Lawful metonyms and unlawful aliases
A framework for determining the boundary between jurisdiction and simulation
Law is a form of grammar. It needs names — and the real things those names refer to. Every lawful act depends on that relationship between symbol and substance.
The Digital ID debate is, at its core, about whether men and women should be assigned digital names that exist outside any specific context — unlike a driving licence or a taxpayer ID. Such universal identifiers widen the law’s reach and open new channels for abuse, particularly when linked to programmable currencies or automated control systems.
Courts themselves are objects in law. And because law, as grammar, can reason about itself, we can ask: does this court name map onto a real statutory court, or is it a fiction — a figment of administrative imagination?
Introducing metonyms
I was up until three in the morning last night because I made a breakthrough in my “ghost court” analysis. While prompting ChatGPT to explore the difference between lawful shorthand for a court and a name that refers to nothing at all, it used a word I’d never seen before — metonym.
In that instant of man–machine symbiosis, I realised this was the missing concept — the hinge around which my entire case turns. It allows me to collapse a forest of procedural complexity into one elegant linguistic principle.
A metonym is the linguistic neighbour of a metaphor. The latter substitutes by similarity — we might speak of “the heart of the law,” knowing there is no literal organ beating inside it.
A metonym, by contrast, substitutes by contiguity or association — a part or symbol that stands lawfully for the whole. Where the metaphor is interpretive, the metonym is literal; its substitution is grounded in reality. The connection is not imaginative but structural.
Metonyms saturate both ordinary language and legal discourse. We speak of:
“The Crown” as shorthand for the monarch and the institutions of monarchy, including the constitutional statutes governing coronation and succession.
“Whitehall” as shorthand for the civil service and its bureaucracy.
“Parliament” for the legislature, its procedures, and statutes.
“The Ministry of Justice” for the Secretary of State and the executive agency operating under their statutory remit.
“The Treasury Solicitor” for the government’s legal department — not one individual.
“The Home Office” for the legal personality of the Secretary of State for the Home Department.
We could multiply examples: “the court”, “the case”, “the hearing” — each condenses a complex institutional reality into a name the law can manipulate. Law, as a grammar, depends on such metonyms to collapse the world’s complexity into tractable objects that can be reasoned about.
Metaphors serve narrative reasoning by illuminating what is like something else. Metonyms serve legal reasoning by naming what stands for something real. Where metaphors invite “junk” — things that don’t exist — and “infidelity” — omissions that distort — metonyms strive for fidelity: a faithful mapping between name and referent. The stability of law depends on that fidelity. Once a metonym loses its traceable referent, jurisdiction starts to collapse.
Metonyms and “ghost courts”
In the case of the “ghost courts”, there is a real court name defined in section 8(1) of the Courts Act 2003. Until about 2015 or 2016, it appeared on all summonses. Then HMCTS quietly abandoned statutory names altogether.
In my own case, the literal court name would be “The Magistrates’ Court for the North and West Cumbria Local Justice Area.” Metonyms for this could include “The Magistrates’ Court for North and West Cumbria” or even “Carlisle Magistrates’ Court” — because that venue uniquely and unambiguously maps to the full statutory title, despite sharing only the word court. “The Lake District People’s Justice Tribunal” obviously would not.
The problem in my case is subtler. We have a pseudo-metonym: “North and West Cumbria Magistrates’ Court (1752).” It sounds right, but it doesn’t actually map onto any lawful entity. It can’t be sued or held to account in that name because it’s not a legal person at all. It is linguistic theatre — a non-person pretending to sit in judgment.
That brings us to the other half of the puzzle: the difference between lawful and unlawful metonyms:
A lawful metonym both invokes authority and can be held answerable.
An unlawful one is asymmetrical — it claims power without liability.
A perfect example is “TV Licensing.” This is presented as if it were a legal person — the website even ends with “© TV Licensing” — but it’s just a brand name used by the BBC and Capita under the Communications Act 2003. If you sue TV Licensing, Capita turns up, not the BBC. It exercises authority in that name, yet cannot be held responsible as that name. The name itself cannot bear legal weight. That makes it an unlawful metonym — and the BBC and Capita know it, which is why they play this liability shell game.
There’s already a modest body of legal philosophy and case law on metonyms and the naming of corporate entities. Metonyms have a dark side: they can conceal the true source of power and enable usurpation by simulation. That is exactly what has happened here. HMCTS has dispensed with the statutory naming scheme altogether, declaring that “court names have no legal meaning.” That assertion is itself unlawful, directly contrary to Articles 1 and 2 of the Bill of Rights 1689, which prohibit the executive from suspending or dispensing with laws.
