Common-Law
The movement claim that the common law is 'founded upon the Holy Bible' — making biblical authority a structural source of operative American law — is partially supported as 19th-century historical doctrine and foreclosed as modern operative claim
Byron Beers cites 19th-century state court cases — principally Wylly v. Collins, 9 Ga. 223 (1850), Updegraph v. Commonwealth, 11 Serg. & Rawle 394 (Pa. 1824), and Shover v. State, 10 Ark. 259 (1850) — for the proposition that the common law is 'founded upon the Holy Bible.' The U.S. Supreme Court's Vidal v. Girard's Executors, 43 U.S. 127 (1844), is cited alongside. The cases are real and do contain language treating Christianity as part of the common law. That historical fact is partially supported. The operative modern claim — that biblical authority is a structural source of currently-binding American law — is foreclosed by the post-Everson Establishment Clause line, by the qualified and narrow scope the cited cases actually carve out (Vidal upheld a clergy-excluding charitable bequest, not a Christian-establishment one), and by the doctrinal mainstream of American legal thought since the mid-20th century. The two halves should not be conflated; this finding distinguishes them.
The Negative Side of Positive Law
Treatise #6 of Beers's 11-treatise corpus. Argues that positive law — legislative enactments enforced by sovereign authority — is contrary to natural law and common law, exists only in the 'unnatural order,' and operates through presumed (tacit or implied) consent rather than actual agreement.
Liberty
Treatise #2 of Beers's 11-treatise corpus. Argues that liberty — freedom from servitude — is divinely mandated, that 'person' is an artificial civil-law construct distinct from 'man' as a term of nature, and that the common law is 'founded upon the Holy Bible.' The person/man distinction and the biblical-foundation claim are both verdicted at the survey-anchor level.
Natural Order / Unnatural Order
Byron Beers's master frame for the eleven-treatise corpus: a 'natural order' (God → man → state → limited constitutional government, operating through common law) was inverted at the Civil War into an 'unnatural order' (sovereign government → state → subjects, operating through positive law). The binary is structural, not rhetorical — it does the load-bearing work that the rest of the corpus builds on. This page defines the framework as Beers uses it and locates its doctrinal anchors so the per-treatise findings can address the operative claims without re-introducing the framework each time.