living or natural person

I have never quite understood the claim to be ‘a living person’, sometimes ‘a natural person’, made by people who describe themselves as sovereign people.  They have much the same beliefs as sovereign citizens but possibly favour the Magna Carta as their justification rather than the American Constitution or other American texts. They also feel that the term sovereign citizen seems to admit to a citizenship which they deny. 

These people rely on the legal distinction between a natural person and a legal person.  In law it is  possible for humans and non-humans (companies or organisations) to enter into the same kind of contracts, but there is obviously a difference between a person and an organisation, so a person is described as a natural person and an organisation as a juridical or legal person.  When you are born into this world you are a free person, but getting a birth certificate is the first contract that you sign with the corporation called the government as a legal person. Because the last name in the birth certificate is in capital letters these sovereign people have taken on the practice of writing in lower case as natural people and upper case as legal people.

As a free individual they have the power to consent or refuse the various contracts (otherwise known as the laws of the land) which the government puts in front of them.  They have the right to drive without a licence and to refuse to pay taxes, and, more recently, to ignore directives to wear masks and to stay inside state borders. 

They often produce as justification various articles of the Magna Carta which they say applies to all Commonwealth countries. A popular one is Article 39:

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.

Because the urge to claim freedom for the individual and offer resistance to the government (a resistance probably based on particular grievances) is dressed up in pseudo-legalese, it makes the movement more attractive.  Certainly there are more sovereign people than there used to be.