Dr Gregory L. Schneider  is Professor of History at Emproia State University, and he’s the author of The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (Critical Issues in American History).

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This is the Meads v Meads text that I referred to.

Lawyers, the story goes, were originally paid by the word when they were writing legal texts, and that is the supposed reason why they write in a long-winded jargon that is often impossible for anyone else to understand.

Lawyers say that they need to be exact, and they do, but they are certainly never afraid to call a shovel a manual digging implement suitable for the displacement of building material.

So there aren’t many legal texts that you would read for pleasure. But there is one. If, in the whole of your life, you only read one legal text for pleasure, or in the whole of your life, you only read one legal text at all, I’ve got the one for you.

It’s a real legal text, it’s the judgment of a real judge in a real court. The judge is Chief Justice J.D. Rooke, and the judgment was delivered in 2012 in the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta. And it’s not short either, the main document is about 150 pages.

But it’s worth reading. Honestly. Even if you’re not a lawyer, especially if you’re not a lawyer.

The case is called Meads versus Meads, I’ve got a link to it in the show notes, and it doesn’t sound like it should be that interesting because it is a case that arises out of a divorce, but I promise you, it is well worth reading.

The reason it’s worth reading is because Larry Meads, one of the litigants, is what’s called a Freeman on the Land. This is a weird cross between a con trick, a cult and a conspiracy theory, it’s related to Sovereign Citizen movements, and when you read the judgment you get a sense of the exasperation that the judge went through in hearing the case, and the forensic takedown that he did of the Freeman on the Land ideology.

And this is a deeply deluded ideology.

In case you don’t know,