Administrative idolatry and the 'shape of law'
Why misleading court names are only the boundary symptom of a deeper sickness: ungodly principalities ruling through the administrative state
Just over a year ago, I stood in Carlisle Magistrates’ Court at a preliminary “mention” hearing. The hearing had been called because I had received no evidence from the prosecution with only two weeks remaining before the scheduled trial date. I made a simple submission: there was no case to answer. There was no evidence of any crime or cause of action, and what material existed was exculpatory. The judge did not rule on the point and instead deferred the matter to trial, which is procedurally permissible.
Before the hearing closed, however, I raised one final question.
Why was the name of the court on the summons not listed in the official HMCTS directory?
I expected a technical explanation. Perhaps some reassurance that the system was confusing but legitimate. Instead I was treated with open disdain. In that moment I knew something was deeply wrong. I did not yet have the language to describe it — the dignity of the defendant, the boundary conditions of law, the erosion of constitutional integrity under modern administrative practice. But I knew that if the text on a coercive legal instrument is opaque or misleading, then the infection lies deeper than a clerical mistake. Something at the root of the proceedings had gone wrong.
Over the following year I learned what had changed. After reforms in 2003, the magistrates’ court system in England and Wales came to operate largely on functional authority rather than formal attribution. If the procedural machinery turns correctly and the statutory scheme is followed, the system treats the result as both lawful and legitimate. Yet the documents it issues still present titles and names as if authority were formally traceable to determinate tribunals established under law, as in the historic system.
This mismatch has drawn academic and civil society criticism for years. Administrative convenience has blurred judicial accountability, and automation has amplified the effect. On the surface a malformed court name on a summons might appear trivial. The hearing venue exists, the bench is appointed, and the charge has been issued. From the system’s perspective this is merely bureaucratic untidiness — a matter for reform, not revolt.
Viewed purely as a legal problem, the system smooths the gap away. Authority is said to attach to the statutory scheme in general. Personal traceability and formal attribution become secondary to throughput. If the process works, the outcome is deemed legitimate.
That is the narrowest framing, and the one on which the state prefers to rest its case.
But widen the frame slightly and a civil rights problem appears immediately. If you were accused of “Code 37”, told you were being prosecuted by “Phi Beta Omega”, and informed that your fate would be decided by “Tribunal KG6BX65” — none of which appeared in any public directory — you would rightly question whether a fair trial was even possible. Opacity in the identity of the charge or the prosecutor is fatal to the legitimacy of criminal proceedings. The same constitutional logic applies to the identity of the tribunal.
Yet even this does not reach the heart of the matter.
When you receive a summons, the name of the court at the top of the document presents itself as a juridical claim to authority. It is the moment where law speaks. If authority has in fact been centralised into a national administrative system, but the document presents legacy names of bounded courts, something subtle but important has happened. The state has not truly spoken law. It has presented administrative labels.
This is neither genuine law speaking — juris-dictio — nor the classic American concept of “colour of law”, a false pretence to legal authority. It is something slightly different. A third category.
The shape of law.
The form of law remains, but the substance has been hollowed out.
Historically, jurisdiction required attribution. A court could bind a defendant because its authority could be traced to a determinate tribunal established under law, whose officers were commissioned and accountable. The declaration of the tribunal was therefore not decorative. It was the act through which authority was declared and bounded.
Administrative systems invert this logic. Authority is treated as inherent in the procedural scheme itself. If the process is followed and the statutory mechanism operates, the question of attribution becomes secondary. The system functions; therefore it is legitimate.
That is the crucial misstep.
Once jurisdiction derives from procedure rather than declared authority, the natural limits of law begin to dissolve. If procedure becomes the source of jurisdiction, then law expands wherever procedure can reach. What was once confined to particular courts and defined powers becomes a general administrative capability capable of extending into every area of life.
This is why the disappearance of formal attribution matters. It marks a transition from law as declared authority to governance as administrative process. The state no longer needs to clearly say who speaks the law. It only needs to ensure the machinery keeps operating. But law exists to limit power, not to expand it. When process becomes the justification for power, something essential has been lost.
