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,” that the Declaration of Independence functions as a super-constitutional standard against which all government action is measured (“The Great Principle”), and that valid legal obligations require knowing-voluntary-intentional individualized consent — the most load-bearing axiom across the entire eleven-treatise corpus.
The per-treatise triage verified eleven Treatise-2-specific federal authorities. Five principal cite-misuses were surfaced: the Nebbia v. New York liberty definition is from Justice McReynolds’s dissent rather than Justice Roberts’s majority (see Nebbia liberty misattribution); Swift v. Tyson’s “predicated upon the common law” is counsel argument AND Swift was overruled by Erie Railroad v. Tompkins in 1938 (see Swift overruled by Erie); Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining v. Pennsylvania defines “citizens” for Article IV Privileges and Immunities Clause purposes — not “natural persons” as an allegiance-bearing status — and corporations ARE “citizens” for diversity-jurisdiction purposes under 28 U.S.C. § 1332(c) (see Pembina citizens not natural persons); Jacobson v. Massachusetts’s “persons and property subjected to restraints” supports state power rather than limits on it; In re Sherman M. Booth was reversed by Ableman v. Booth (1859).
The per-treatise essay Liberty: Treatise #2’s Definitional Framework Examined walks through the structural argument step by step. The companion findings deliver the specific verdicts: the consent standard (foreclosed — the most consequential finding in the cycle, addressing the most load-bearing axiom in the corpus); the Declaration-as-super-constitutional reading (unsupported, with engagement of nemo dat quod non habet and the natural-law constitutional tradition); and the four citation-misuse findings. The concept page on knowing-voluntary-intentional consent defines the vocabulary the consent finding builds on.
Two of the survey-anchor findings also address claims rooted in this treatise: the person / man distinction as a statutory-construction claim and the common-law-founded-on-the-Bible claim.