The movement claim that Pembina v. Pennsylvania defines 'natural person' as 'a member of the body politic owing allegiance to the State' — establishing personhood as a status of subjection — is unsupported
The movement proposition
Treatise #2’s definitional claim D4 reads: “Natural person = member of the body politic owing allegiance to the State.” Beers attributes the definition to Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 181, 189 (1887). The claim is foundational to the corpus’s person/man framework — it provides the doctrinal anchor for the proposition that “natural person” is a status term implying allegiance and subjection, distinct from “man” as a natural condition outside the civil-law taxonomy.
The reading is load-bearing. Once “natural person” is read as allegiance-bearing status, Beers’s argument that statutes addressed to “persons” or “natural persons” bind only those who hold the status (and not “men” who decline it) has a doctrinal anchor. Treatises 7, 9, and 10 all build on this anchor in their applied claims about citizenship, residency, and corporate political society.
The authority
Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 181 (1887) was a corporate-jurisdiction case. The plaintiff, a Colorado mining corporation, challenged Pennsylvania’s annual license tax on foreign corporations doing business in the state. The corporation argued the tax violated the Article IV Privileges and Immunities Clause (“The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States”) because Pennsylvania was discriminating against out-of-state “citizens.”
The Supreme Court (Field, J.) held against the corporation. The relevant passage at page 189:
“The term ‘citizens,’ as used in the clause, applies only to natural persons, members of the body politic owing allegiance to the state, not to artificial persons created by the legislature.”
The Court’s reasoning: Article IV’s “citizens” means natural persons (human beings) who are members of a state’s body politic; corporations are artificial persons created by legislative act, not natural persons; therefore corporations are not “citizens” under Article IV; therefore Pennsylvania could discriminate against the Colorado corporation without violating the clause.
What this means for Beers’s argument
The passage Beers attributes to Pembina defines citizens, not natural persons. The structure of the sentence is precise:
- “Citizens” = the term being defined
- “Natural persons, members of the body politic owing allegiance to the state” = the definition of citizens
- “Not artificial persons created by the legislature” = the contrast (corporations excluded)
The phrase “members of the body politic owing allegiance to the state” is a gloss on citizens — drawing the line between humans-who-are-citizens-for-Article-IV-P&I-purposes and corporations-which-are-not. The phrase is not a gloss on “natural persons.” Natural persons (humans) are the larger category from which the citizen subset is drawn. The Court is distinguishing:
- Natural persons (humans) → can be “citizens” for purposes of the Article IV Privileges and Immunities Clause
- Artificial persons (corporations) → cannot be “citizens” for that purpose
The Court is not distinguishing:
- Natural persons who hold allegiance (some humans) → are persons
- Natural persons who lack allegiance (other humans) → are not persons
The first distinction is what Pembina draws; the second distinction is what Beers reads into it. They are different distinctions.
A doctrinal observation worth foregrounding here: corporations do have a form of “citizenship” in American law — just not the kind Pembina was deciding. 28 U.S.C. § 1332(c)(1), the federal diversity-jurisdiction statute, provides that “a corporation shall be deemed to be a citizen of every State and foreign state by which it has been incorporated and of the State or foreign state where it has its principal place of business.” The Supreme Court applied this framework in Hertz Corp. v. Friend, 559 U.S. 77 (2010), establishing the “nerve center” test for identifying principal place of business. A Delaware-incorporated corporation with its principal place of business in New York is a “citizen” of both states for federal diversity jurisdiction — even though the same corporation is not a “citizen” under Article IV P&I per Pembina.
At least four distinct “citizenship” concepts operate in American law simultaneously: 14A federal citizenship (natural persons only); state citizenship under the 14A second clause (natural persons, of the state wherein they reside); Article IV Privileges and Immunities citizenship (natural persons only, per Pembina); diversity-jurisdiction citizenship under 28 U.S.C. § 1332(c) (corporations included by statute). The four overlap but aren’t identical. Pembina draws its line at the third of these — the Article IV P&I Clause specifically.
This is doctrinally important for assessing what Beers can extract from Pembina. The Court was making a clause-specific judgment, not announcing a metaphysical taxonomy about personhood-and-allegiance. Beers’s reading treats Pembina as if the Court were declaring general doctrine about what “natural person” and “citizen” mean across all legal contexts. The Court did no such thing. Citizenship in American law is contextual — clause-specific, statute-specific, purpose-specific — not a unified metaphysical status of allegiance. The same corporation can be a “citizen” for one purpose and not for another, depending on which clause or statute is at issue. The Court’s care about clause-specific scope is itself evidence against the broader Beers reading: the doctrine operates with surgical precision about which kind of citizenship is at stake, which is incompatible with the framework’s request that “citizen” name a single allegiance-based status.
The case provides no support for the proposition that some humans are not “natural persons,” or that being a “natural person” requires allegiance. Pembina draws the human-vs-corporation line for Article IV P&I purposes specifically; it does not draw a sovereign-citizen vs. 14A-citizen line, and it does not establish any general doctrine of citizenship-as-allegiance.
Counter-authority
The broader doctrinal landscape consistently treats “natural person” as referring to humans generally, in contradistinction to corporations and other artificial entities. Examples:
- The Dictionary Act, 1 U.S.C. § 1, defines “person” for purposes of the U.S. Code to include “corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.” “Individuals” here means natural persons; the contrast is with artificial entities, not with a sub-category of unconsenting humans.
- The Internal Revenue Code at 26 U.S.C. § 7701(a)(1) defines “person” to include “an individual, a trust, estate, partnership, association, company or corporation.” Again, “individual” = natural person = human being. No allegiance requirement is imposed.
- The federal-tax frivolous-positions case law uniformly rejects the natural-man / declination argument that builds on the Pembina misreading. See United States v. Mundt, 29 F.3d 233 (6th Cir. 1994); United States v. Sloan, 939 F.2d 499 (7th Cir. 1991); the broader rejected-frivolous line.
The existing finding on the person/man distinction as statutory construction (foreclosed) treats the broader doctrinal landscape; this finding addresses the specific Pembina misreading.
Verdict
Unsupported. Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania defines “citizens” as a subset of natural persons — drawing the line between humans (natural persons) who can be citizens and corporations (artificial persons) who cannot. The case provides no support for the proposition that “natural person” is itself a status term requiring allegiance, or that some humans are not “natural persons.” The passage Beers builds the person/man framework’s allegiance-as-personhood reading on is doing different doctrinal work — corporate-vs-human personhood — than the work Beers’s framework requires.
A reader checking the cite at 125 U.S. 189 will find the citizens-of-states definition in a corporate-personhood case. The case is real; the doctrine is real; the application Beers makes inverts what the case does. The companion concept page on Beers’s person/man distinction treats the broader definitional history; the finding on statutory-construction person/man distinction treats the operative legal claim. This finding addresses the specific Pembina misreading that anchors the broader framework.
Sources cited
- Liberty — Byron Beers