For centuries the rich and powerful have conspired to deny us our inalienable rights. But as people are realizing the extent of the betrayal by those we put our trust in, we are looking for better ways to govern ourselves.
Common Law is the bedrock we can build a better future on.
This video explains what common law is, and how we can start living our lives as truly free individuals bound together by common sense laws that protect us. The full text is provided below as an aid for anyone wishing to learn about Common Law:
Video Transcript
Hello, my name is William Keat and I’m one of the main people behind the campaign commonlawconstitution.org in alliance with the Hardwick Alliance for Real Ecology. I was a teacher, originally. And I’m now responsible for that campaign which is exposing information about our common law constitution as a solution to the issues that we have today.
So, the first point to make is that this is an area constitutional law that has largely been missed by the freedom movement generally and certainly by the masses to its detriment, I would say. But I think that’s changing now. And the common law underpinnings of our constitution. Is what is at the heart of our solution.
It’s often been overlooked, and I would say even that there have been probably some deliberate distractions along the way, in that whenever people claim they’re going to talk about common law they actually do the opposite, and start talking about other forms of law that our dear friends behind the system have put in place.
But actually, if we frame it in constitutional law which is what we’re pushing. We have some solutions in place, no question, and some very hidden information that we’re trying to expose. I would say to people to keep in mind that this is about constitutional law and the common law underpinnings and that’s what this is all about.
Okay, so the first thing that we have to think about is that the original rule of law, the genuine rule of law that our constitution gives us in our British law tradition is one in which the people are equal before the law. And that means it’s an equitable system of law. Now, ultimately, what does that mean?
It actually means that the people themselves can define the laws of their community. If the people actually take part in the act of defining the laws of their community, then you have equity. You have everybody being equal before the law. And our original rule of law, our genuine rule of law, is based on that principle.
Now there is a very hidden concealed mechanism that few people are aware of, rather more now. Since we started this campaign and that mechanism is the true genuine trial by jury system. That’s not the trial by jury system that we have today. It’s one where the jury have much greater control and it has two purposes, not just one.
So, we all know the first purpose is to judge the accused man before court, but the second hidden purpose, very concealed. Is the idea that the jury themselves are also able to judge on the justice of the piece of legislation that brought that man into court in the first place. So, if you think about what that is, that’s actually the people judging on the appropriateness of that piece of government legislation.
Now that’s raw power. And that’s how our constitution is supposed to operate. Rather different from the distorted rule of law, which I’ll come on to in a moment as to how it operates today. The other thing to think about is that the way that trial by jury works is that the people are simply judging on the justice of how that piece of legislation is applied to the current man before court, and that, and no crime can be committed unless, of course, there is some kind of injured party, somebody who’s been damaged.
If you think about the legislation that we have in place today. The rules and regulations. Many of them, of course, do not have, when you breach them, there is no injured party at all. And under the principles of common law, you can only have a crime and therefore you can only be punished not only by your peers, by your social equals, but you can only have that if there is some specific injured party, somebody who’s been damaged in some way.
The law is supposed to work on principle. Now that being the case, it means that, from a legislative point of view, there would hardly be any legislation at all, because everything is about moral principle. It’s about the principles, the moral principles on, in, in the way that we conduct ourselves in life.
And that’s why you have to be judged by your social equals. And that’s very much the the rule of law is based on that principle. Now what that does, if you think about it, is that it takes away the power to punish from government. Because if everybody is afforded a trial by their peers, trial by jury, that means a trial by their social equals, by the people around them in their community.
What that actually means is that the punishing is only being done by our fellow man. It’s not being done by a perceived authority. So that removes punishment from government and gives it only to the people around us. Now that effectively is a natural law tribunal. That’s what you’re ending up with. The other thing that you’re ending up with is a complete free space or a free landscape in which we have the freedom to operate as we like.
