity, agency, and equal liberty, including the inviolability of one’s body, property, rightful action, conscience, and voluntary association. They are primary and may not be permanently waived, transferred, alienated, or subordinated by any synthetic right, agreement, majority, or institution. Synthetic rights arise only from valid rights-generating relations and remain valid only insofar as they are consistent with the inherent rights of every individual affected.
A purported rule is void to the extent that it lacks this rights-protective purpose, contradicts it, is unpublished or not reasonably knowable before enforcement, or imposes coercion beyond what is necessary to secure the right at issue. No rule becomes Law merely because an authority has enacted, declared, recognized, or enforced it. The ordinary and preferred form of Law is prohibitive. An affirmative command may stand as Law only where no negative reduction can fully secure the protected right, where a determinate claim-right and correlative duty arise from a valid rights-generating relation, and where the command is strictly necessary, minimally coercive, and consistent with inherent rights.
A human being is not bound merely because an institution has produced a command. Coercion is legitimate only when it protects a definite right, comes from a determinate rights-generating relation where affirmative performance is demanded, is publicly knowable in advance, and reaches no further than necessity requires.
“Human being” means a living individual member of the human species. Only a human being possesses inherent rights.
“Individual” refers to a human being.
“Rightful action” means conduct consistent with inherent rights and valid synthetic rights. It includes defensive force honestly believed by the defender necessary to prevent, terminate, or forestall an actual, attempted, or distinctly imminent rights violation under the circumstances then known or perceived at the time, as provided in this Code. An action does not cease to be rightful merely because it is forceful, harmful to a rights violator, or prohibited by a statute void under this Code.
The assertion of governmental, institutional, official, or statutory authority does not itself create a right to invade an individual’s inherent rights or negate the individual’s right of defense. An individual may defend against an actual, attempted, or distinctly imminent rights violation presented by an officer, agent, official, or other representative to the same extent and under the same conditions as against any other individual. An unlawful arrest, detention, or restraint alone does not justify force likely to cause death absent a distinct and imminent threat to bodily integrity or physical safety as provided in §2.11.
“Crime” means a culpable violation of Law. It includes an intentional, knowing, reckless, or criminally negligent attempt, completion, or deliberate facilitation of a violation of an inherent right or valid synthetic right. No act or omission is a Crime merely because a statute labels it criminal.
“Negligence” means a breach of a determinate duty of care, arising from a valid rights-generating relation or from the foreseeable risk created by one’s voluntary conduct, where the breach causes injury to the inherent or valid synthetic rights of another individual.
“Civil negligence” gives rise to a duty of restoration, restitution, or other remedy necessary to repair the injury caused. It is not, without more, a Crime.
“Criminal negligence” means a gross and culpable disregard of a distinct, substantial, and foreseeable risk of grave injury to the rights of another individual, where the actor knew of the risk or where the risk was so obvious that failure to recognize it itself demonstrates culpable indifference to those rights. Criminal negligence is a Crime.
“Person” means a synthetic juridical entity, including a corporation, company, partnership, association, trust, estate, nonprofit body, municipality, agency, or other entity created, recognized, organized, or maintained by human beings or by institutional act. A person is not a human being.
“Synthetic entity” means any person or other nonhuman legal, commercial, organizational, or institutional construct. A synthetic entity has no inherent rights, conscience, body, life, liberty, or agency of its own. It may act only through human representatives and may possess only those synthetic rights, powers, privileges, immunities, liabilities, duties, and capacities that arise through valid agreement, delegation, ownership, representation, or other valid rights-generating relation.
No statute, charter, registration, judicial declaration, administrative act, or institutional recognition may create inherent rights in a synthetic entity. Every power, privilege, capacity, immunity, and legal protection held by a synthetic entity is synthetic, conditional, limited, and subordinate to the inherent rights of human beings. It may be modified, suspended, or dissolved only by publicly knowable rules and fair procedures consistent with the accrued rights of affected human beings.
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2.0 Detailed Elaboration (Code of Principles)
2.1 Law
“Law” is a rule of conduct whose sole justifying purpose is the protection, definition, adjudication, restoration, or enforcement of the equal rights of individuals.
Rights are either inherent or synthetic.
- “Inherent rights” are rights axiomatic in humanity, agency, and equal liberty, including the inviolability of one’s body, property, rightful action, conscience, and voluntary association.
- “Synthetic rights” are rights derived from a voluntary and rights-respecting agreement, undertaking, transfer, exchange, custodial relation, causal act, wrongful act, restitutionary relation, or other valid rights-generating relation.
