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But to otherwise allow a party to bring in claims of "fairness" from the outside, to now operate on the contract, would be to work a Tort on the other party that such "fairness" operates against. This is an important concept to understand with contracts. As a Principle of Nature, Judges are correct when they toss out your arguments that sound in the pleasing tone of Tort, when you are a party to a Contract Law jurisprudential grievance. Willful Failure to File and Highway Traffic Infractions are all Contract Law grievances. Remember that invisible contracts are in effect whenever benefits have been accepted and reciprocity is being expected back in return. Your use of the state's highways automatically creates the existence of such an invisible juristic contract, and also attaches the summary features of a giblet cracking regulatory adjudicating Star Chamber that American Traffic Courts have infamous reputations for.
Occasionally, I have heard rumblings from Highway Contract Protesters to the effect that both the United States and the several States lack jurisdiction to exclude foot passengers from using the Interstate Highway System. They cite the Common Law Doctrine that:
"...all persons have a right to walk on a public highway, and are entitled to the exercise of reasonable care on the part of persons driving carriages along it." - Joseph Angell in Law of Highways, at 454 [Little Brown (1886)]. [Joseph Angell also cites Brooks vs. Schwerin, 54 New York 343 to state that foot passengers have equal rights with those driving in carriages.]
The answer lies in another Common Law Doctrine that gave improved methods of Locomotion Superior Privileges on highway use. See a Case entitled Macomber vs. Nichols, 34 Michigan 212 (1875), for an Opinion by Chief Judge Cooley discussing this Doctrine, and the interesting Case citations therein. See also Road Rights and Liability of Wheelmen by George Clemenston [Callaghan & Company, Chicago (1895)]. Sorry, Protesters, but our Father's Common Law is not being damaged by the placement of signs at entrances to Interstate Highways that exclude foot passengers; such Public Notice reasonably creates expectations of reciprocity by the highway's owners that they are conditionally offering the use of that highway to you as a benefit, and so now contracts are in effect. Those Interstate Highways are special purpose limited use highways constructed along sealed corridors where any type of use limitation is purely discretionary by their Government owners. Government is not required to build those Interstate Highways for you, so when they do so, they are built and offered for use on their terms.
Yet, there is some minimal merit present in the Patriot position out on the highways. Patriots have been silent on a judicial enlightenment analogy that should be made here, as some Patriots like to enlighten Judges on reasoning and Principles applicable to favorite Patriot factual setting confrontations. The Supreme Court has ruled that shopping center owners, who open up their premises for public ingress and egress, lose some of their property rights, i.e., there is a declension in status from having absolute authority to eject with discretion anyone they want, down to being restrained from doing so.
Marsh vs. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946); [A company owned town had taken on a public function and could not prohibit the distribution of religious material on the town's privately owned streets.]
Amalgamated Food Employees vs. Logan Valley Pizza, 391 U.S. 308 (1968); [Shopping center management cannot interfere with union pickets, reasoning that shopping centers were the functional equivalent of central business districts. (Logan Valley was later modified in Lloyd Corporation vs. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551 (1972)].
Pruneyard Shopping Center vs. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980); [Shopping center management restrained from ejecting persons (high school students) disseminating political literature (a petition in opposition to the United Nations Resolution against Zionism). Affirmed on the basis of adequate and independent California state grounds; property owners face diminished expectations of property rights when their property is open to the public.]
If this legal reasoning, which diminishes the rights of property owners, were to be applied to a highway setting by way of comparative analogy, then the fact that Government Highways are open to the public should, theoretically, partially restrain the State from exercising absolute jurisdiction to eject a person from merely using the highways without a license, down to a reduced property rights status where the mere non-existence of a compelled Driver's License is insufficient grounds for incarceration, absent, perhaps, collaborating causal damages. Of and by itself, that argument won't win any Cases (the quiescent environmental ambiance one enjoys walking down a row of store fronts in a shopping center really does not have any factual parity with the high-powered accelerated velocity of contemporary highways). I know that Protesters would very much like to hear me throw invectives at Traffic Court Star Chamber Magistrates and state that Principles of Nature are being violated by Judges by their consenting to incarcerate unlicensed drivers at Sentencing Hearings, but Traffic Courts are merely enforcing contracts, and no restrainment exists in appellate court rulings or other pronouncing instruments of Law; nowhere is there specific wording to disable expectations of reciprocity denominated in penal terms, on those Highway Contracts.
As for the analogy in status declension, this property rights declension in status experienced by property owners who open up their property for public use is just the same old longstanding Common Law restrainment that English judges placed on the King of England updated and applied to a contemporary Commercial factual setting of privately owned shopping centers, that restrained the King from selectively excluding persons from using the King's Highways by requiring free and open access and use of the King's Highways to everyone.
And in real property law, a variation of this Principle surfaces in the Ingress and Egress Doctrine, which forces the neighbors of a landlocked parcel of land to yield some of their property rights and grant a right of way easement to the nearest public thoroughfare for the benefit of the fellow who is landlocked.
The application of this Principle also surfaces again with the rights of property owners adjoining public highways, to yield their expectations of exclusion and privacy whenever the highway itself becomes impassable or otherwise founderous, and allows travelers to leave the highway and start using your property.
"If the usual track is impassable, it is for the general good that people should be entitled to pass another line." - Lord Mansfield, in Comyn's Digest, "Chemin," D.6.
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