Because what you’re really defining in natural law is what you cannot do, what is unacceptable. And that’s what the jury are doing. When they’re making judgment is that they are looking carefully, if you like, at the justice of the situation and seeing is there Mens Rea in Latin, which means is there malice, is there malicious intent on the part of the defendant?
And if there isn’t, you can’t pass a guilty verdict. So people, especially by today’s standards, would largely be not guilty in most cases. Because A, there is no there’s no injured party. But secondly, it would be difficult to find that malice in most cases. So that is the principle of a, of your common law trial by jury system.
Very different from what we have today. And essentially what it means is the government is all about being parked to the side. And being reduced in their powers. They are there only to serve administratively the people. The other important thing to say, of course, is that the judge, that what we perceive as the judge today is not a judge at all, but merely what we probably, we could call a convener, somebody who brings the proceedings together and makes them operate.
But the judges, the real judges are actually the people on the jury, the jurors, they are the judges. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any point in having a jury at all. And the last point, of course, to make is that the, there are actually four aspects to the case that the jury should be judging on, not just one.
So, we’re told today that the jury only gets to decide the facts of the case. That’s not the case. They’re meant to be there to judge the facts, the law itself, as I’ve mentioned, the appropriateness of the legislation possibly even the admissibility of evidence. And even the punishment. So, you can see that the jury has the most massive power and control.
And that’s essentially how it should be. That’s the genuine rule of law. And the last thing to say is that the head of state in that context, in the genuine rule of law, so that’s our monarch in Britain are there as the most senior public servant of the land. They are to be considered the first among equals, not the way that they are characterized usually today.
And their role is to make sure that all of that is in place and they take a promise in perpetuity to keep that rule of law in place. And if they don’t, they de legitimize themselves. And one of the ways that they’re meant to do that, briefly, is that any legislation that is being passed by the legislature, that’s the arm of government that, that deals with legislature, with legislation, the creation of statute law, they have to make sure that none of that legislation breaches the common law and the constitution and doesn’t reduce the liberties of the people.
And if that were to be the case, they have the power to refuse it. And they must do so as well. So that’s the genuine rule of law, as it was supposed to work. And it’s just, that’s supposed to be working that way now, but it isn’t. Okay, so now we have a very different situation. We have what I would call a distorted or bent out of shape rule of law that is not functioning according to our common law constitution.
So how is it working? Let’s have a look at the comparisons. So what’s happening now is that the power to punish is now transferred to government. Why? Because statutory law itself is now punishing people simply by the very fact that it’s breached. So just to create clarity on that, in the proper genuine rule of law, of course.
All statute law is doing is bringing people before a court. It’s a sort of standard, a flagging up standard, if you like. And it doesn’t have the power to punish itself. But that’s a very different situation today. So we have an awful lot of statutory law in place, where people just simply by the fact that they breached it, will receive punishment.
And that’s fundamentally unconstitutional. Because remember that it’s supposed to be based on… And it’s supposed to be an organic decision according to conscience. I should have said, actually, in the first bit, of course, that the way that it’s normally done under the genuine rule of law is that the jury would return a not guilty verdict, even though it may be clear that the individual in question had actually breached the statute.
What’s the matter with you? I have a reasonable doubt now. I’ve never been warned. What about all the other evidence? What about all that stuff? The knife, the whole business? You said we could throw out all the other evidence. Now that has the effect of what we call annulment. So, in that particular case, it means that the legislation is effectively nullified.
It doesn’t mean it’s repealed generally from the statute books. There’s another process for that actually. But it does mean that in that particular case, it’s effectively annulled. Now that isn’t happening in our current distorted rule of law. So effectively what that’s doing is it’s handing massive power to government.
Now the other issue, of course, is that the minutiae of our lives, in every sense is being is being captured, if you like, through vast amounts of legislation. If you look at the landscape of what we call law is just enormous. Everything is about rules, regulations, even licensing. In order to have the right to do something, we have to go and obtain a license to do it.
