Lawful or legal?
What's the difference, FFS?
The Law of the Land (sometimes referred to as Equity, Common or Natural Law) is straightforward and may be simply summarised as: “Do No Harm”. All living men and women are equal in the eyes of God and are born with inalienable rights and freedoms, enshrined in The Act of Settlement (1700) Section IV - provided they keep the peace.
Implicitly this means that any contracts you enter into are promises, and in order to remain within the law, you must honour your contracts. This gives rises rise to the term "The Honourable Gentleman" and "His Honour". The law and honour are intertwined; you can't have one without the other. So, to summarise; do no harm and act in and with honour in your contracts.
Legal is an all-encompassing term used to cover legislation - the rules and policies used to govern and control society. In the UK, legislation is created in parliament, and we the people are presumed to have agreed to them by consent. This consent is individual not collective. Legislation is statutory and contained in Statutes, known as Acts of Parliament.
These Acts and statutes are, for the most part, not laws. They are parliamentary legislated policies which determine what is ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’; words which are derived from the word ‘legislated’ and ‘legislation’. Blacks Law Dictionary defines a Statute as "a legislative rule of society given the force of Law by consent of the governed." As Theresa May said "we govern by consent". The same, of course, is true of the police.
We must however distinguish between superior, constitutional statutes, primary and secondary legislation. Examples of superior constitutional statutes are Magna Carta 1215, The Coronation Oath Act 1688, The Bill of Rights 1689, and The Act of Settlement 1700.
On 21 July 1993, the Speaker of The House of Commons issued a reminder to the courts. Betty Boothroyd said: "There has of course been no amendment to The Bill of Rights . . . the House is entitled to expect that The Bill of Rights will be fully respected by all those appearing before the courts."
She went on to say. As you will be aware, the Bill of Rights is a "constitutional statue" and may not be repealed impliedly. This was stated in the case Thoburn v City of Sunderland, the decision commonly referred to as the "Metric Martyrs" Judgment. This was handed down in the Divisional Court (18 February 2002) by Lord Justice Laws and Mr Justice Crane (I will paraphrase, but have included a copy of the judgment's relevant sections 62 and 63).
62. "We should recognise a hierarchy of Acts of Parliament: as it were "ordinary" statutes and "constitutional statutes." The special status of constitutional statutes follows the special status of constitutional rights. Examples are the . . . Bill of Rights 1689 . . ."
63. "Ordinary statutes may be impliedly repealed. Constitutional statutes may not . . ." This was upheld by Lords Bingham, Scott and Steyn in an appeal which went to the House of Lords on Monday 15 July 2002.
If Acts of Parliament were laws, they would be called ‘Laws of Parliament.’ Acts of Parliament have a noticeable absence of the word law. The question we might ask is why is there this distinction?
The 1689 Bill of Rights makes a distinction between laws and statutes – “All which are utterly and directly contrary to the known laws and statutes and freedom of this realm”.
All acts and statutes refer to a "person" which many people consider to mean that it applies to them as natural living beings. This is another deception; parliament cannot subjugate us living beings, so must resort to spells and sophistry. Furthermore, the Interpretation Act 1978 confirms the definition of a person as follows:
“Person” includes a body of persons corporate or unincorporate. [1889]
Statutes are often incorrectly referred to as laws by barristers and solicitors trained by the State to serve the State’s legal system, but the correct interpretation would be ‘black letter law’.
The word ‘Statute’ is legally defined as: “A legislative rule of society given the force of law by the consent of the governed, a rule, as of a corporation.” By its own definition it is not a law, it is only given the force of law by the consent of those who have entered into an agreement to be governed.
So, to summarise, a law differs from a statute in that law applies to all individuals in the land regardless of consent, for example nobody is above the Common Law crime of murder. Each independent being must be treated equally by the law, and all are subject to the same laws of justice. However statutes require consent and apply to defined sectors of society, as per the details of the relevant Act of Parliament.