History Files: 1234 CE-Present
The History of the BAR Association
Ending Sovereign Immunity and Restoring the American Republic
First Treatise to End Sovereign Immunity
by Sondra Wilson. Updated Aug. 1, 2025.
This series of treatises reveals how the Bar Association evolved from a legal authority who, for centuries, shielded the British Crown from accountability through the doctrine of sovereign immunity, to enforcing the King’s oppressive laws leading up and during the American Revolution, to then reforming and now monopolizing American legal systems under the American Bar Association (ABA). Today, the Bar is deeply embedded across all three branches of government. It concentrates legal power in elite hands, restricts public access to justice, and has reinstituted sovereign immunity—shielding authority from accountability once again.
This concern is not new. Jefferson’s warning in 1821 rings true today, “[T]he germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little to-day and a little tomorrow, and advancing it’s noiseless step, like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the states, and the government of all be consolidated into one. To this I am opposed; because whenever all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.” (Jefferson, 1821).
§1 On Sovereign Immunity
The principle that the sovereign cannot be sued in is own courts or in any other court without its consent and permission; a principle which applies with full force to the several states of the Union. 49 Am J1st States § 91.
The principle that the United States is immune from suit except where it consents thereto, as by a statue such as the Federal Tort Claims Act. 28 U.S.C. §§ 1491 et seq.; 20 Am J2d Cts § 152.
The principle that a sovereign state is bound to respect the independence of every other sovereign state, so that the courts of one country will not sit in judgment on the acts of the government of another, done within its own territory. 20 Am J2d Cts § 152.
This alleged “doctrine”, contrived under the rule of King Edward I and based on the premise that “a king can do no wrong”, was later slipped into U.S. law just after the Reconstruction Era ended, under Hans v. Louisiana 134 U.S. 1 (1890).
It has since served as a judicial shield for government actors, enabling systemic abuses without accountability. This treatise supports the foundational principles of the American Accreditation Registrar (AAR), which seeks to restore constitutional integrity.
§2 Anglo-Saxon Common Law
Anglo-Saxon law, dating from the 5th century to 1066, consisted of royal decrees and local customs developed by Germanic tribes (Black’s Law Dictionary, 2014). This customary framework laid the foundation for English common law — a system rooted in judicial reasoning rather than codified statutes.
Patrick Devlin’s The Judge (1979) offers a critical distinction between common law and civil codes:
“Historically, [the common law] is made quite differently from the Continental code. The code precedes judgments; the common law follows them. The code articulates in chapters, sections, and paragraphs the rules in accordance with which judgments are given. The common law on the other hand is inarticulate until it is expressed in a judgment. Where the code governs, it is the judge’s duty to ascertain the law from the words which the code uses. Where the common law governs, the judge, in what is now the forgotten past, decided the case in accordance with morality and custom and later judges followed his decision. They did not do so by construing the words of his judgment. They looked for the reason which had made him decide the case the way he did, the ratio decidendi as it came to be called. Thus it was the principle of the case, not the words, which went into the common law. so historically the common law is much less fettering than a code.”
This organic, principle-based system was once the bedrock of Anglo-American jurisprudence. However, its integrity began to erode as judicial interpretations sometimes strayed from its foundational spirit, laying the groundwork for its systematic dismantling. For instance, Thomas Jefferson himself expressed concern over judicial overreach and the distortion of common law principles. In a letter to John Cartwright in 1824, he critiqued the judiciary’s “usurpation of legislative powers,” specifically citing their erroneous assertion that Christianity was inherently part of common law:
“I was glad to find in your book… of the Judiciary usurpation of legislative powers; for such the judges have usurped in their repeated decisions that Christianity is a part of the Common law. the proof of the contrary which you have adduced is incontrovertible, to wit, that
but it may amuse you to show when, and by what means they stole this law in upon us. in a case of Quare impedit in the year-book 24. H. 6. folio. 38. [anno 1458.]…” (National Archives 1824).
Jefferson’s observations highlight an early form of judicial activism, where judges began to “steal” or introduce new interpretations into the common law, moving away from its original organic, customary basis. This trend of judicial redefinition, as Jefferson noted, marked a significant departure from the common law’s traditional function and foreshadowed its later systematic manipulation.