Now that’s absolutely fundamentally unlawful according to the Constitution, because it’s breaching our liberties. So that’s, you’re seeing a very different character. Now other things for example is that the only influence, if you like, that the people can have, Now, rather than that true, genuine trial by jury where we start to affect what is the moral character of our community by deciding on, effectively on, on what legislation is appropriate or not, instead of having that, and we don’t, the reason why we don’t really have that now is because juries are not Given the information, they are not told of their power, it’s kept from them.
So, most juries wouldn’t even know that they have this ability. Now where they do know, we are still getting annulment happening. But given the fact that about 1 percent of cases actually even reach a jury trial, we’ve got some big problems. So just by raising that fact alone, that under the constitution, all men and women are to be afforded a trial of their peers.
And yeah, and even in their own statutory law, it states that. So that is unlawful, technically unlawful under the constitution, and they should be challenged on it. The other thing, of course, is that the head of state the monarch, in our case has largely been transferred into a sort of a ceremonial role only.
Okay, so the power to refuse royal assent is not is considered anachronistic. It’s it’s not relevant anymore. In fact, they actually confuse and obfuscate over this by saying technically the head of state has the power to do it, but they wouldn’t do it. And this is a lot of the way that this has been done is this confusion and obfuscation.
They absolutely do have the power, and they have the right and the responsibility to make sure that they are using that power to refuse legislation that would be inappropriate and contravene our constitution and our liberties. We now have a very bent out of shape rule of law. In which we have very little influence, and the only influence, of course, that we have now is voting in elections for a package of measures, if you like, if you want to put it that way which is a very different kind of thing, and we get to do that, what, I think it’s meant to be once every five years, although it seems like five minutes now and that, of course, is a very different thing, so you compare that, that sort of level of influence with the full power Of the people deciding on the appropriateness of government created legislation, as it was originally.
Very different thing. So that’s the situation that we have today. And it’s important to understand the contrast between the two. Because if there’s that clarity Then you begin to see the picture very clearly. Okay, so you will understand from the previous segment then, that the current distorted rule of law that we now have in place is essentially based on order following.
Everything is about following orders. Whereas the original genuine rule of law is about moral principle. And this is the problem that we’ve got. Is that people are adhering to law Through fear, and through ultimately the threat of punishment, which, if you think about it, if you take that to the furthest extreme, That effectively means the threat of violence, ultimately.
Because if you were to refuse to do something, because you don’t regard it as a lawful thing a proper piece of law then essentially if you were to simply refuse, ultimately the threat will be some kind of violence at the end of the day, because firstly it will be a fine. And then you can extrapolate where that’s eventually going to go.
So ultimately will always be a problem in terms of following orders. Now, if you think about how orders are being followed in society, it happens in pretty much three ways. The first way is it’s the people following statutes and through fear of punishment. So, these are preconceived.
Conditions, if you like, that have been pre dreamt up and categorized and chopped up. So, it’s like a program, it’s like an algorithmic program. If you do this or if you do that, or this you’re gonna get this punishment. And that’s not, fundamentally not how law works. Law is based on principle, as now, from the trial by jury discussion earlier.
So, the first thing is that we got order following from the people based on statute. The second form of order following that would be going on is that the jury in, in, in trial by jury that we have today, which is this watered-down version of trial by jury, are essentially being told that they have to follow the directions of the judge.
And the judge is not meant to be there as a judge at all. They’re meant to be there just somebody organizing the occasion, if you like. The judges, remember, as I said earlier, are the people. So, you shouldn’t have the judges following the direction of somebody who’s effectively working for the state, working alongside closely the state, because the judiciary are meant to be independent, but they’re not.
So, you’ve got all the following going on there. And if the jury are not making a decision independently of the legislation, then what’s the point of them being there at all? Yeah, they are following orders at the moment as well. And again, they follow the directions of the judge because if they didn’t, there would be trouble.
