In Richard v Beresford c/- Registrar-General of New Zealand [2023] NZHC 500 an adherent of pseudolaw unsuccessfully sought to sue himself in the non-existent NZ 'Court of Chancery'.
The Court states
[6] The claim is lengthy and sometimes difficult to understand. It does not comply with the High Court Rules 2016 and indeed asserts that Court rules are not to apply. It appears to seek declaratory and injunctive relief. The complainant wishes to have the claim determined in a court “of Chancery”, notwithstanding that no such court exists (or has ever existed) in New Zealand, in which the courts have a “fused jurisdiction”, meaning the ability to exercise both common law and equitable jurisdiction.
[7] There is an immediate issue in that the complainant and the defendant are the same person. This is a result of what the complainant has described as the distinction between himself as “Richard” and the legal entity “RICHARD JOHN BERESFORD”, which he considers was created at the time of his birth through his birth certificate. This is presumably why the defendant is named as being “RICHARD JOHN BERESFORD c/- Registrar General of New Zealand”, which is likely intended to refer to the Registrar-General charged with the administration of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Act 1995.
[8] The complainant appears to seek that the legal entity “RICHARD JOHN BERESFORD” as described in his birth certificate have its status changed from “living” to “deceased”, because:
The self-evident truth of the matter is that the extra feto embryonic material and placenta also born slightly later on that day also died on that day, it died by abortion and an act of violence with a weapon, died prematurely as an act of, maybe unwittingly by the assaulter, of intentional premeditated interference in the divine natural order of life, depriving me of my due remaining sustenance. Regardless i [sic] survived the premature abortion of my sustaining organ, whole, but at the end of the day, thankfully, my extra feto embryonic material and placenta became deceased. As the registered event entity is deceased, it [is] now required, pertaining to 88 of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Handbook on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Systems, Management, Operation and Maintenance, revision 1, New York, 2021, and as a function of the civil registration component, that the assigned PIN of the deceased person RICHARD JOHN BERESFORD, be changed, by retirement of the PIN of RICHARD JOHN BERESFORD by flagging the PIN or changing its status from “living” to “deceased”, as prescribed by law.
[9] Claims such as the present one are characteristic of the consent-based Sovereign Citizen, “dual personality” or “Organised Pseudolegal Commercial Argument” (OPCA) theories that have been consistently rejected by the courts as legally untenable and “without legal foundation”.
[10] Pseudolegal claims:
...[mirror and co-opt] the language, forms and structures of legal reasoning [but lack] substantive engagement with the core norms, principles and methods of legal reasoning. Proponents of pseudolaw appear to have a genuine belief that their doctrines represent the ‘true’ position of the law where more ‘mainstream’ approaches have become illegitimate for some reason(s). This means that adherents can disregard existing legal norms while simultaneously retaining of a self-conception of lawfulness and righteousness.
[11] Such claims are undoubtedly damaging, and are a growing issue across the common law world. As has recently been stated, pseudolaw:
... hurts litigants, their families (whānau), and friends. Litigants employing pseudolaw waste time and money. They forego the opportunities to obtain capable legal representation. It creates opportunities for scammers and charlatans. Pseudolaw is also harmful to the proper administration of justice. Legitimate legal issues may be buried under pseudolegal gibberish and could be dismissed too hastily.
[12] In line with this approach, the Sovereign Citizen or “dual personality” pseudolegal belief is that “sovereign” individuals are not bound by the laws of the jurisdiction in which they reside unless they waive their rights and accept a contract with the government. Litigants who ascribe to this belief typically write their names in a non-standard fashion, thereby seeking to demonstrate that they do not consent to the Court’s authority.
[13] The part of the complainant’s claim that seeks to change his birth status from “living” to “deceased” appears to me to seek that this Court engage in legitimising that theory, essentially to validate the complainant’s position that the law only applies to fictional legal personalities, rather than natural persons. It appears that the complainant believes that:
Because every person has inalienable, natural rights, governments must assert their authority over natural or ‘flesh and blood’ persons to make them subjects. Governments do that, for example, when a birth certificate, bank account, driver’s licence, or government identity is issued. Those actions create an ‘artificial’ person – a legal person, personality, corporation, or ‘strawman’ – over whom the government and its agencies, which are parallel corporate forms, have jurisdiction. The crucial aspect is that the natural or living man or woman is freed from government subjection when they assert their status, claim it, and prove it.
[14] This is clear in the naming of the parties in the complainant’s claim. He, as a ‘natural person’, seeks to be divorced from the “artificial” conception of him as a legal person, which he believes is embodied in his birth certificate. The complainant seeks the same outcome for his five children.
[15] The complainant also seeks orders including:
(a) the granting of probate for the estate of the deceased person RICHARD JOHN BERESFORD, and also his five children, on the basis that they are all deceased persons;
(b) primary care of his children, notwithstanding that it appears their mother, his ex-partner, presently has primary care of them;
(c) counsel and resources to assist him to obtain primary care of his children;
(d) an order that his ex-partner return to Wellington with his children;
(e) an order that enables him to choose and commission a therapist or counsellor for his children;
(f) an order that removes or discharges the matters in CRI-2021-096-3103, and CIV-2021-485-502;
(g) if he is “deemed [to] have behaved unlawfully”, an order to bring him before a “proper” court of law;
(h) an order to provide him with evidence relating to his ex-partner that would assist the court;
(i) an order that his children are not to be involved in “exploitation involving slavery or death of our neighbours”;
(j) an order that he and his children are not to be subject to “any weapons of war”; and
(k) an order that any order made applies to his children until they are 21- years-old.
[16] The complainant also records that he will “give up and forsake everything the commercial world has offered and given to [him]”.
[17] The complainant provided an affidavit in support of his claim, which was not sworn or witnessed. The content of that document largely contains quotes from various sources, including but not limited to the Bible, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Webster’s Dictionary, Black’s Law Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary, and Butterworths New Zealand Law Dictionary. The exhibits attached to that affidavit contained further quotes from other sources, which the complainant seems to consider support his claim, as well as the birth certificates of him and his children. The affidavit also includes what appears to be correspondence with the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) in which DIA has declined the complainant’s request to discharge certain public records.
The Court kindly concludes that
[18] The complainant’s claim does not articulate any valid cause of action and seeks orders that the Court is unable to grant. Chief among the barriers to the complainant’s claim is the view that his birth certificate can be changed to say that he is dead, when he is plainly very much alive. The same applies as in respect of his children.