A purported rule is void insofar as it lacks this rights-protective purpose, contradicts that purpose, was not publicly promulgated and reasonably knowable before enforcement, or imposes coercion beyond what is necessary to secure the right at issue.
No rule becomes Law merely because an authority has enacted, declared, recognized, or enforced it.
“Valid rights-generating relation” means a relation that gives rise to a determinate claim-right and correlative duty through voluntary and informed agreement, rightful transfer, causation of injury, wrongful taking or withholding, custody voluntarily assumed or justly imposed by causation, possession of another’s property, reliance knowingly induced, restitution, or another relation consistent with inherent rights. No relation is valid if created by force, fraud, material deception, coercion, incapacity, exploitation of dependency, or conditions that deny a valid and reasonable path of exit.
“Authority by representation” arises only where an individual or synthetic entity, by its own words, conduct, position, prior dealings, acquiescence, or knowing failure to correct a material appearance of authority, causes another individual reasonably to believe that a representative is authorized to undertake the particular act at issue, and that individual reasonably relies upon that appearance. Such authority extends no further than the authority reasonably conveyed by the represented party’s own conduct in light of the nature, scope, value, and circumstances of the particular transaction. A representative’s unsupported assertion, concealment, deception, or unauthorized act does not create authority by representation or bind the represented party.
2.2 Priority of Inherent Rights
Inherent rights are primary and may not be permanently waived, transferred, alienated, subordinated, or invaded by any synthetic right, contractual right, institutional rule, majority decision, office, license, or purported consent. An individual may nevertheless become liable to defensive, adjudicative, restorative, or other rights-protective restraint only as provided in this Code, upon commission of a rights violation or upon the existence of a distinct and imminent threat of such a violation.
A synthetic right is valid only insofar as it:
- Arises from a valid rights-generating relation.
- Is voluntarily undertaken or otherwise justly incurred.
- Remains consistent with the inherent rights of every individual affected.
- Does not authorize, require, excuse, diminish, interfere with, or permanently impose the violation of an inherent right.
Nothing in this Code prohibits an individual from granting a specific, informed, voluntary, and limited permission respecting the exercise of that individual’s inherent rights. Such permission may authorize conduct that would otherwise constitute an interference with the grantor’s protected domain, but it does not waive, transfer, alienate, subordinate, or extinguish the underlying inherent right.
A valid permission must be limited as to the recipient, purpose, scope, and duration, or otherwise be reasonably ascertainable in those respects. It is revocable prospectively by the grantor through reasonable notice, except to the extent that revocation would defeat an accrued right, prevent return of another’s property, or breach a valid, limited, and rights-consistent obligation for which the appropriate remedy is restitution, return, or other restoration rather than compelled labor, service, speech, bodily action, or other affirmative performance by the individual whose permission is revoked.
No permission is valid if obtained or maintained by force, fraud, material deception, coercion, incapacity, exploitation of dependency, or conditions that deny a valid and reasonable path of exit. No permission may create dominion over the grantor’s body, agency, conscience, equal liberty, or right of exit.
Any agreement, law, association, rule, or institutional arrangement that purports to authorize the invasion, surrender, permanent alienation, or impairment of an inherent right is void to the extent of that conflict. Where the invalid portion can be separated from the valid remainder without changing the essential agreement, only the offending portion is void. Where it cannot be separated, the whole agreement or rule is void.
No individual forfeits inherent rights merely by accusation, status, opinion, association, poverty, unpopularity, prior wrongdoing, or governmental declaration. Nor does a rights violation render its author rightless.
An individual who is committing a rights violation, attempting such a violation, or who presents a distinct and imminent threat of such a violation becomes liable to necessary defensive restraint as provided in §2.11.
Defensive restraint is protective rather than punitive. It may be imposed only to the extent necessary to prevent, terminate, or forestall the actual, attempted, or distinctly imminent rights violation, and it neither establishes culpability nor authorizes punishment, restitution, continuing incapacity, or other adjudicative consequence absent the procedures, evidence, and burden applicable to that consequence.
Such liability does not constitute the waiver, transfer, alienation, or destruction of inherent rights. It is a temporary or continuing qualification of the restrained individual’s claim against specified interference, limited in subject, scope, duration, and severity to what the rights violation or imminent threat has made necessary.
