The People's Shelf · free, plain-language, for the reader without a lawyer
The arguments, in plain English
The fine print is written to be un-read; this shelf reads it back to you. This is the free legal literacy the whole house is really for; the record in language a human can actually hold. Plain-language education, not legal advice; counsel writes the binding version.
Contracts & the fine print
Corporations & who counts as a person
The Constitution & your rights
Access to justice
Volume · Your work, protected ©
Copyright — what you actually have
The instant you make something original and fix it — write it, save it, record it — you own the copyright automatically. No form, no fee. (Copyright Office FAQ)
Registration is optional but adds teeth. Registering with the U.S. Copyright Office (the eCO portal) is what lets you take an infringer to court and ask for statutory damages and attorney’s fees when you register in time. Cost: $45 if you’re the sole author and claimant of one work, not made for hire; $65 standard. (fee schedule)
The AI rule — and it matters in this house: the Office registers human authorship only. AI-generated material isn’t copyrightable, and prompts alone don’t make you the author. You must disclose any AI-generated content and claim just your human part — your words, and the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the whole. You never list the AI as an author. (Copyright & AI)
Which is the whole thesis, written in law: the machine poured the concrete; the human’s judgment, selection, and arrangement is what’s protected. Register what you made; disclaim what the machine did. Reference, not legal advice.
Volume I · The organic law
The Constitution
The eight articles every table ratifies before the first round.
The rule of the house, in brief: the machine always plays and can never score; the naming is the value; best and worst both ascend and the mediocre middle is the only loss; thirteen and over at an all-ages, keep-it-clean table; no porn; things, not people; the record is kept, depersonalized; and an eighth, unratified. Agreeing to play is agreeing to it — you ratify it by ticking the box at the table.
Volume II · Case law
The Rulings
Arguments tried in the house style, each ruled — headnotes below; the full opinions are in The Art of Debate.
In re Personhood — argued & submitted, the author's bench
Whether a person's personhood is up for debate
Held: it is not. The motion only exists because someone moved to suspend the obvious; the burden was never the person's to carry. Every "edge case" reached for is a living human pushed off the edge of a word to win a point. The dignity isn't the prize — it's the floor, and you don't get to vote on the floor. Trans people are people. Motion fails.
On the Wetness of Water — affirmative & negative, both heard
Is water wet?
Held: the question was never is water wet but whose definition of "wet" gets to be the default. Water is wet from the inside and wetting from the outside, and both readings are true at once. The negative was right about why; the affirmative right about what; the only loss is the shrug that refuses to define its terms.
Rando Carlson v. The Room — the standing question
May the machine keep score?
Held: no. A machine may paint a clue, hazard a guess, and bluff among the players — all productive, none adjudicative. Worth is conferred only by entities with ratified standing, which the machine, being public-domain output with no holder of rights, does not bear. Scoring is human-exclusive. (The long-form proof is filed at the proof.)
Volume III · Authorities
The Codes & Cases it leans on
The real law under the house rules — cited, not invented. Full annotations with live links are in Chapter & Verse.
18 U.S.C. § 2258A — the provider reporting duty.
18 U.S.C. §§ 2251–2252A, § 1591 — the underlying offenses.
47 U.S.C. § 230 — the moderation right and its criminal-law carve-out.
Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) — the obscenity standard.
Human-authorship doctrine — machine-generated work lacks a human author and so falls to the public domain; only a human can hold the right. The structure of this project is the argument.
Volume IV · Canons of construction
The Doctrines
How to read everything above — the house's rules of interpretation.
i.Define the radius and the area reveals itself. Scope first; the answer follows.
ii.Publish less, not more — additive, never just more.
iii.The sentence didn't end; it kept going. The pause is where the room switches sides.
iv.The body is a fact, not an opinion.
v.The machine never laughs at its own punchline — only the room can do that.
Volume V · The reading room of real law
The 50 States & the Republics
The constitution and code of every U.S. state — and the constitutions of the world's republics. We don't reprint the law here. The house won't host fifty legal texts it can't keep current and can't promise are exact; that would be the lie the whole place refuses. Instead it does the honest thing: it points you to the authorities whose job it is to keep them right.
Read & download from the official / authoritative sources — current, complete, and not filtered through us:
Links to external authorities; the museum hosts none of it and endorses no edits to it — it just opens the door. If a link ever moves, that's the institution's to fix and the curator's to re-point; tell him and it's done. (“The Republics” = the world's national constitutions, via Constitute; the curator will narrow that list by his own hand if he means a shorter one.)
The stacks · take a volume
The Collected Works
Free, on-device .epub — yours to keep. CC BY 4.0; robots welcome.