The code says it. The regulation says it. An agency administers it. An executive officer enforces it. A court applies it.

Therefore, we simply call the whole thing “the law.”

Western civilization developed a much richer legal inheritance. Across centuries, people reasoned through different bodies, traditions, sources and forms of jurisprudence, including natural law, common law, equity, commercial law, maritime and admiralty law, constitutional law, statutory law, Biblical legal traditions and other bodies and sources of legal authority.

These did not remain sealed in separate boxes. Their institutions, doctrines and procedures have been merged, transformed, absorbed and administered in different ways over hundreds of years. Here, our history matters.

Because when somebody says, “It’s the law,” the statement may conceal much more than it explains.

The Great American Law Series begins restoring these distinctions—not so you can memorize unfamiliar terminology, but so you can begin to think jurisprudentially for yourself.

He says his first major legal investigation required approximately five and a half months of study before he found what he needed to successfully defend himself. Along the way, he began discovering principles of common law, natural rights and American jurisprudence that he says virtually nobody around him had ever taught him.

Then he began putting what he learned to the test.

For more than 50 years, Frits reports dozens of encounters with police officers, police chiefs, judges, district attorneys, enforcement officials, government departments and other public authorities. He reports an extraordinary record of success in resolving those encounters.

One encounter illustrates the questions at the heart of this course.

Health departments issued mandates. Governors invoked emergency powers. Businesses, schools and employers imposed requirements. Executive and administrative agencies exercised extraordinary influence over ordinary life.

Whatever one’s conclusions about the disease itself, millions of Americans confronted legal and civic questions they had rarely been required to consider:

For many Americans, those questions never went away.

They arise in different forms in encounters involving police, licensing, taxation, property, courts, travel, employment, administrative agencies, firearms, speech, searches, fines, government notices and countless other interactions between the individual and the modern state.

The circumstances change. The foundational question remains:

Another about natural law.

A court case somebody tells you changes everything.

A document somebody says worked.

An attorney telling you it will not.

A government official insisting the matter is settled.

An online expert offering a completely different explanation.

Sooner or later, the real problem becomes apparent:

Our rights are God-given. Government did not create them. But possessing rights and knowing how to exercise them responsibly are not the same thing.

A people who cannot evaluate authority increasingly submit to whatever carries the appearance of authority. A people who forget the source of their rights can gradually begin treating permission as freedom. Over generations, those habits can become customs, institutions and assumptions inherited by the next generation.

The process is not irreversible. Self-government begins with people willing to learn, question, investigate, exercise judgment and accept responsibility for what they choose to do.

And when someone claims authority over them, they are prepared to ask: