Enjoy the Silence: Pseudolaw at the Supreme Court of Canada

Abstract

Pseudolaw is a collection of legal-sounding but false rules, that purport to be law, employed by groups including the Detaxer and Freemen-on-the-Land movements. While pseudolaw is universally rejected by Canadian courts, no Supreme Court of Canada decision addresses these concepts. This study reviews 51 unsuccessful Supreme Court leave applications that potentially involve pseudolaw to determine what pseudolaw issues were raised, whether those issues were comprehensible, and therefore if by its silence the Court has implicitly rejected these concepts. Some pseudolaw-related leave applications were not comprehensible to a legally-trained reader, however the remainder clearly imply that the Supreme Court of Canada has been exposed to the cornerstone concepts of modern pseudolaw, including “Strawman” Theory, and has rejected these ideas as not having national significance.