 Hi, James Cox from PeaceFreedomProsperity.com, and I'm joined today with Stephen Canceler, a patent attorney, and I want to discuss with him why man-made law is bad, why I think it's enslavement. I'm quite sure that he has a different approach on it, and why we should not, in my opinion, be voting for these people that call themselves government and them forcing their will, honors by calling it legislation, statutes, and ordinances, I guess, that they call them in the city. Stefan, thank you for joining us. Sure, glad to be here. I think I agree with your general thrust. The way I would word this may be a little differently. In a way, all law is man-made, in the sense that there are rules that human beings that cooperate with each other come up with to help us get along with each other, okay? And we as libertarians have a certain preference for a certain type of that rule. The problem is not man-made law, the problem is what you had talked about, a statute of legislation, right? Man-made law, number one, having the state make law, and the state typically makes law either by taking over the court system, which is a sort of decentralized, old-fashioned way of making law, or more organic way of making law, but even there, the state can infiltrate it and affect it. So like the common law in England is not completely private either, nor was the Roman law under Rome, although it's a different way of making law or formulating or developing legal rules than the current system, which is heavily dominated by statute, which is the idea, it's called sometimes legal positivism, which is the idea that laws have to come and primarily do come from the decrees of some law giver, right? Some sovereign, and nowadays we think of that as a state. So what's happened is, at least under a private system, a decentralized system like a court system, the common law system, or the Roman law, the way law develops is people want to get along with each other, every now and then there's a dispute about a piece of property or two people having a dispute with each other. So they'll go to the court, they'll go to some neutral third party who could help decide the case, and even if the wrong choice is decided by the judge, at least the judge is trying to find the just result. So they have two parties in front of them, two actual human beings with a real dispute. They can ask questions about what happened, what the context is, what the facts are, what's relevant. They can try to come up with a rule based upon what custom is and what the expectations of the parties are, what their grievance are, what people typically do in this community. They can try to come up with a just rule. There's no guarantee, but at least they can try to find the just result, either you win or you win or you both go home or whatever. But today, law has been corrupted by this phenomenon of legislatures, which are the legislative branches of states becoming the primary issuers of law, and they just decree whatever they want. And when they do that, there's no limit on what they can say. They can just come up with a bunch of words that can say, here we have the Americans with Disabilities Act, here we have the drug law. It's not even what the people want, it's just these people making this stuff up and forcing it on others, correct? Yeah, it's not always what the people want, of course, because of public choice and other reasons. But it's not even a law in the sense of trying to find the just result. It's just decreeing a consequence for failure to abide by this rule. So if you don't pay income tax, or if you sell cocaine, or if you don't show up and register for the selective service, then we will grab you and put you in jail. It's just a threat. So law has devolved to the most crude consequences of punishment for failing to abide by the decrees of some law giver. And what this does is it leads people to start thinking of law as whatever the government says it is, whatever the government decrees. So this leads to disrespect for law because we don't think of law as being synonymous with justice anymore. Everyone can become cynical, and they should become cynical in today's system. But everyone's a law breaker now. There are literally millions of laws that we all can't help but violate because there are so many decrees issued by various agencies of the state from the top to the bottom. So this gives the government the power to have discretion in choosing who to selectively enforce the law against. So we're all law breakers, and so the government, whoever they want to make a target out of, they can find something they've done, especially now with this NSA data retention. They can go back years and years and see what you've been doing for the last five or ten years, find something you've done that violates one of their Picayune laws, and use it to blackmail or threaten or extort you and get you to cave in or cop a plea bargain. So this is the fundamental problem, is the state, and especially legislation as a source of law. We need to think of law as the formalized body of rules that help us cooperate and have civilized interaction. So people in a geographic area, a certain geographic area, coming together, like if you and I were neighbors and we had an easement between our property, we'd have to come up with some agreement of what we're going to do with the easement, how we're going to maintain the roads between us. It wouldn't be necessarily law, it would just be a contract between us agreeing that this is how we're going to behave with one another. And if a tree that's on my property falls, happens to fall over and damage your property, then that's my responsibility, or we may have something written into it, where we both take care of it. Yeah, in legal systems, lawyers think of these agreements between people as, we call it sometimes, the law between the parties. And in fact, that's kind of an anarchist, libertarian way of looking at it. You and I, with a certain background understanding of respect for each other's property rights, and with a background idea of some kind of order, right? And it's all in form of this idea of agreement and compromise and contract. We come up with an agreement between each other that's a law between us, but only between us, so it's... Because we've agreed to it and we signed it. And anybody who lives around us, you know, if it's something to do with roads that we can travel on past one another's property, we all agree to take care of it, you know? Yeah, and there's a background... There's a legal term called Pacta Suitservanda, which is an international term. Pacta Suitservanda, which means agreements or PACs are to be respected. And that's sort of this background presupposition that, look, if two countries, two sovereigns or two individuals, make a solemn agreement with each other, they're settling between themselves what their understanding is as to their rights and duties and obligations with respect to each other. They're respecting each other's bodies and property rights, and they're agreeing that going forward, here's how we're going to interact with each other. There's no, like, super contractual authority that makes them abide by it other than reputation and just the natural way that things work out. But you do not need a state and you certainly don't need legislation to have contract law. In fact, all of these social theories that attempt to justify the state rest upon some kind of contractual theory, because they'll say like everyone in society implicitly agrees to consent to the government's authority so that we can have peace or whatever, right, to escape the Habisian world, you know. But, of course, no one actually ever actually agreed to it. They're just said to implicitly agree to it. But even that argument at least recognizes that if you agree to it, it means something. So they're implicitly assuming you can't help but agree, you can't help but recognize the importance of agreement between people and compromise and contract. Okay, do you have a website that you want to mention for people that's going to view the video? Yeah, I've got some articles on these types of topics at stefanconcella.com, and I have a podcast there where I talk about some of these issues. Do you want to just spell your name out, because obviously, Yup, it's S-T-E-P-H-A-N-K-N-K-I-N-S-E-L-L-L-A. And on my publications page, I have an article on legislation itself, which discusses this very topic, and why the original decentralized systems of the Roman law and the common law, although they were state-related, were superior in most respects to the modern legislation and statute-based systems, and that we should get back towards that type of way of developing law other than decrees of a strongman. Okay, Stefan, thank you for your time, and I hope to talk to you again on another video broadcast. It's been great discussion. Happy to do it. Thanks, James. Thank you.