This, finally, gives me the key insight that ties the whole thing together — a doctrine simple enough to fit on one line, yet deep enough to expose an entire constitutional failure.
Doctrine of Naming and Jurisdiction
1. Principle
A magistrates’ court is a statutory creature. It cannot exist by custom or administrative usage.
Section 8(1) of the Courts Act 2003 provides that “a magistrates’ court for any local justice area shall be known by such name as is specified in an order made by the Lord Chancellor.”
Jurisdiction depends upon the existence of that legally constituted tribunal. The name in law is not decorative; it identifies the corporate personality through which judicial authority is exercised.
2. The Commutative Doctrine
Authority and accountability are commutative: the entity that wields power must also be capable of being held to account.
If a body issues process under a name that is not that of a court constituted by order, it cannot simultaneously claim the powers of that court and the immunities of judicial office.
Naming, in this sense, is the junction point where executive administration meets constitutional legality.
3. The Metonym Test
A variation in form is curable only if the name functions as a lawful metonym for the court established by statute.
The test of lawful metonymy requires:
Traceability — the term must point uniquely and verifiably to a court named in an Order under section 8(1).
Non-ambiguity — the form must leave no reasonable doubt as to which tribunal is acting.
Consistency of public usage — the abbreviation must reflect an established shorthand for the constituted court, not an internal administrative invention.
Where these conditions are met, the defect is one of form and can be cured under section 123(1) of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980.
Where they are not, the instrument is a nullity.
4. Application
The designation “North and West Cumbria Magistrates’ Court (1752)” fails all three limbs:
There is no Lord Chancellor’s Order specifying such a court.
The suffix “1752” is an invented administrative identifier, not part of any statutory instrument.
HMCTS has explicitly denied that these names are legal entities, describing them as “administrative assignments with no legal meaning.”
Accordingly, the name is not a metonym for “The Magistrates’ Court for the North and West Cumbria Local Justice Area.”
It is an invented label.
Process issued in that name is therefore without jurisdiction.
5. Curability and the Limits of Section 123(1)
Section 123(1) of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980 cures defects in substance or form only where a valid information or summons otherwise emanates from a lawfully constituted court.
It does not authorise the creation of a tribunal that Parliament never constituted.
As held in Anisminic Ltd v Foreign Compensation Commission [1969] 2 AC 147, an act done outside jurisdiction is a nullity, not an irregularity.
The dividing line is between error within jurisdiction (curable) and the exercise of power without jurisdiction (void).
6. Constitutional Context
To dispense with the statutory naming requirement is to dispense with law — directly contrary to Article 1 of the Bill of Rights 1689.
The constitutional principle is simple: justice must be administered only by courts established by law.
Administrative convenience cannot substitute for the Lord Chancellor’s formal act of constitution.
Closing reflections
The answer is very clear: HMCTS is not using lawful metonyms.
The question is what the High Court will do about it.
It is possible the Court will try to fudge it — letting pragmatism override principle.
But the difficulty is that HMCTS has effectively unwound fifty years of modern public law, and several centuries of common law before that, by asserting that jurisdiction attaches to the justices themselves rather than to the tribunal they serve.
This reimagines jurisdiction as a sort of container — something you enter once and carry with you, even if you later act in error. Yet Anisminic [1969] — perhaps the most famous case in administrative law — established precisely the opposite. Jurisdiction is not a possession; it is a rolling condition. Once you stop adhering to law, you lose it.
HMCTS are now trying to unpick Anisminic, and permitting that would be a rather “courageous” move for any judge — in the Sir Humphrey Appleby sense of the word.
My deeper hope is that there are still some adults in the administrative machine who can recognise that the “anything goes” position on court names is indefensible.
My own sense is that HMCTS’s use of unlawful aliases belongs to the cock-up theory of history, not conspiracy. There was no bad faith, and no deliberate intent to defraud.
Technical problems in routing convictions and fines were “solved” using naming conventions that quietly ran ahead of statute. It was careless, but human — and, if we’re honest, a little funny.
Even if the mistake is embarrassing, and potentially expensive, nobody needs to resign for it. The only unforgivable act would be to deny it. Grace must flow both ways: we should extend it as freely as we wish to receive it.
The matter is already decided: only lawful metonyms are permitted. All we can do is recognise it as reality and move on.
Note: This essay discusses public law and constitutional principles in general terms. It does not comment on the merits or outcome of any particular case presently before the courts.
rsal identifiers widen the law’s reach and open new channels for abuse, particularly when linked to programmable currencies or automated control systems.
Courts themselves are objects in law. And because law, as grammar, can reason about itself, we can ask: does this court name map onto a real statutory court, or is it a fiction — a figment of administrative imagination?