Through fear again. And of course, the third way or the third kind of order following that’s going on in society is the one that we’re used to anyway. It’s the police and the prison service and the military. who will be following orders as well. So, order following is a problem because it’s always immoral.
Because what you’re doing when you’re following orders is that you are always suspending your moral faculty. Remember that it’s no longer based on principle. So even if you were to follow an order, having considered it morally and carefully, and you decide to go along with it, that’s fine because you’re not following the order.
You’re still considering it. The problem is where you suspend that moral faculty and you’ve just been told to do something So you just go and do it. Anyway, that is always Immoral. It is never virtuous to follow orders and it leads to problems. Now if you think about it, of course the Nuremberg trials that followed the Second World War has always been promoted as a great decision that based on the idea of that we should not be following orders because look where it led us.
On the one hand, with the Nuremberg trials, we’re told that we shouldn’t be following orders because there’s something higher that we should be considering. You never quite know, based on the possibility of infiltration of your governing system, you never quite know where those orders are going to go eventually.
What’s the worst thing that you could be told to do as an order follower? You have to think about that pretty carefully, because following orders to do something morally bad is going to land you in serious trouble from a karmic point of view built into natural law. It’s quite esoteric, but you are building up massive karmic consequence if you follow orders, and that involves immoral behavior against people.
So, we knew that from the Nuremberg trials, and yet our entire system of governance now. is based on order following, as I’ve just pointed out to you. And that’s how you can see and demonstrate to yourself that we are not following the genuine rule of law. So, having been through the areas that we have been through, you’re now at a position just to reflect on the ultimate question, which is who has the ultimate power to decide on law?
Okay, so, is it? Is it the people that get to decide on the moral framework of their community, on the character, the moral character of their community? Or is it the government that gets to do that? So, if you turn that the other way around, you could say, you could frame the question as saying, Is it the people that get to define the liberties that they have or they wish to enjoy?
Or is it the government that gives them the liberties that the government decides they’re okay to have and therefore would be able to take away again? See, that’s the ultimate question. Yeah, so who has the ultimate power? Another way of putting it would be to say, can government do anything it likes?
And by, by that you’re simply saying can the government decide on punishment? And those are the things we’ve already been through, of course, and that’s the ultimate question. So, you’ll realize that the original genuine rule of law that we talked about with full Genuine trial by jury under common law.
What that is it is a rule of law in which the people define Their own liberties. They’re defining the moral character of their community. In the distorted rule of law that we have today, you’ve got a system of order following and a perceived authority, which is really an illegitimate concept So you’ve, you effectively we’ve handed the authority, the ultimate authority to this fiction or this figment of our imagination called government.
And remember, it was the people that created government in the first place. The people are real in nature, living beings, and the government is just a concept, an abstraction of the mind. And you can’t have. The thing that we’ve created gaining authority over the people doesn’t make any logical sense at all.
So that’s the ultimate question. And that’s really what the constitution is giving us. It’s giving us clarity about the fact that no, it’s the people that define the moral character of their community. It’s the people that get to do that. They are the final arbiter of law.
Okay, and finally, we just need to consider what is. Our constitution in this country in Britain. So the English constitutional tradition, which is what binds our government comes from really the 1215 Magna Carta. Now the 1215 Magna Carta or the great charter is the last written document that expresses our constitutional law.
It has contained within it articles of common law. Now, some people, there’s a lot of discussion about whether the constitution consists of a collection of documents. I would say no. Because most of the other documents that some claim are usually statutory law. And remember that statutory law is created by government.
So, you can’t have a situation where the government itself elevates itself into constitutional law authority. By making changes to the constitution because effectively what that’s doing is it’s raising itself in power: And that’s not lawful. It’s not constitutional. Remember that constitutional law binds Government.
Yeah, the point of it is to provide us a set of standards Inside which the government has to operate so you can’t have a situation where the government can write itself into constitutional authority. And therefore you cannot point to statutory law as an authority of the constitution. You can still express it in statutory law or express the same things that are in our constitutional law in statute, but you could never use statutory law as the basis.
