723. What Is Castle Law?

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. We are going to talk about property rights today, which are among the most important rights and natural rights. They are one of the few natural rights, right? You have the right to life, liberty, and property.

So we're going to talk about property rights and how they relate back to the 1600s, to a judge whose name was Sir Edward Cook. It is spelled coke, but it is pronounced cook, and I always get thrown off by it. So if I accidentally say coke, I mean cook, cook is the right way to say it. But I talked about him in another earlier episode about what he had to say about just compensation, about making sure that the government takes your property.

They have to pay you for it. They have to give you what you are owed. Well, today I want to talk about something else he said, and that is this doctrine called castle law. It is something that we still hear in America today. It's something that is still deeply rooted in our laws today.

Different states have different kind of versions of castle law. But essentially what castle law says is, and it's taken from something that Sir Edward Cook, there we go, I got it right, said, and that is that a man's home, and by man, man or woman, whoever owns it, a man's home is his castle. So what does that mean? Does that mean that the man is the king, and I can boss everybody around?

Well, no, but kind of yes, it means that in his home, he is the king. He's not the king who's living in a palace on a throne, but he is the king of his own property of the place where he lives. He may as well be king because that is his. That is something that he works for, that he owns, that he maintains, that is his home. And because castle law exists, it limits few things.

It limits what the government can do in your home. It limits, and what just strangers, what other individuals can do in your home. So this doctor and castle law doctrine is going to originate from long history of what are known as the Stuart Kings. They were violating property rights of people in England, and we know England has a history of that.

That's how we got Magna Carta. That's how we got a lot of the stuff we have today in America. It all came from England being so protective of their property, which we're so thankful for it because it gave us our foundation. So the king's men, it wasn't the king themselves, but they were coming into homes without warrants. They were searching and seizing things.

There's of course the quartering of soldiers. I've talked about this before when we hear the Third Amendment, where it's no quartering of soldiers. We think, well, of course, they're not the president's not going to send soldiers to live in our house. But there was a time in England when the king doing that, and even in our history, the revolutionary

war, where that was happening. They were forcing the people to not necessarily quartering like they were staying in their houses though that could happen too, but they had to feed them. They had to provide their necessities to soldiers. That's not just because that was their property. Things like that.

These things were happening long before even America's a place. This stuff is what Cook was talking about. He was saying, you can't do this. The government is limited. We have already established this with Magna Carta and other things. We know that a rule of law exists.

When it comes to property, no, a man's home is his castle, and he has the authority to say what goes on on that land. This gets really interesting. This is what I mean by all rights start with property rights is if you are in a public square, you do not have the same rights as you have on your own private property. You can't go in a public square and start spray painting on things or destroying that

property or doing whatever you want on it, but you can do that at your house. You could have a bonfire at your house. If you want to spray paint your house, I don't think your parents will appreciate that, but if that's what you want to do, you can't decide to paint the road to different colors because you decide to do it if it's a public square, but you can do that on your own house. There are things you can't do on land you don't own that you can do on your own land.

Now just the contrarian and me always thinks like, yeah, but we pay taxes in the public property. So wouldn't that mean that technically you could we're not going to get into that today. But if you were like me, who's always like challenging that and thinking that put that aside for the day on your own property, you can do and say and and be whoever you you want to be, right?

That is really where the rights derive from from your home. It is not neutral ground. It is your ground. It is what you want it to be. And that's a really powerful thing. That's why property is so important because it gives you all those freedoms.

It gives you, you know, if you want to have a bunch of guns on your property, go ahead have all those guns. It's it's just and again, that get the contrarian and me is like, well, yeah, but the second amendment you can carry. Yes. So there are things obviously in public, you do have the right because of certain amendments,

but at your home, you can have as many things as you want, right? So there there is a difference and the and the home is your castle, it is your property. And this is going to come into play when the Revolutionary War is brewing in America, right? When they're considering it because you have a king and his men who were now doing the writs of assistance is what they were called.

That was basically when they were searching you that could even stop and search you and they could search your house and they they didn't have to have any any warrant saying this is what we're searching. This is why we're searching it. This is what we're looking for. Didn't have to be specific.

They could do whatever they wanted. They could again, quarter soldiers do all that stuff. So this was happening on people's property and they were thinking like, no, this is not what's in English common law. This is not what we're about here. No, my home is my castle.