Introducing metonyms
I was up until three in the morning last night because I made a breakthrough in my “ghost court” analysis. While prompting ChatGPT to explore the difference between lawful shorthand for a court and a name that refers to nothing at all, it used a word I’d never seen before — metonym.
In that instant of man–machine symbiosis, I realised this was the missing concept — the hinge around which my entire case turns. It allows me to collapse a forest of procedural complexity into one elegant linguistic principle.
A metonym is the linguistic neighbour of a metaphor. The latter substitutes by similarity — we might speak of “the heart of the law,” knowing there is no literal organ beating inside it.
A metonym, by contrast, substitutes by contiguity or association — a part or symbol that stands lawfully for the whole. Where the metaphor is interpretive, the metonym is literal; its substitution is grounded in reality. The connection is not imaginative but structural.
Metonyms saturate both ordinary language and legal discourse. We speak of:
“The Crown” as shorthand for the monarch and the institutions of monarchy, including the constitutional statutes governing coronation and succession.
“Whitehall” as shorthand for the civil service and its bureaucracy.
“Parliament” for the legislature, its procedures, and statutes.
“The Ministry of Justice” for the Secretary of State and the executive agency operating under their statutory remit.
“The Treasury Solicitor” for the government’s legal department — not one individual.
“The Home Office” for the legal personality of the Secretary of State for the Home Department.
We could multiply examples: “the court”, “the case”, “the hearing” — each condenses a complex institutional reality into a name the law can manipulate. Law, as a grammar, depends on such metonyms to collapse the world’s complexity into tractable objects that can be reasoned about.
Metaphors serve narrative reasoning by illuminating what is like something else. Metonyms serve legal reasoning by naming what stands for something real. Where metaphors invite “junk” — things that don’t exist — and “infidelity” — omissions that distort — metonyms strive for fidelity: a faithful mapping between name and referent. The stability of law depends on that fidelity. Once a metonym loses its traceable referent, jurisdiction starts to collapse.
Metonyms and “ghost courts”
In the case of the “ghost courts”, there is a real court name defined in section 8(1) of the Courts Act 2003. Until about 2015 or 2016, it appeared on all summonses. Then HMCTS quietly abandoned statutory names altogether.
In my own case, the literal court name would be “The Magistrates’ Court for the North and West Cumbria Local Justice Area.” Metonyms for this could include “The Magistrates’ Court for North and West Cumbria” or even “Carlisle Magistrates’ Court” — because that venue uniquely and unambiguously maps to the full statutory title, despite sharing only the word court. “The Lake District People’s Justice Tribunal” obviously would not.
The problem in my case is subtler. We have a pseudo-metonym: “North and West Cumbria Magistrates’ Court (1752).” It sounds right, but it doesn’t actually map onto any lawful entity. It can’t be sued or held to account in that name because it’s not a legal person at all. It is linguistic theatre — a non-person pretending to sit in judgment.
That brings us to the other half of the puzzle: the difference between lawful and unlawful metonyms:
A lawful metonym both invokes authority and can be held answerable.
An unlawful one is asymmetrical — it claims power without liability.
A perfect example is “TV Licensing.” This is presented as if it were a legal person — the website even ends with “© TV Licensing” — but it’s just a brand name used by the BBC and Capita under the Communications Act 2003. If you sue TV Licensing, Capita turns up, not the BBC. It exercises authority in that name, yet cannot be held responsible as that name. The name itself cannot bear legal weight. That makes it an unlawful metonym — and the BBC and Capita know it, which is why they play this liability shell game.
There’s already a modest body of legal philosophy and case law on metonyms and the naming of corporate entities. Metonyms have a dark side: they can conceal the true source of power and enable usurpation by simulation. That is exactly what has happened here. HMCTS has dispensed with the statutory naming scheme altogether, declaring that “court names have no legal meaning.” That assertion is itself unlawful, directly contrary to Articles 1 and 2 of the Bill of Rights 1689, which prohibit the executive from suspending or dispensing with laws.
This, finally, gives me the key insight that ties the whole thing together — a doctrine simple enough to fit on one line, yet deep enough to expose an entire constitutional failure.
Doctrine of Naming and Jurisdiction
1. Principle
A magistrates’ court is a statutory creature. It cannot exist by custom or administrative usage.
Section 8(1) of the Courts Act 2003 provides that “a magistrates’ court for any local justice area shall be known by such name as is specified in an order made by the Lord Chancellor.”
Jurisdiction depends upon the existence of that legally constituted tribunal. The name in law is not decorative; it identifies the corporate personality through which judicial authority is exercised.
2. The Commutative Doctrine
Authority and accountability are commutative: the entity that wields power must also be capable of being held to account.
