Bouvier
Liberty
Treatise #2 of Beers's 11-treatise corpus. The corpus's definitional and philosophical engine room — liberty as divinely mandated, 'person' as artificial civil-law construct distinct from 'man,' common law as biblical foundation, the Declaration of Independence as super-constitutional standard, and the knowing-voluntary-intentional consent standard for legal obligations. The consent standard is identified by the treatise's own dependency map as the most load-bearing axiom in the entire corpus. Per-treatise verification surfaced five principal contradictions in the citation cascade: Nebbia liberty language is McReynolds dissent (not Roberts majority); Swift v. Tyson is counsel argument AND was overruled by Erie (1938); Pembina defines 'citizens' for Article IV P&I purposes (not 'natural persons' as allegiance-status); Jacobson supports state power (not limits on it); In re Booth was reversed by Ableman v. Booth (1859).
Person / Man Distinction (Beers)
Byron Beers's central definitional move, recurring across Treatises 2, 7, 9, and 10: 'person' is a creature of civil law — a legal fiction whose status the sovereign confers and can revoke — while 'man' is the natural condition of human beings outside that taxonomy. The distinction is used to argue that statutes addressed to 'persons,' 'residents,' or 'individuals' bind only those who hold the corresponding legal status, not 'free men and women' operating under the natural order. The historical fact that older legal dictionaries treated 'person' as a status-bearing term is correct; the inference Beers builds on it is foreclosed by every statute that defines 'person' for its own purposes.