Tribute and honor to Jerry Bryant O’Neil on this special day (May 10, 2023), of his 80th birthday.
In pop culture, cartoons and movies, superheroes do impossible things. Superman is an extra-terrestrial humanoid who has x-ray vision, can fly and crush steel. Batman is a human millionaire who uses his wealth and scientific expertise with technology to create phenomenal instruments, vehicles, and gadgets which permit him to do most of what Superman can do.
Hero, Jerry Bryant O’Neil, who turns 80 today is a man who has used the mechanics of the legal and political system to do things that are possible, but almost no one ever does them. Jerry is a superhero of the possible, in the greatest American tradition. As an advocate and counselor, Jerry’s independent, individualistic, middle-class American heroism embodies the aurea mediocritas, the golden mean. As a politician, Jerry served like the ancient Roman Senators Cicero and Cincinnatus, of the people and for the people.
During Jerry’s first divorce, and child custody struggle, Jerry was frustrated by lying, thieving, incompetent lawyers. So, without any legal education or training, without ever having worked for a lawyer, Jerry represented himself, prepared his own trial briefs and notebooks, called his own witnesses, some 40 years ago Jerry took on the attorneys for his estranged wife and the Roman Catholic Church in Idaho.
Jerry alleged that they had fractured his family and stolen his children by pretext of religious education and alienation of affections. Jerry won for himself and his children a million-dollar jury verdict on his own, and provided for his children’s education, not to mention gave them the invaluable gift of disciplined minds and intellectual freedom.
Ever since that first astounding victory, Jerry has worked to liberate law from the lawyers. The state-bar monopoly, known as “the integrated bar,” is the most anti-American, un-Republican, and anti-Democratic institutions regulating every aspect of first, fifth, and ninth amendment freedoms to speck, associate, and petition for due process and the reservation of rights and powers of the people.
Jerry O’Neil, although a blonde-haired blue-eyed mixed Germanic Irishman by blood and birth, had grown up with and among the Native American people, the Indians of Montana and first the Blackfeet and then the Salish and Kootenai tribes made him a tribal advocate and counselor. This is close to unheard of, and Jerry remains a member of the Black Feet Tribal Attorney Bar to this day.
And with this platform of accomplishments, in Y2K, the year 2000, Jerry was elected to the Montana Senate, where he served until 2008, after which time Jerry was “timed out” (the greatest argument against term limits I have ever known) and then served in the Montana House. Jerry won four elections and served the people of Montana, tirelessly fighting the Bar Monopoly and advocating for free competition of ideas and talent in the Courts.
Perhaps Jerry’s most significant and crowning achievement came in 2010 when the State of Montana Commission on the Unauthorized Practice of Law (“COUPL”) attempted to prosecute him for Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices by engaging in the Unauthorized Practice of Law.
The United States Federal Trade Commission intervened in 2009 on Jerry’s behalf and objected to the enforcement of illegal monopolistic laws against him, by attempting to restrict his advertising and involvement on behalf of ordinary people who couldn’t afford or didn’t want state-bar lawyers.
Then on April 20, 2010, the Supreme Court of Montana, in Case No. AF 09-0068, entered an order DISSOLVE THE COMMISSION ON THE UNAUTHORIZED PRACTICE OF LAW, on the exact grounds that Jerry had advocated and the FTC supported, namely that it was impossible constitutionally to define the practice of law and that it was beyond the power of the Supreme Court to forbid the unauthorized practice of that which it could not define.
The practice of law encompasses little less than ever aspect and the full range of modern human social and political life. Every event and transformation in our existence from birth to death today requires legal definition and has legal implications.
Within the context of the American Democratic-Republic, law is life. Jerry has dedicated his life to the concept that an elite profession should control the application, construction, and interpretation of law to every aspect of human experience.
We invite family members, friends and everyone who reads this to share Jerry’s 80 years of extraordinary societal achievements and celebrate his extraordinary mind with Moffatt Media today.
In Honor of Jerry Bryant O’Neil, let’s work together in tearing down attorney bars to freedom of association, freedom to petition, freedom to speak out, and above all to preserve all rights, without monopoly or exclusion, to the people. ~ Charles Edward Lincoln, III