So where does that leave us? It means it leaves us with the 1215 Magna Carta, which was not statutory law. It was a treaty. It was effectively a one, I see it as a one-sided promise. It can’t be really a contract because a contract suggests that it’s something that’s signed by the people as well, and you can’t do that.
So, what it really is a one sided promise on the part of the head of state, who is our, of course, our most senior public servant. to promise in perpetuity to hold our constitutional principles in place. That’s essentially what it was. Now it’s not the whole of the Magna Carta really. It’s only a handful of articles of the common law articles, particularly article 39, especially important article 40 article 61.
And you could point to one or two others possibly as well. But those are the most important. So, it’s not a huge amount of it, but the 1215 Magna Carta is the last clear written document in which the constitutional law and the principles of the constitution were written. Now I say last, because the constitution didn’t start.
with 1215 Magna Carta. It was in place well before that as well and particularly in the time of the late Saxon kings. So, King Alfred Edgar, Edward the Confessor, these were the great late Saxon kings. Who were concerned about law. And they were heavily involved in making sure that these principles were in place.
Now it goes back even further. Even 200 years before Magna Carta. Emperor Conrad of Germany. For example, was expressing almost exactly the same thing as was expressed in Article 39 of Magna Carta, almost the same text, in fact, and what he was saying was that the people have the power through the jury to judge freely, to judge independently, and therefore, in a sense define the character of their community, define their own liberties, and it goes back further still, so the roots goes way back to ancient Greece, To the Athenian Constitution in the time of Cese in 508 to 507 BC this is early Athens in which Cese, who is interestingly an aristocrat, actually stated or helped to put in place the principle that the people through their exia rights were essentially the final arbiter of law.
And so, our constitutional law, if you like, goes way back that far. The other thing to say very quickly, of course, is that other common law nations that are based on the same English common law system. So that would be our common law countries. It’s also the case with America as well, the United States.
They are also based on that common law tradition as well. So, it’s any system in which the trial by jury underpins it. And it’s really important to make sure that the genuine trial by jury, which has at its heart jury independence, is placed as the central pillar of the understanding of our constitutional law.
If you miss that bit out, it’s not really a democratic constitution anymore. Okay, so democracy, this is the last point, democracy is not something that is based on voting in elections. We’re always taught to believe that this is about a majority vote. And we always think of democracy as that. And that’s been a a confusion that’s been put in place maybe deliberately, perhaps.
The real heart or the real central characteristic of democracy is actually a mechanism that allows the people to define. the legislation to decide on the appropriateness of legislation in their community. And that principle extends all the way from maybe a shamanic village in the Amazon up to a sophisticated nation like ours.
It doesn’t actually make any difference. As long as you understand the central principles of a democratic constitution. Then, if the entire system comes down, at least the people know what they have to have at the heart of their community and how their governing system should work. And that’s the main thing to guard against, is that if it does all collapse and we have to have something new, we’re not going to have the wool pulled over our eyes again.
So just to address a few extra things at the end to do with resources for further reading. Questions that came up in our discussion. So first thing to say is that certainly in the freedom movement. Where we’ve had discussions on common law in the past, what has actually tended to happen is that people have deviated off.
Ironically, they said they’re going to talk about common law on what actually happens. They end up deviating off into talking about strange hidden processes to do with things like straw man theory, birth certificate fraud and so on, which are actually things that are held within their maritime admiralty systems.
So that’s almost an antithesis of common law essentially and it’s important to lay that out So if are there things that we can do possibly the problem I’m actually saying that I think it’s probably not a good idea to get entangled in those admiralty systems And I’m saying that for two reasons actually mainly firstly.
It’s extremely complicated. It’s very complex. There are people who’ve unwrapped all of those processes and have had some success, but there are many actually that are getting themselves into a right pickle in doing it. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen that as an ultimate solution for the masses, for the large numbers of people engaging in complex processes.
