General (not jurisdiction-specific)

Public law governs the state and its relationship with the people, and private law governs relationships between private persons. Private duties mostly arise from consent, while public-law duties come from constitutions and statutes.

Consent is central to private contracts and to the political theory of government. Public-law duties such as licensing, registration and taxes come from statutes, and courts do not treat them as contracts a person can cancel.

Uncontested affidavits filed in a lawsuit may be accepted by the court as true. Courts have not treated mailed affidavits, commercial maxims or private discharge bonds as binding on anyone who does not answer them.

Judges are immune from damages for judicial acts unless they act in the clear absence of all jurisdiction, and officials can be sued when they violate constitutional rights. Several immunity quotations in right to travel affidavits do not appear in the cases they cite.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly said that sovereignty resides in the people and that unconstitutional laws are void. The same opinions describe the people acting through the Constitution and the institutions it creates.

Courts have called cars consumer goods, household effects and personal effects under the UCC, customs law and wills. Each label comes from the law that uses it, and none of these cases addresses registration or driver licensing.

Federal law does describe the United States as a body corporate and lists “a Federal corporation” in the debt-collection definition. Those definitions apply to their own chapters, and no statute makes U.S. citizens employees of a corporation.

State citizenship and U.S. citizenship are distinct, and the cases quoting that distinction are real. The same cases say a person born or naturalized here holds both, and the nationality statutes limit non-citizen national status to people tied to American Samoa and Swains Island.

The right to travel is a recognized liberty. The courts that quoted it in highway cases still upheld licensing, registration and for-hire regulation, and modern courts hold that the right to travel does not include driving without a license.

A right to travel affidavit quotes real decisions on liberty, citizenship and sovereignty. Courts have read the same decisions as allowing states to license drivers and register vehicles.