And so this is going to evolve over the years and obviously in America, we're very big on property rights. Now I want to get away from what the government can do on your property and I want to move towards the second part of this castle law, which is self defense. And this is where castle law actually becomes a little bit controversial because for a few reasons, one, there are obviously people who are very anti gun who don't want to support

anything involving Second Amendment or anything involving guns. But when it comes down to it, part of castle law is saying that because you are king of your castle, you are allowed to protect your castle, right? So if somebody comes into your house in the middle of the night and they're not invited, they're breaking in your house, they're trying to rob you, you have the right to defend your home by any means necessary.

And unfortunately, sometimes that means at the point of a gun. Now one thing I want to make very clear here is just because you have that right doesn't mean that right doesn't come with repercussions. And what I mean by that is no one ever wants to have to shoot and harm somebody, right? That's not the goal. Your goal isn't, oh, I hope I hear something middle of the night so I can hurt somebody.

No, the goal is my family is sleeping upstairs, my children, my husband or wife, whoever it is, like I want to protect my family and this is my castle and I'm going to protect them. And you know what, that is why I keep a gun, you know, in my house. And if you hear somebody break in your house, you have the right to use that force if it's protecting your property and your loved ones. Now, there are also, there are courtesy things you can do and obviously when you're in that

moment and someone is breaking in your home and they do mean to do you harm, you might just shoot, you know, to stop them and sometimes people end up dying and that is horrible, right? But again, you are, you are doing that in self-defense. Now, in an ideal world, someone breaks in your house and you shoot them in the leg so that they're disarmed, but you don't have to kill them. And then the police come and whatever, right?

Sometimes that doesn't happen. Sometimes people do die because of self-defense, but as a homeowner, you do have the right to do that. And so that gets into, again, a lot of different things. I always, a friendlier version where we don't have to do with that as I always think of like home alone.

I think we've all seen home alone. And even though let's be honest, half the things at home alone would cause a lot more damage than they seem to in the movie, but it's like Kevin, it's like Kevin defending his home when he's home alone and the burglars come, you have the right to do that. You have the right to defend your house because that home is your castle and you get to be the king.

Now, right now you guys live in your parents' home, so that's not quite your home. You're like, you get space in their home, so right now your home is your parents' castle. So let's also remember that when it comes to self-defense of your home. I know I use the home alone example, but in real practical life, it is your parents' job to defend that you're, you know, you're not going to be setting up booby traps along your house like Kevin from home alone, at least I hope not.

So just a, just a side note there. So castle law is not giving you a carte blanche to go be violent against people, right? That's not what it is. You never want to have to do that, right? That's a last resort, but you want to protect your family. And so castle law gives you the right to do that.

And again, castle law gets controversial because of the self-defense aspect of it. In, you know, in actuality, castle law isn't just self-defense, it's also defense from the government. It's saying that the king, that, you know, whoever it is, they can't come in your house without a warrant and just willy-nilly do whatever they want. So castle law has really important roots that's both anti the government doing whatever it

wants and also self-defense, which is equally as important, right? Part of the reason we have a Second Amendment is to make sure that we are taking care of our own. You know, police officers, especially if it has to do with like a house being invaded, sometimes they can't get there quick enough, you know, they're limited by resources and by how far they are, especially if you're in like a rural town or something.

And so you, they might not get there until after whatever has happened has happened. And so that's why it's so important for people to be able to treat their home like a castle and be able to use self-defense. And so it goes along with a lot of, a lot of other things. And again, remember I said that property rights are really like the start of every right? That's where your Second Amendment really is going to shine if it needs to.

And so this is castle law. This is going to be Sir Edward Cook. I said it right every time guys, I think, unless I didn't, and I didn't realize it. But he is really important. Again, I've talked about him before. I'll probably talk about him again.

But this is really cool stuff, I think, to see how far reaching property rights goes in time so that it's not just something that the founders invented. The founders didn't really invent these rights. They built on them from centuries of experience, from centuries of wisdom, from people like Sir Edward Cook, did it again, who have helped really establish them. And I originally also wanted to say, you guys should go read some of Cook's, his commentary

on these cases that he worked on. But Old English, I don't know if you guys know this, used different spelling. So they have two forms of S's and one of the S's looks like an F, but it's like a short S. So you'll be reading something, and you'll notice on this actually on the Declaration of Independence.

It looks like it says Congress, instead of Congress, because they were using the different form of S that looks like an F. It's very confusing. I tried to read Cook's work in the original documents, like scanned, not like the original documents. And I couldn't do it because it was frustrating me so much with how weird the letters were.

So I asked Chad GPT to decode them for me. So you can do that and it's fun. But we will wrap it up there. As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, I will talk to you later.