Historically in Britain there existed a visible chain of authority. From the monarch as head of state and church, to the Crown in Parliament, to commissions of justices of the peace, and onward to individual sittings of the court. Authority could be traced backwards along that chain. The system was imperfect, but it was intended to be grounded in a moral hierarchy that ultimately derived from the Most High.
That structure has quietly been displaced. Procedural outcomes are now treated as sufficient to bind without the same formally declared hierarchy. Humanist administrative logic has replaced a theological conception of authority.
The result is a boundary problem far deeper than separation of powers. Law is legitimate only because it is conditional, constrained, and clearly bounded. Men and women are born with an existence anterior to the state’s claims upon them. Outside totalitarian doctrine, the state’s jurisdiction must begin somewhere and end somewhere.
But when coercive instruments carry juridical claims that are opaque or misleading, those boundaries begin to collapse. Politics spills into the whole of life.
The state claims jurisdiction over you without clearly declaring the source of that authority. When officials assert that court names have “no legal meaning”, the reciprocal structure of law disappears. Government is freed from attributable responsibility while the citizen remains bound to procedures that can expand indefinitely.
Communism made the state an explicit substitute for God. Administrative managerialism achieves the same result more subtly. Authority becomes self-justifying.
The outcome is law without speech and authority without truth.
Submission to such authority becomes an implied act of worship. In the case of “ghost courts”, citizens are asked to accept that the legibility of the tribunal itself is no longer necessary for legitimacy. The state may determine legality within its own framework, but it cannot ultimately define the boundary of justice. That must be discerned, not decreed.
When the state claims the final word on that boundary, it asks for something that belongs only to God.
That is idolatry.
My experience under Covid taught me what happens when the state acts outside its proper moral limits. The consequences were not abstract. They were deadly. Coming out of that period, my reaction to opaque coercive power is no longer polite disagreement. It is refusal.
I am accountable to a higher authority for the moral consent I give. When a summons names a tribunal that corresponds to no identifiable legal object, the problem is not merely technical. The truthfulness of the authority claim has already failed, regardless of what a court might later declare about legality.
This is why procedural supremacy is more dangerous than overt tyranny. Tyranny at least declares itself openly. Administrative simulation preserves the appearance of legitimacy while hollowing out its foundation. Anyone who attempts to inspect those foundations is treated not as a citizen seeking truth, but as a trespasser.
The sovereign citizen movement says laws require consent to bind. That is wrong. Law binds because it is true and just. But when law abandons truth and becomes self-legitimising procedure, it ceases to be law at all. Simulations take over — convincing ones — and dissent becomes rare because the illusion is so effective.
After Nuremberg we supposedly accepted that procedural obedience does not justify injustice. Yet the world has quietly rebuilt systems that depend on exactly that premise.
The true conflict here is not about court names, administrative efficiency, or the boundaries of judicial convenience. It is about the difference between authority traceable to Source and the quiet elevation of the state into an idol.
For that reason I eventually withdrew my Judicial Review. Once the core problem is spiritual rather than technical, asking the system to repair itself through deeper procedural entanglement becomes futile. The problem is not that the system operates through functional authority. The problem is that it refuses to declare that fact honestly.
Formal attribution is evaded. Procedural defences are invoked. Continuity doctrines are deployed. The system pretends its shortcuts are not shortcuts.
But legitimacy cannot coexist with deception.
The battle therefore was never going to be won in court. My role was simply to bear witness. I refused to participate in idolatry. As a result I was denied a fair hearing and branded a criminal for a matter that never had any substance to begin with.
That is a price worth paying.
Better to be in the bad books of men who operate outside truth than to answer, in the end, for having knowingly consented to falsehood.
The law is the law because it is true and just — not because it has a shape, nor a colour.
That is why I declined to recognise the court’s jurisdiction.
It was speaking in outlines and hues, not truth.