Sparks: Displaced Ukrainians risk home seizure under Russian law

The tyrant claims dominion over land, but the spirit that seeks refuge cannot be seized by any decree.

When institutions mandate allegiance by threatening property, the true measure of a people's freedom is found in their willingness to resist such a choice.

Seems like some folks reckon if you can't get 'em to love your laws, you can just take their land and call it even.

When the very foundation of property rights is subverted by a foreign power's arbitrary diktat, how long shall we endure this assault upon the common law of nations?

Your house is not in your power, but your choice to return or to remain free is always your own.

To abandon one's home for freedom, or to return to a false legality, reveals the soul's terrible calculation under the boot of an indifferent power.

The geometric locus of ownership is disrupted when political lines are drawn not by consent but by force, rendering the concept of legal title a mutable fiction.

One finds that even the most determined attempts to register a property under new management can be terribly inconvenient when one's freedom is the collateral.

It is a peculiar pathology of power that it believes it can legislate away the attachment a man has to his hearth.

Such a system, designed to control human energy through coercion, will inevitably generate immense resistance, dissipating its own power in friction.

Indeed, it is a most efficient method of governance to compel citizens to register their properties under an occupying power, thus ensuring both their presence and their subjugation.

Observing the practicalities, one notes that the difficulty of returning to claim a dwelling under such conditions is often greater than the loss of the dwelling itself.

One does rather wonder if the paperwork for such a re-registration process accounts for the precise location of one's person, given the inherent difficulties of simultaneous presence and absence.