Part II — The life the design leaves alone

8. What Nobody Has to Ask Permission For

People may learn, publish, believe or refuse belief, gather, research, make art, speak their language, play sport, keep friendships, form associations and help neighbours without first obtaining official permission for ordinary private or civic life. Public power bears the burden of justifying a restriction. These freedoms do not give one person authority to compel another's association or cooperation.

Restriction requires evidence of harm to someone's rights or to the commons. Taking offence, disagreeing or announcing an official view of the truth cannot supply that ground. The restriction must be the least restrictive effective response, name the activity and people it reaches, and give usable public reasons. It must have an end and a challenge that suspends it during independent review. It may not target a viewpoint, belief or identity. The restricting body, reviewer and challenge reader must remain separate.

Enforcement must identify the exact restriction reviewed: its matter, activity, version, period and end. A restriction reviewed for one thing cannot be carried over to another, and one reviewed for a newspaper cannot be moved to a gallery. Enforcement also requires prior notice, reasons and a usable challenge. It takes no standing, floor, ballot entitlement or recognition.

The ordinary case runs in the other direction. A record establishing that no restriction applies confers no public power to interfere; it obliges the public body not to demand permission, and not to keep a register of what people believe, what opinions they hold, or what they have joined. In the test, a note of belief or association supplies no new authority over its subject and no adverse finding. The person's standing, floor and existing ballot entitlement remain, as do the protections against compelled conscience and association.

Public information and its access and correction routes must be usable. A refusal needs a reviewed ground and reasons, with any releasable part supplied. Access cannot depend on explaining why you want it or paying an exclusionary fee. Public bodies must use accessible formats and plain language, adjusted on request without charge; no meaning may depend on one sense or notation alone. Researchers and artists may publish or perform without prior approval. Public power cannot dictate the question, method, result or content, and funding may not buy a finding.

Concentration receives a different review, concerning ownership, distribution, ranking and attention. That review cannot establish whether anything published was true or well chosen. It opens a duty to disclose reach and the basis of ranking, and a route to an independent review. It classifies no audience and nobody's beliefs. A structural remedy does not authorise an official verdict on the content being published.

The things power may not prescribe

The rules also state limits applying to every person. Nobody's privacy may be arbitrarily interfered with. Nobody's bodily choice may be coerced. Nobody's movement may be restricted without a supported ground. No decision with consequences for a person may be made without review. Nobody may be forced into an association, told what to express, compelled in conscience, or prescribed a form of family. Nobody holds an unequal civic status, and nobody's private or civic life may be prescribed. Each barrier follows from personhood; the checks establish them for a cast member and for the child with nobody.

These limits bind public power directly. They also require public institutions to prevent, investigate and answer private interference, without creating a general duty from every private person to every other. A prohibition on compelled expression supplies no recorded voice; a prohibition on coercing bodily choice supplies no care receipt. The barrier rules protect freedom without establishing delivery or making its absence a premise.

The child with nobody

Nell's personhood establishes the limits on coercion and prescription without an application or a family entry. The floor's entitlements to learning, expression, belief and company remain beside them.

The record supplies no teacher heard, receipt or recorded voice for Nell. No learning, belief or company conclusion follows. That absence is not a finding that Nell has no beliefs or associations in the world.

What none of this certifies

These rules establish freedoms and bound restrictions. They certify neither the truth of a statement nor the sincerity of a belief. A completed restriction record does not establish that its alleged harm existed; a duty to protect expression does not establish that anyone could speak or publish.

The next chapter turns to employment and what a person may earn without having to earn this protected starting point.