Hershey vs. Commonwealth, 669 A2.d 517
Hershey attempted to sue Pennsylvania to renew his driver license, after
it was cancelled/non-renewed. Hershey claimed he had no SSN, but
Pennsylvania claimed otherwise. The final appeal sided with the
Commonwealth, apparently ruling solely on the grounds that Hershey did
indeed have a social security number.
I read the original court decision, and quite frankly, I found it
quite pathetic. To the best of my knowledge, Hershey does not have
a social security number, as he apparently went through the revocation
process via an affidavit of revocation and rescission. The court ruled
he had a social security number, dispite the affidavit that was filed.
This is, of course, an unfortunate case to have on the books and is
one major problem with so-called "case law". Sometimes patriot-types
hear about how social security is voluntary or how they don't have to
file tax returns or what have you, and go off and create lawsuits against
the government having good intentions and even good arguments, but are
still nonetheless ill-prepared to either present their argument well, or
simply not familiar enough with the mechanics of court. (Sometimes
they lose in court no matter how well they do). If they do
this and lose, the good argument gets listed in the court record as
a losing argument, and the precedent is set, making it all the more
difficult for others that come later and rely on that same argument.
As stated elsewhere in this site, "case law", is not and never has been,
law. This should be quite obvious when one considers that law can
only be created by the legislature. The judicial branch of government
is not empowered with the ability to create law, but even so, prior
cases are usually regarded as "authorities".
The decisions made by a court are only legally binding on the
parties that appear before that court, and no one else. They are
only "authorities" for those 2 parties that stand before that particular
court on that particular day. Period.
"Case law" does have a place, but since it's not law, the name is
misleading. It should be "case history". There is nothing wrong with
reviewing a prior case and understanding why decisions
went one way or the other, and applying the same tested reasoning to a
present case. In this way, we can gleen some wisdom (or lack thereof)
that was used in the past, and apply it or dispute it in a present case.
But the common practice of going into court arguing that "Alfred has to
do something just because some judge in Timbucktoo said Betty had to do
it 10 years ago" is inappropriate, and a judge that holds case
history in the same regard as true legislatively enacted law should be
removed from the bench. Again, the legislative branch creates the
law, and the judicial branch judges by it. No branch of government can
both create law and pass judgement according to the law it creates.
Anyway, this is not to criticize Hershey, as I don't know all the details
of the case. He may have done extremely well, and nonetheless had the courts
rule against him, which does happen. Regardless, a very poor
precedent has been set, and now it's being used against me, which brings
me to the point here today, where I have filed a
second affidavit specifically designed to defend
against that which was used against Hershey.
August 19, 1999
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