Liberty
The second booklet in the corpus. Beers argues that liberty is the natural condition of mankind under divine ordinance, that the legal term “person” is a civil-law fiction historically encompassing slaves, corporations, and ministers exercising office, and that “man” is the term of nature outside that taxonomy. The treatise also argues that the common law itself is “founded upon the Holy Bible,” citing 19th-century state cases (Wylly v. Collins, Updegraph v. Commonwealth, Shover v. State) and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Vidal v. Girard’s Executors.
Two of the survey-anchor findings address claims rooted in this treatise: the person / man distinction as a statutory-construction claim (verdict: foreclosed) and the common-law-founded-on-the-Bible claim (verdict: partially-supported — historical-doctrine kernel survives, modern operative claim is foreclosed by post-incorporation Establishment Clause doctrine).
Per-treatise triage cycle pending — claims pre-extracted in notes/beers-treatise-02-extraction.md.