Ancient-Law
The Natural Order of Things: Treatise #3 as Architectural Synthesis
Treatise #3 is the architectural treatise — establishes the natural-order / unnatural-order binary that organizes the Beers corpus. Real cases, real scholars, real doctrinal seeds. The load-bearing finding: U.S. v. Amy's toga-civillis quote is real, but in Taney's hands the same reasoning UPHELD the criminal conviction of an enslaved woman. The quote does opposite work depending on which direction the personhood line runs. Three additional findings document the rhetorical-premise-vs-operative-holding pattern (Cruikshank, Hurtado, the counsel-argument-as-holding line in Glass and Hepburn).
Maine's Fictions / Equity / Legislation Framework
Sir Henry Maine's *Ancient Law* (1861) introduces a canonical three-instrument framework for how positive law adapts to social change: legal fictions, equity, and legislation, in historical order. The framework is taught in jurisprudence courses, cited across mainstream legal scholarship, and recurs as a structural anchor in the Byron Beers treatise corpus (Treatises 3, 5, 6, 8). This page defines the framework as Maine articulates it and locates how Beers's corpus extends it beyond Maine's descriptive purpose. The framework is real legal anthropology; Maine treats it as describing how law evolves. The corpus extends it to a prescriptive claim about illegitimate sovereign overreach, which goes beyond Maine.