Legal-Fiction
The movement claim that statutes addressed to 'persons' bind only those who hold the corresponding legal status — leaving 'free men and women' outside the statute's reach — is foreclosed
Byron Beers's central definitional move, recurring across Treatises 2, 7, 9, and 10, distinguishes 'person' (a creature of civil law, a status the sovereign confers and can revoke) from 'man' (the natural condition outside that taxonomy). The historical fact that older legal dictionaries treated 'person' as a status term is correct. The operative claim Beers builds on it — that statutes addressed to 'persons' don't bind people who decline the status — is foreclosed, but by an interpretive chain rather than by a single express statutory definition. The Internal Revenue Code's § 7701(a)(1) and the Dictionary Act at 1 U.S.C. § 1 both define 'person' to include 'an individual' alongside corporate and entity categories. Neither statute separately defines 'individual.' The operative meaning is supplied by three converging sources: the plain-meaning canon of statutory construction (which applies a term's ordinary English meaning when Congress hasn't defined it), Treasury Regulation 26 CFR § 1.1-1(a)(1) (which operationalizes the income tax on 'every individual who is a citizen or resident'), and uniform federal case law rejecting the natural-man / declination argument. The chain is doctrinally sufficient to foreclose the argument under current law; the verdict is foreclosed under that chain, not by an unalterable express statutory definition. The two-types-of-slaves taxonomy Beers attributes to Dred Scott v. Sandford as further support for the distinction is not in Taney's opinion.
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.