§3 In 1234 CE , teaching the “Common Law” became Illegal
During the 12th and early 13th centuries, legal education in the City of London was largely conducted by clergy. Two pivotal disruptions reshaped this tradition:
1.) On December 2, 1234, King Henry III issued a royal decree explicitly banning any institutes of legal education within the City’s walls (Douthwaite, 1886).
2.) Around the same time, Pope Gregory IX issued a papal bull (part of the 1231–1234 Decretales Gregorii IX, promulgated by the bull Rex pacificus) reasserting clerical monopoly over legal instruction and effectively forbidding clergy from teaching common law, in favor of canon law (Watt, Barton, & Benham, 1928; see also Decretals of Gregory IX, 1234; Elisei, n.d.).
As a result, common law practitioners relocated just outside the City to Holborn and founded the Inns of Court, which later became exclusive gatekeepers regulating legal education and practice (Evans, 2015).
This transition marked the onset of legal stratification—law ceased to be a public tool and became a professionalized weapon of the elite.
As Edward Carpenter warned, “The courts of law have become the stronghold of the rich and the powerful… not a temple of justice, but a fortress of privilege” (Carpenter, 1896, p. 63).
Similarly, Reginald Heber Smith observed, “The law is not designed to give justice to the poor. It is designed to keep order among the poor, and power in the hands of those who already have it” (Smith, 1919, p. 47).
§4 History of the BAR Association
Excerpt from BAR Council’s website:
“Lawyers took over the Inner and Middle Temples from the Order of Knights Templar, a Common Bench having been established at Westminster in the late 13th and early 14th century. Lincoln’s and Gray’s Inns grew from association with Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln and the de Gray family respectively. From the 17th century onward, the right to practise as an advocate in the Royal Courts was restricted to members of the Inns, the Bar becoming firmly a referral profession acting on the instructions of solicitors in the 19th century.
Discipline over the Bar has, since the reign of Edward I, been the responsibility of the judges; in practice carried out by the benchers of the Inns but subject to the visitorial jurisdiction of the judges. The General Council of the Bar (Bar Council) was formed in 1894 to deal with matters of professional etiquette.
In 1974, the Bar Council and the governing body of the Inns, the Senate, combined to form the Senate of the Inns of Court and the Bar. However, on 1 January 1987, in line with the recommendations of a report on the Constitution of the Senate by Lord Rawlinson PC QC, a Council of the Inns of Court was re-established separately. The Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 designated the Bar Council as the authorised body for the profession,” (The BAR Council July 1 2025).
This evolution transformed the Bar into a centralized authority, controlling not only who may speak in court, but what legal narratives are permissible.
§5 Friday the 13th: Knights Templar burned at the Stake, Legal System Abducted by Early BAR
Founded around 1118 as a monastic military order devoted to the protection of pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land following the Christian capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, the Knights Templar quickly became one of the richest and most influential groups of the Middle Ages, thanks to lavish donations from the crowned heads of Europe, eager to curry favor with the fierce Knights. By the turn of the 14th century, the Templars had established a system of castles, churches and banks throughout Western Europe. And it was this astonishing wealth that would lead to their downfall.
On Friday, October 13, 1307. Grand Master Jacques de Molay, the Order’s treasurer, and numerous knights were burned at the stake due to allegations including heresy, devil worship and spitting on the cross, homosexuality, fraud, and financial corruption. (Maranzani, Barbara. May 28, 2025).
Above image source borrowed from Real History in Star Wars: Order 66 and Friday the 13th (Habibipour, Aaron 2021).
Their properties, including the Inner and Middle Temples, were seized by lawyers, marking the beginning of aristocratic control over legal institutions.
§6 Edward I, Sovereign Immunity, and the Bar’s Defense of the Crown
While not codified in his time, the doctrine of sovereign immunity reflects legal norms that solidified under King Edward I (1272–1307), a monarch who centralized royal authority and transformed English legal administration. This included the king’s immunity from being sued in his own courts without royal consent, enforced through the procedure of Petition of Right (Pollock & Maitland, 1899; Pugh, 1953). Later monarchs would formalize this logic under the maxim “the king can do no wrong,” embedding sovereign immunity into British legal culture (Fortin, 2024).
