Below is Part III - The Real History of Lawyers,
Part III — The Invention of “Legal Persons”: How Lawyers Turned People Into Paper
As my research deepened, I reached one of the most unsettling discoveries in the entire history of the legal profession. It emerges slowly, almost innocently at first, until you realize you are staring at a conceptual sleight-of-hand so profound that it reshaped civilization: the invention of the legal person.
It is here—as we pass from the medieval into the early modern period—that lawyers stopped being merely interpreters of royal authority and became architects of an entirely new metaphysical category. They created something that had never existed before: a second, artificial version of the human being, made of paper, controlled by courts, and owned by the system.
It may sound dramatic, but the historical record is clear. The legal profession created a duplicate of you. And the system deals with that entity, not the real you.
The Problem That Created the Paper Person
To understand how this happened, imagine a growing kingdom with expanding commerce, inheritance disputes, maritime ventures, intergenerational wealth, and increasingly complex financial activities. Kings and nobles needed a way to manage obligations that outlived the individuals involved. A merchant might die on a voyage, a partnership might dissolve, or a debt might transcend the life of the one who owed it.
The legal system faced a dilemma. If everything died with the individual, continuity collapsed. But if obligations could be detached from the person and treated as abstract entities, legal business could carry on forever.
The lawyers’ solution was brilliantly devious: create a fictional person—a legal construct that could own property, incur debts, sue and be sued, survive your death, and, most importantly, be controlled entirely through the courts.
This is the origin of the “person” as the legal system defines it. Not you, the breathing, thinking creature made in the image of God. But a paper-based surrogate.
In the early records, you see this fiction emerge first in merchant guilds, then in the charters of the Catholic Church, and finally in corporations—literally “bodies made in writing.” As this fictional persona became normalized, lawyers realized they could expand the concept further. Why not create one for every individual?
Why not duplicate the entire human population on parchment?
That is precisely what they ultimately did.
The State Discovers the Power of Paper People
When governments saw the potential of legal fictions, they adopted the practice with zeal. A monarch could now assign obligations to a person who did not physically exist. Taxes could be levied. Debts could be collected. Rights could be diminished or expanded without affecting the living being directly. The legal fiction became the state’s most versatile tool.
Over time, these artificial persons multiplied:
• Corporations
• Trusts
• Estates
• Foundations
• Maritime entities
• Municipal corporations
• Birth-registered “natural persons”
The last category is the most important for our purposes.
The legal system began registering births not to record joyous events, but to create formal legal entities—shell identities—that courts could control. From that moment forward, every individual had two parallel existences: the living being and the legal person.
One is real. The other is property.
Lawyers understood that once you engage with the legal system, it does not address you—the living man or woman—but your paper representative. The system protects itself by speaking only to the fiction it created.
This is why the legal profession reveres procedure over substance. The procedure governs the paper person. The substance concerns the living soul—and the courts have no jurisdiction over souls.
A Profession That Speaks Two Languages
When I first encountered this dual-person system, it seemed like an abstract philosophical oddity. But then I realized its full implications. The legal profession speaks two languages at once: one for real people, and one for legal persons. The entire structure of legalese—the specialized lexicon that evolved in the bar-taverns of old England—is built to enforce this divide.
The courts rarely communicate in normal human language. Instead, they use coded terminology: “person,” “individual,” “resident,” “occupant,” “citizen,” “natural person,” “subject.” Each of these terms has a specific technical meaning, rarely matching the common understanding. This mismatch allows lawyers to engage in a ritual of translation that ordinary people cannot navigate.
It is a magician’s act. The lawyer knows both languages. You know only one. When you step into a legal setting without training, you believe they are speaking English. They are not. They are speaking the language of the legal person—the artificial entity.
This is how good men lose in court while believing they were speaking plainly. The system isn’t speaking to them; it is speaking to their legal avatar.
How the BAR Gained Monopoly Control
The bar associations, recognizing the immense power of linguistic monopoly, began to tighten their grip. Only members of the bar could represent the artificial persons in court. Only bar members could interpret legal language. Only bar members could speak for the system they themselves designed. This was not an evolution of justice—it was an evolution of exclusivity.
The legal profession became a closed priesthood, not only because of the technical knowledge required, but because of the structural barriers erected to maintain control:
• Licensing
• Accreditation
• Examination rituals
• Oaths of allegiance to the system
• Mandatory training in legal reasoning
These were not implemented to protect the public. They were implemented to protect the profession’s monopoly over the artificial persons they created.
It is a brilliant control system:
Create a fictional entity → Force every human into it → Make it impossible for anyone but a lawyer to interact with it → Rule the entire society through that entity.
The Courtroom as a Ritual Space
Once you understand the creation of the legal person, the rituals of a courtroom start to make sense. The judge enters and everyone rises, not because of respect for the man or woman wearing the robe, but because this is a symbolic temple. The robe itself is a vestige of medieval church garb, connecting the modern judge to an ancient priesthood. The elevated bench signifies spiritual authority. The language is formal, archaic, and affected.
Everything is slow, ceremonial, and deliberate.
This is not accidental. The courtroom is not a rational administrative space—it is a ritual environment designed to reinforce the power of the legal fiction. Its architecture, its language, its costumes, and its customs are all constructed to remind the participants that the proceedings are not about the living being. They are about the paper person.
Understanding this distinction is essential. Without it, one cannot understand the true history of lawyers.
The Hidden Strength of the System
What makes this entire structure so durable is not its justice, but its complexity. The legal person system is so convoluted, so intricately woven into banking, taxation, property ownership, and corporate operation, that most people cannot even conceive that it exists. They live their entire lives dealing with the fictional persona without ever questioning its origin.
And lawyers—who are raised, trained, examined, accredited, and sworn into the system—become its guardians. Many do so with honest intentions. They believe they are upholding justice. But the system was never built for justice. It was built for control, continuity, and the protection of wealth and power as it moves across generations through paper identities.
The legal person is the bridge between medieval aristocracy and modern bureaucracy. Lawyers are the bridgekeepers.
In Part IV, we will examine how these paper persons and their legal guardians joined forces with banking networks to create the debt-based systems that now bind entire nations.
-