And the other important reason why I would guard against doing that is because I don’t think it’s actually very honest either. Because given the fact that our common law constitution is our real system of law, it actually underpins our real system of law. If we were too into a pickle about something, whether it’s a parking fine or a speeding fine or something like that, coming out of our own system of law and going into their illegitimate system of law and playing them at their own games is hiding the lie.
It’s hiding the problem and playing them at their own games is not really the thing. It’s not really about what we should be doing. We should be calling them out over here in, in, when we’re in the normal system of law where they can be exposed. And that’s what we should all be doing.
So, I would I don’t think it’s that honest in going across into those systems. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t ever be done, but I think you need to be very careful doing it. And I do think that there is some truth. In, in all of that I’ve been down those rabbit holes myself. So, there is a truth in the admiralty system of law and what goes on with that public and private, trust law.
But I think I would guard against it actually and if we all came over to the normal side of law and simply expose the government for the crimes that they are committing under our constitution. I think we would, we’d nail it. So that’s the first thing to say. Resources I would, the first thing I would say is go to our website which is commonlawconstitution.org which we set up at the beginning of January as a kind of learning platform for constitutional law. And I’ve, along with others, have set out the materials in there for pretty simple understanding, simple learning. One of the first things that you’ll come across is five steps to Understanding the Constitution.
That sounds good. And there are one or two other documents that keep it neat and tidy so that you understand the essential principles. So, I would go there. Further websites and materials you should definitely go to democracydefined.org which is run by the Democracy Defined campaign, Ken Doodley’s campaign and a lot of our material is based on his tireless work and he’s published a book called Democracy Defined, The Manifesto.
Which you should get a copy. So that’s good. You should read the writings of people like Lysander Spooner, for example. Wrote an important essay in 1852, called Trial by Jury. Lysander Spooner is absolutely essential to this topic. There are others, so in America, for example Clay Conrad is an important man in this.
Has written an excellent book, I think it’s called Jury Nullification, off the top of my head. So, Jury Nullification is the term that is used in America for annulment by jury. Where you get the legislation being annulled by the jury. That’s a really good book as well. There are other places too, lots of other things.
In fact, up on commonlawconstitution.org, I’m going to be putting more and more resources up there. One of the other things in that website, commonlawconstitution.org, is a whole series of useful quotations, quite short quotations from people in the history of law. Ranging from Blackstone to Churchill to David Hume Gilbert, great historians stating clearly how our law is supposed to function.
So, there’s a lot of work that we’ve done, which is basically aggregating a lot of information to make it easy for people to grasp the subject for practically the first time. But we’ve done that because, in a sense, really, what, the way that they have achieved, they, the other side have achieved the confusion, this incremental confusion over time.
They’ve done it through that, really. Just confusion, incrementally, gaslighting. And even confusing themselves within the system as well. We actually, you’d be amazed at how senior in the system people are who just simply do not understand the principles of the constitution. And claims that are being made on the parliament website are simply Astounding that you will be able to spot this kind of stuff literally within an hour or two of doing some good reading in those areas and you’ll get it and you’ll understand it.
And the point of doing that is to give yourself that confidence because when people know that the system of law that underpins our official system of law in this country, the constitution was actually set up correctly and set up to defend the liberties of the people. When you actually know that it was set up correctly and you know that what’s gone wrong since is there incremental distortion, that’s going to give people much greater Confidence in their noncompliance and they’re going to be able to spot it and call people out and that’s the next stage when we’ve got sufficient numbers on board.
That’s when we can start calling out public servants on saying, for example, you’re getting very close to misconduct in public office, which is a common law offense. These are the kinds of things that we’re going to be able to do, but not until we’ve got that tipping point in those numbers, but I don’t think we’re that far off it.
So, let’s get into this material. Let’s get passionate about it, embrace our constitution, because it was there for us. And then we’ll be a force to be reckoned with.
