"
Freemen-on-the-land" are a loose group of individuals who believe in a
conspiracy theory[1] that they are bound by
statute laws only if they consent to those laws. They believe that they can therefore declare themselves independent of the government and the
rule of law, holding that the only "true" law is their own interpretation of "
common law".
[2] Freemen are active in
English-speaking countries: the
United Kingdom,
Ireland,
Canada, the
United States,
Australia, and
New Zealand.
In the Canadian court case
Meads v. Meads,
Alberta Court of Queen's Bench Associate Chief Justice John D. Rooke used the phrase "Organised Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments" (OPCA) to describe the techniques and arguments used by freemen in court
[3] describing them as frivolous and
vexatious.
[4][5][6] There is no recorded instance of freeman tactics being upheld in a court of law;
[7] in refuting one by one each of the arguments used by Meads, Rooke concluded that "a decade of reported cases, many of which he refers to in his ruling, have failed to prove a single concept advanced by OPCA litigants."
[8]
Freemen-on-the-land are also called "Freemen-of-the-land" and the "Freemen movement". They may be an offshoot of the
sovereign citizen movement.
[9][10] The
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) classifies sovereign citizen extremists as
domestic terrorists, and states that these groups may refer to themselves as "freemen
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