Every coercive measure imposed upon an individual accused or convicted of a rights violation shall preserve all inherent rights not incompatible with the necessary protection, adjudication, restoration, or enforcement at issue. The measure shall cease or be reduced as soon as its rights-protective justification no longer obtains.
2.3 Equal Protection of Rights
Law shall recognize and protect the equal rights of all individuals. “Equal” here means formal equality: the same set of inherent rights belongs to every individual. No individual, group, office, institution, class, majority, or government possesses authority to diminish another individual’s inherent rights merely by superior number, force, wealth, status, custom, alleged public benefit, or enactment.
The need of one individual, the utility of a proposed result, the preference of a majority, or the claimed benefit to society does not alone create a claim-right against another individual. A claim-right sufficient to compel conduct must arise from a definite rights-generating relation between the claimant and the individual upon whom the duty is imposed.
2.4 Negative Reduction
Negative reduction is the replacement of an affirmative rule of conduct with a prohibitive rule that protects the same right, against the same class of violation, to the same extent, and without diminishing the scope, force, remedy, or enforceability of that protection.
A negative reduction exists only where the right can be fully secured by prohibiting invasion, interference, appropriation, impairment, fraud, coercion, breach, wrongful withholding, or another corresponding form of violation.
A negative reduction does not exist merely because an affirmative command may be grammatically expressed as a prohibition. A rule requiring an individual to furnish labor, services, resources, speech, rescue, care, property, or another affirmative performance remains affirmative even if restated as “do not fail,” “do not omit,” or similar language.
Where a negative reduction exists, only the prohibitive form may stand as Law. The affirmative form is void because it imposes coercion beyond that necessary to secure the protected right.
2.5 Affirmative Law
An affirmative rule of conduct may stand as Law only where no negative reduction can fully secure the protected right.
An affirmative rule is valid only if all of the following conditions are met:
- The individual protected holds a definite claim-right to the required performance.
- The individual commanded bears a determinate correlative duty to the protected individual.
- The duty arises from a valid rights-generating relation, including voluntary undertaking, contract, causation of harm, wrongful withholding, custody, guardianship, possession of another’s property, restitution, or another comparable relation.
- The required performance is necessary to protect, restore, enforce, or adjudicate the particular right.
- The obligation is limited to the least coercive extent sufficient to achieve that purpose.
- The rule does not trespass upon an inherent right of the individual commanded or of any other individual.
No affirmative duty may be imposed merely because another individual would benefit, is in need, or could be assisted; because a service would be socially useful; or because a legislature, majority, institution, or authority desires its provision.
2.6 Primary and Remedial Duties
A primary duty governs conduct before a violation occurs. Its ordinary and preferred form is prohibitive. Examples include prohibitions upon assault, homicide, theft, trespass, fraud, coercion, destruction of property, and interference with voluntary agreement.
A remedial duty arises after a rights violation, or after a valid rights-generating event. It may require affirmative performance where necessary to restore, secure, or adjudicate the injured right.
Remedial duties may include:
- Restoring property wrongfully taken or withheld.
- Paying restitution for injury, destruction, fraud, or loss caused.
- Performing an obligation voluntarily and validly assumed.
- Returning property held on another’s behalf.
- Providing necessary care or protection where an individual has assumed custody, created the dependency, or stands in a rightful guardianship relation.
- Providing information, accounting, testimony, or access necessary to resolve a definite rights claim, subject to inherent rights of conscience, privacy, and self-possession.
An individual who holds or possesses property of another individual under a loan, custody, agency, lease, bailment, or other limited right of possession bears a duty to return the property when that right expires or is lawfully terminated. The owner may recover the property by peaceful means that do not violate the inherent rights of another individual; force may be used only as permitted by §2.11. A material good-faith dispute over ownership or the right to possession shall be resolved through fair adjudication and does not alone authorize forcible self-help.
Where an individual voluntarily sells, exchanges, or transfers an identified item of property for agreed consideration, and the parties intend that acceptance of the consideration completes the transfer, the recipient acquires the corresponding property right in the identified item upon that acceptance, unless the parties have clearly and rights-consistently agreed that transfer is conditional upon a stated event. The transferor shall preserve, account for, and deliver the item, and shall not sell, encumber, destroy, conceal, or wrongfully withhold it. Withdrawal from the agreement does not defeat the recipient’s accrued property right or excuse return, transfer, restoration, or restitution necessary to secure it.
An affirmative remedial duty is not justified by a generalized entitlement to another individual’s labor or property. It is justified only by the definite relation from which the duty arose.