If a body issues process under a name that is not that of a court constituted by order, it cannot simultaneously claim the powers of that court and the immunities of judicial office.
Naming, in this sense, is the junction point where executive administration meets constitutional legality.
3. The Metonym Test
A variation in form is curable only if the name functions as a lawful metonym for the court established by statute.
The test of lawful metonymy requires:
Traceability — the term must point uniquely and verifiably to a court named in an Order under section 8(1).
Non-ambiguity — the form must leave no reasonable doubt as to which tribunal is acting.
Consistency of public usage — the abbreviation must reflect an established shorthand for the constituted court, not an internal administrative invention.
Where these conditions are met, the defect is one of form and can be cured under section 123(1) of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980.
Where they are not, the instrument is a nullity.
4. Application
The designation “North and West Cumbria Magistrates’ Court (1752)” fails all three limbs:
There is no Lord Chancellor’s Order specifying such a court.
The suffix “1752” is an invented administrative identifier, not part of any statutory instrument.
HMCTS has explicitly denied that these names are legal entities, describing them as “administrative assignments with no legal meaning.”
Accordingly, the name is not a metonym for “The Magistrates’ Court for the North and West Cumbria Local Justice Area.”
It is an invented label.
Process issued in that name is therefore without jurisdiction.
5. Curability and the Limits of Section 123(1)
Section 123(1) of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980 cures defects in substance or form only where a valid information or summons otherwise emanates from a lawfully constituted court.
It does not authorise the creation of a tribunal that Parliament never constituted.
As held in Anisminic Ltd v Foreign Compensation Commission [1969] 2 AC 147, an act done outside jurisdiction is a nullity, not an irregularity.
The dividing line is between error within jurisdiction (curable) and the exercise of power without jurisdiction (void).
6. Constitutional Context
To dispense with the statutory naming requirement is to dispense with law — directly contrary to Article 1 of the Bill of Rights 1689.
The constitutional principle is simple: justice must be administered only by courts established by law.
Administrative convenience cannot substitute for the Lord Chancellor’s formal act of constitution.
Closing reflections
The answer is very clear: HMCTS is not using lawful metonyms.
The question is what the High Court will do about it.
It is possible the Court will try to fudge it — letting pragmatism override principle.
But the difficulty is that HMCTS has effectively unwound fifty years of modern public law, and several centuries of common law before that, by asserting that jurisdiction attaches to the justices themselves rather than to the tribunal they serve.
This reimagines jurisdiction as a sort of container — something you enter once and carry with you, even if you later act in error. Yet Anisminic [1969] — perhaps the most famous case in administrative law — established precisely the opposite. Jurisdiction is not a possession; it is a rolling condition. Once you stop adhering to law, you lose it.
HMCTS are now trying to unpick Anisminic, and permitting that would be a rather “courageous” move for any judge — in the Sir Humphrey Appleby sense of the word.
My deeper hope is that there are still some adults in the administrative machine who can recognise that the “anything goes” position on court names is indefensible.
My own sense is that HMCTS’s use of unlawful aliases belongs to the cock-up theory of history, not conspiracy. There was no bad faith, and no deliberate intent to defraud.
Technical problems in routing convictions and fines were “solved” using naming conventions that quietly ran ahead of statute. It was careless, but human — and, if we’re honest, a little funny.
Even if the mistake is embarrassing, and potentially expensive, nobody needs to resign for it. The only unforgivable act would be to deny it. Grace must flow both ways: we should extend it as freely as we wish to receive it.
The matter is already decided: only lawful metonyms are permitted. All we can do is recognise it as reality and move on.
Note: This essay discusses public law and constitutional principles in general terms. It does not comment on the merits or outcome of any particular case presently before the courts.
The Metonyn is borne of arrogance, the type of HMCTS arrogance that will ignore you for weeks, for months, for years, because they can.
Because they know that you can complain 6 times to their HMCTS complaints process and they will do nothing, because they can.
The type of arrogance that will reject your judicial review because they will tell you that you haven’t paid ( despite the fact that you have included a receipt with every application ).
Because the N461 form is submitted separately and not in one PDF with your bundle, despite the Admin Court rules saying a Litigant in Person merely has to explain why they cannot comply with the minutiae of every diktat.
These are not HMCTS employees making mistakes!
They are the very gatekeepers of the swamp who are tasked with dissuading you from ever getting your case into court by making you ascribe their mendacious actions as mere mistakes instead of their core purpose.
#ROTTENTOTHECORE
In your brief discussion of grace, near the end of your comments, you show yourself to be a truly honorable man, Martin. May you be responded to accordingly, by those in positions of authority in this situation !