Legal redress against the Crown required a petition of right, which first needed royal consent before any claim could proceed (Pugh, 1953). This procedural barrier ensured that sovereign entities could rarely be held accountable, and was enforced via the Inns of Court — professional guilds that served royal interests by disciplining attorneys and controlling legal narratives (Evans, 2015).
The Bar became a de facto extension of the monarchy, shaping precedent and enforcing boundaries of legal dissent. Its defense of sovereign immunity endured beyond Edward’s reign and through the colonial period, solidifying British jurisprudence as fundamentally hierarchical. Fortin (2024) notes that “the American doctrine of sovereign immunity rests on a premise that is most un-English — the sovereign’s status as above the law.”
Although the American Revolution repudiated royal infallibility — with the Declaration of Independence objecting to the king’s refusal to permit “laws of immediate and pressing importance” — post-revolutionary jurisprudence subtly reintroduced sovereign immunity. In Hans v. Louisiana (1890), the U.S. Supreme Court cited English precedent to bar lawsuits against states, effectively reinstating the logic of Edwardian immunity (134 U.S. 1).
The Bar, now fully embedded within the U.S. legal infrastructure, continued to support this doctrine not as a remnant of monarchy but as an instrument of bureaucratic insulation. The result was a legal culture where government actors operate above reproach, and where public accountability remains suppressed by procedural gatekeeping.
Read Part Two
John Locke and the First U.S. Flag
References
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The BAR Council. (Retrieved July 1, 2025) About us: A More Detailed History of the BAR Council. https://www.barcouncil.org.uk/about/about-us.html. Screenshot in case the page gets moved or deleted:
Black, H. C., & Garner, B. A. (Eds.). (2014). Black’s law dictionary (10th ed., Deluxe ed.). Thomson Reuters.
Carpenter, E. (1896). Civilisation: Its cause and cure (7th ed.). Swan Sonnenschein & Co.
Douthwaite, W. R. (1886). Gray’s Inn, Its History & Associations. Reeves and Turner. OCLC 2578698.p.2
Elisei, B. (n.d.). The Medieval Law School and the Decretals of Gregory IX. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved from Berkeley Law Robbins Collection materials.
Evans, I. (2015). A Brief History of Barristers and the Inns of Court. Retrieved from: https://hubpages.com/education/A-Brief-History-of-Barristers-the-Inns-of-Court.
Fortin, M. (2024). Judicial Authority and Sovereign Exception. Oxford Academic.
Gregory IX’s papal bull Rex pacificus, associated with the promulgation of the Decretales Gregorii IX (Liber extra, 1234), addressed canon law faculties at Bologna and Paris and asserted papal authority over legal instruction (Elisei, n.d.; Decretals of Gregory IX, 1234).
Habibipour, A. (2021, August 13). Real History in Star Wars: Order 66 and Friday the 13th. Medium. Retrieved from: https://medium.com/@aaronhabibipour/real-history-in-star-wars-order-66-and-friday-the-13th-83b170678b47.
Maranzani, B. (2025, May 28). Why Friday the 13th Spelled Doom for the Knights Templar. History.com. Retrieved from. https://www.history.com/articles/why-friday-the-13th-spelled-doom-for-the-knights-templar.
National Archives. (1824). Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright, 5 June 1824. Retrieved from: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-4313.
Jefferson, T. (1821, August 18). Thomas Jefferson to Charles Hammond. Founders Online, National Archives.
Pollock, F., & Maitland, F. W. (1899). The history of English law before the time of Edward I (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Pugh, R. B. (1953). The Crown and local government in England 1500–1640. Oxford University Press.
United States Supreme Court. Hans v. Louisiana, 134 U.S. 1 (1890).
Smith, R. H. (1919). Justice and the poor: A study of the present denial of justice to the poor and of the agencies making more equal their position before the law. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Watt, F., Barton, D. P., & Benham, C. (1928). The Story of the Inns of Court. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. OCLC 77565485 p.133