Where more than one individual or synthetic entity stands in a valid rights-generating relation to an injury, the injured individual is entitled to prompt restoration from an individual or entity whose causation, custody, possession, undertaking, representation, or other established relation makes that restoration presently due. Restoration by one such obligor does not determine ultimate responsibility and gives that obligor a corresponding claim of restitution, indemnity, contribution, or reimbursement against any individual or synthetic entity whose defect, wrongful conduct, breach, undertaking, or other valid rights-generating relation caused or contributed to the injury. No dispute concerning ultimate allocation shall delay restoration necessary to repair the injured individual’s right, except where causation or the duty of restoration is genuinely unresolved.
2.7 Reserved Right of Exit
Every individual retains the inherent right to withdraw from any voluntary agreement, association, institution, employment, membership, undertaking, or continuing relation through a valid and reasonable path of exit.
A path of exit is valid and reasonable only if it:
- Preserves the individual’s inherent rights.
- Does not require involuntary servitude, permanent submission, or the surrender of bodily autonomy, conscience, rightfully acquired property, or rightful action.
- Does not impose conditions that are impossible, deceptive, coercive, punitive, or retaliatory, or that exceed what is necessary to protect another individual’s accrued rights.
- Allows sufficient notice, transition, accounting, return of property, or settlement only insofar as those measures are necessary to protect identifiable rights already held by others.
- Does not operate in form or effect as a disguised denial of withdrawal.
Exit terminates obligations that are prospective and dependent upon continued voluntary participation.
Exit does not extinguish obligations already accrued before withdrawal, including:
- Restitution for harm caused.
- Return of another individual’s property.
- Debt, restitution, return, transfer, accounting, preservation, or other obligation concerning identified property or an accrued monetary obligation that became due before effective withdrawal under a valid agreement.
- Liability for completed breach, fraud, injury, or wrongful withholding.
- Reasonable settlement of reliance interests actually created by the withdrawing party.
- Narrowly necessary transition obligations required to prevent a distinct and imminent violation of another individual’s rights. A transition obligation may require only notice, transfer of custody or property, reasonable cooperation in securing a substitute, or another limited measure strictly necessary to prevent a distinct and imminent violation of an identifiable individual’s inherent rights. It may not require continued labor, service, residence, association, or submission beyond that necessity.
No obligation may be enforced through compelled future labor, service, speech, bodily action, continued association, or other affirmative personal performance dependent upon continued voluntary participation.
No agreement may make a continuing obligation perpetual, inescapable, or enforceable through the destruction, surrender, or violation of an individual’s inherent rights.
2.8 Law and Statute
Statute means an enactment, charter, ordinance, regulation, rule, directive, or other command issued by an institution, legislature, court, agency, or other authority. A statute is not Law merely by virtue of enactment or enforcement.
No statute may restrict, compel, burden, license, penalize, or otherwise govern the rightful conduct of a human being unless and only to the extent that the statute states, implements, or provides a fair procedure for a valid rule of Law under this Code.
A statute that purports to impose an obligation upon a human being without a definite rights-protective purpose, a valid rights-generating relation, and the necessity required by this Code is void as against that human being.
Maxim of Applicability
Human beings are subject only to Law; synthetic entities are subject to statute. A statute binds a human being only insofar as it faithfully implements a valid Law and affords fair, publicly and readily knowable means of adjudication. No statute governing a synthetic entity may impose liability, duty, restraint, penalty, or deprivation upon a human being except insofar as that human being has independently incurred a valid duty or responsibility under this Code through agreement, representation, causation, custody, wrongful conduct, possession, or another valid rights-generating relation.
2.9 Publicity, Notice, and Non-Latency
A rule is publicly promulgated only when its authoritative text, effective date, scope, jurisdiction, enforceable consequences, and reasonably material official interpretations are made available without charge or unreasonable burden through durable public means reasonably calculated to provide actual access to those subject to it.
A rule is latent, and therefore void as applied to a human being, when its existence, operative meaning, scope, penalty, interpretation, or applicability could not reasonably have been known by that human being before the conduct in question. Latency includes unpublished rules, inaccessible enactments, concealed interpretations, retroactive constructions, internally maintained enforcement policies, unpublished precedent treated as binding, contradictory official statements, and requirements discoverable only through specialized research, private databases, or professional legal assistance unavailable as a practical matter to ordinary human beings.
Ignorance of a rule is a complete defense where the rule was latent, inaccessible, materially unclear, unforeseeably interpreted, or otherwise not reasonably knowable before the alleged violation. The burden lies upon the party asserting enforcement to prove timely publication, ordinary accessibility, intelligible notice, and non-retroactive applicability.
