Add your name and address for updates and information. 

An All-Day Conversation About the American Inheritance
and What We Do With It Now

Recorded July 4, 2026

On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Americans gathered with Commoner Law Group for an unusual kind of Independence Day celebration.

For twelve hours, we read, questioned, disagreed, remembered, and reasoned together about the principles upon which America was founded and the responsibility those principles place upon ordinary people today.
The conversation followed a deliberate course: from The Inheritance, through The Grievances and The Fracture, toward The Commoner's Response, Group Reflections, and finally The Mutual Pledge.

Four parts are now available to watch. The remaining conversations will be released soon.

250 YEARS LATER, THE QUESTION RETURNS TO US

The Declaration of Independence announced principles that reach far beyond the political circumstances of 1776: human beings possess rights that precede government; just government depends upon the consent of the governed; and when government becomes destructive of its proper ends, the people retain both the authority and responsibility to act.

Those propositions placed an extraordinary trust in ordinary people.

Two hundred fifty years later, we gathered to ask what became of that inheritance.

America has changed almost beyond recognition. Government has grown, institutions have multiplied, technology has transformed human relationships, wealth and power have become concentrated in new ways, and many of the civic bonds through which Americans once governed themselves have weakened.

Yet the fundamental question remains remarkably familiar:

Can a free people govern themselves?

The American Commoner — 250 Years Later became a twelve-hour exploration of that question—not in the  abstract, but through history, American law, disagreement, lived experience, possible remedies, and the voices of ordinary Americans themselves.

Four questions guided the day:

What was entrusted to us?
What happened to that inheritance?
What remains available to ordinary people today?
What do we owe one another and the generations that follow?
THE INHERITANCE
Featuring Dr. Frederick Graves
What is the American inheritance?

The opening conversation returns to first principles: true law, natural rights, self-government, the sovereignty of the people, the jury, civic responsibility, and the deeper meaning of a nation founded upon the proposition that ordinary people possess the capacity to govern themselves.
THE COMMONER'S RESPONSE
Featuring Daniel Mentz
After inheritance, grievances and fracture comes responsibility.

This conversation turns toward remedies. Daniel Mentz presents pathways for greater independence and private action, while the larger discussion considers several responses available to Americans who believe the present condition cannot simply continue: stay and fix, exit and build, withdraw consent, and hold power accountable.

The conversation eventually reaches an indispensable question for every alternative community and every republic alike: How will we govern ourselves?
THE GRIEVANCES
Featuring Mindy Pechenuk
The Declaration moved from principle to particulars. Its grievances made a record of abuses that the colonists believed demonstrated a government departing from its legitimate purpose.

Two hundred fifty years later, this conversation asks what those grievances teach us about power, responsibility, civic courage, and the duty of a people who believe their government has gone astray.
THE FRACTURE
Featuring James Roguski and
Professor Deana Pollard Sacks
A people charged with governing themselves must somehow remain a people.

This candid conversation enters some of the divisions now separating Americans—politics, race, institutional trust, speech, due process, global governance and competing understandings of justice—and demonstrates what can happen when people remain in conversation long enough to reach for the principles beneath their disagreements.

250 YEARS LATER, THE QUESTION RETURNS TO US

The Fourth of July commemorates an event. The American Commoner was created to recover a responsibility.

The men who signed the Declaration could announce independence. They could fight for it. They could establish institutions intended to preserve it. They could leave behind principles, examples, warnings, and an extraordinary constitutional inheritance.

They could not govern the country 250 years later. That belongs to us. Every generation receives America under different circumstances. Each must learn again what makes a free people free, recognize the forces that threaten that freedom, cultivate the character necessary for self-government, and decide what it will preserve and pass forward.

Commoner Law Group exists for that work.

We study American law because law reveals the relationship between the people and the institutions they create. We study juries, due process, rights, remedies, public authority and private action because self-government requires more than political opinion. It requires competence.

And we create conversations like The American Commoner because free people must remain capable of reasoning together about principles that matter—even when they disagree about how those principles should be applied.

America endures when Americans take responsibility for it.

The American Commoner asks whether a free people can still govern themselves 250 years after the Declaration of Independence. That question eventually comes home to each of us. Self-government requires Americans who understand the principles of their inheritance, know the law and institutions created to secure their liberty, and possess the competence to act when those principles are threatened.

The Great American Law Series: Overcoming Government Oppression is Commoner Law Group's foundational course in that education.

Instructor Frits Van Mastright came to the law through necessity. Beginning as a young man, encounters with government sent him repeatedly into law libraries to learn what authority public officials possessed, what rights belonged to him, and what principles of American law governed the relationship between the individual and the state. What began as self-defense became a decades-long study of American common law, natural rights, due process, jurisdiction, government authority, and lawful remedy.

This self-directed course organizes that education into more than twelve hours of instruction, original documents, court cases, supporting materials, workshops, and document templates. It is designed to give an ordinary American a foundation from which to understand the law for himself and make more informed judgments about his rights, responsibilities, and encounters with government.
Your inheritance is worth cherishing. Learn the law to secure it.
We are not attorneys and do not give legal advice.
All training and services fulfill educational purposes only.