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by anigbrowl 4760 days ago
Where can one look up the actual legal definition for any given word?

Legislation often includes a section dedicated to definitions, commonly the first or last clause in a subsection of the US code. The holdings of court cases are also a significant source of information (but you have to distinguish between the holding, which is highly technical and narrow, and the dicta which is the long and often wide-ranging explanations of what the holding means that makes up the bulk of a judicial opinion, but which do not themselves have the force of law).

Have you heard the claim that your name in all caps is different than your name as you would write it? What is your opinion on that claim?

Complete garbage. I don't want to spend time or energy digging up all the references for you, but you can safely assume that anyone advancing that argument is a crazy trying to get out of paying income taxes (similar arguments include claims that having a certain kind of flag in the courtroom nullifies the legal force of a judicial decision and that your social security card is actually a certificate of slavery). Almost all such arguments originate from a set of fringe Christian conspiracy theories informally known as Dominionism in which (among other things) the federal government is considered an invention of Satan designed to trick Christians out of their rightful place as rulers over the Promised Land. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Reconstructionism

Surprising or counter-intuititve legal arguments that lean heavily on 'natural law' often turn out to be grounded in religious belief as well.

1 comments

This comment should be included (scrolling Star Wars style) before every Alex Jones video.
Tee-hee! I hereby waive my copyright interest in the comment above and offer it up freely for this purpose if anyone feels like implementing it :-p