No human being may be deprived of life, liberty, property, association, movement, livelihood, or other inherent right by reason of a latent rule. In any case of genuine and material ambiguity, uncertainty shall be resolved in favor of liberty and against coercion.
A statute applying to a synthetic entity must likewise be public, accessible, definite, and prospective. Its breach may justify only consequences stated or reasonably ascertainable in advance, subject always to the inherent rights of affected human beings.
A human being may not be held to a coercive rule unless the enforcing party can demonstrate that the rule was public, accessible, intelligible, prospective, and reasonably knowable before the conduct occurred.
2.10 Interpretation
In construing any purported Law, agreement, obligation, remedy, or institutional rule, the following presumptions shall govern:
- Rights are equal in principle among individuals (formal equality of inherent rights).
- Inherent rights take priority over synthetic rights.
- Prohibitive rules are preferred where they afford equal protection of the right.
- Coercion must be necessary, particularized, and limited to the protection of a definite right.
- A duty must be traceable to a determinate rights-generating relation.
- Doubt shall be resolved against unnecessary compulsion and against interpretations that enlarge authority beyond what is required to protect rights.
- No individual may be used merely as a means to provide benefits to another absent a valid duty arising from a determinate rights-generating relation.
- No coercive rule shall be inferred, implied, expanded by analogy, or enforced through an unpublished, latent, retroactive, or unforeseeable interpretation. Where a rule admits more than one materially plausible construction, the construction least restrictive of inherent rights shall control.
2.11 Defensive Interpretation and Defensive Liability
Every individual may defend himself, herself, or another individual against an actual, attempted, or distinctly imminent rights violation by force that the defender honestly and reasonably believes necessary to prevent, terminate, or forestall that violation under the circumstances then known or reasonably perceived at the time.
For purposes of defensive force, the existence of an actual, attempted, or distinctly imminent rights violation depends upon the threat presented to the defender or protected individual under the circumstances then known or reasonably perceived, and not upon the source’s intent, knowledge, culpability, voluntariness, motive, or the ultimate cause of the threat.
Where an individual presents a distinct and imminent threat of a rights violation against another’s bodily integrity or physical safety, the defender may use force likely to cause death when the defender honestly and reasonably believes such force necessary to prevent or terminate the violation under the circumstances then known or reasonably perceived at the time.
A grave rights violation includes actual or threatened killing, rape, kidnapping, torture, maiming, armed attack, or arson or destruction of an occupied home, workplace, or other place where individuals are present or exposed to a distinct and imminent threat to bodily integrity or physical safety; catastrophic destruction or taking of property where it presents such a threat; or another act reasonably understood by the defender to inflict comparable devastation or irreparable physical injury.
The legality of defensive force shall be judged from the perspective of the defender at the time of action, upon the facts then known or reasonably perceived, and not by hindsight. Fear, shock, confusion, urgency, and the practical impossibility of exact calculation in a violent or rapidly unfolding event shall be given substantial weight.
Defensive force is not justified after the defensive necessity has clearly ended. An individual who knowingly fabricates a threat, deliberately creates a false appearance of necessity, or employs purported defense as a pretext to commit an independent rights violation is liable for that violation.
Defensive force justified under this Section constitutes rightful action.
No office, badge, institutional affiliation, command, asserted authority, or relationship to another individual creates a presumption that a use of force is rightful or necessary. An individual who uses force in defense of another is subject to the same substantive conditions and limitations applicable to every other defender under this Section. Knowledge of, deliberate participation in, or culpable indifference to another individual’s rights violation defeats any claim that force used to advance, conceal, continue, or protect that violation was defensive.
2.12 No Duty of Omniscience
Maxim of Omniscience
No human being is bound by secret Law, latent statute, or unforeseeable construction; and none bears an affirmative duty of legal omniscience.
2.13 Governing Principle
Law exists solely to secure equal individual rights. Its ordinary form is prohibition of rights-violating conduct. An affirmative command is valid only where prohibition cannot equally protect the right, where a determinate duty is owed by the compelled individual to the protected individual, and where the command is strictly necessary, minimally coercive, consistent with inherent rights, and limited to the protection, restoration, or adjudication of that right.
Human beings possess inherent rights, from which rightful action follows. Statute may not convert rightful action into a rights violation merely by declaration, and necessary defensive force may be rightful even where it is violent or lethal.
