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The National Council on Identity Policy Legal History: Drivers' Licenses & Identity The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) was born of the struggles of one tenacious survivor of domestic violence and stalking. The NCIDP continues her work with the help of many. Read more about the NCIDP... ~ This is a page from the NCIDP "A Brief History of Identity" collection. These pages are intended to provide a context for understanding the development of legal principles regarding identity information as it continues to bear upon modern legal governance of identity information. This is an extract of a history of this subject highlighting those aspects that enhance understanding of why the laws of today are such as they are, and how they came to be that way. These pages are intended to cast important perspective upon relevant law, but are not intended as a comprehensive sociological study of these subjects. Throughout most of history, by custom and tradition, an ordinary individual's declared name was the extent of identity information used to describe a person. There were no Social Security Numbers, Drivers' Licenses, Passports, voter registries, deed polls, credit reports.... Any individual could [and can] adopt any identity they chose at will, and their word of it was [and is] the fact of it. (Jonson v. Greaves (KB, 1765); Christianson v. King County (S Ct., 1915); et al.). The idea that an individual might be stuck with a fixed identity at any time in life was never conceived of, and was [and is] abject violence. (Keeble v. Hickeringill (QB, 1707)). That it might be dictated to an individual at any time was unimaginable, and is unconstitutional in the U.S. (Entick v. Carrington and Three Other King's Messengers (KB, 1765); Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey (S Ct., 1992); Lawrence v. Texas (S Ct., 2003); et al.). Time and again, history has shown that the slightest routinized solicitations of government to identify individuals is born of, or leads to, the selective oppression of individuals. The privacy right of anonymity is the first and most profound defense of personal safety and common liberty. * Drivers' Licenses * Contrary to one popular modern myth, Drivers' Licenses were NOT conceived and created to ensure that drivers had appropriate training and skills for driving. After the first Drivers' License requirement was first implemented, licenses were issued for five decades before competency requirements of any kind became widespread. They were conceived of originally as a revenue source through imposition of a use tax, and further, were at first applied only to business and trade activities involving driving (cab drivers, freight carriers, cargo deliveries). The first attempt at issuing drivers' licenses within the U.S. occurred at the cusp of the Twentieth Century, although drivers had been operating vehicles for many years already. These first licenses were promptly ruled (in Chicago v. Collins (Ill S.Ct., 1898)) an unjustifiable, unconscionable and unconstitutional intrusion upon the rights of individuals to travel upon public ways unhindered and unimpaired. The court found that only the regulation of commerce could justify any drivers' license requirements, and only applying such requirement to commercial drivers (cab drivers, freight carriers, cargo deliveries, etc.) could be justified by it; that it was a right of private individuals to travel upon such public unhindered by such encumbrances and laws. Initially, licenses were issued upon demand, in many cases by mail, and no tests were required. Only a very few states, on the order of two or three perhaps, instituted driver competency standards shortly after instituting their licensing requirement. Most states issued licenses for decades before implementing any driver competency exam requirement. As license requirements were instituted, it appears that no statistically significant reduction in accident rates was found among licensed drivers. As competency exam requirements were instituted, it appears that no statistically significant reduction in accident rates was found among licensed drivers. Only formal driver education courses, as they began to appear in high schools across the country, seemed to show an actual beneficial impact upon accident rates. Through World War I, only a small handful of states issued Drivers' Licenses. Many of those states required them only of commercial drivers, but some few states ignored the Illinois Supreme Court precedent, since they weren't Illinois and, therefore, not strictly bound to it, and began requiring licenses of all operators. As the Great Depression unfolded, and viewing license requirements as a potential revenue source, more states began requiring them. Still, it appears that only about half or less of all states required licenses by the time that the U.S. entered World War II (1941), and perhaps less than half a dozen required any competency exam. The constitutionality of licensing requirements was widely doubted and, indeed, often regarded as a fascist practice that was almost certainly unconstitutional, as had been found in Illinois. It wasn't until the influence of rabid McCarthyist fascism swept the nation that all states came to require drivers' licenses and establish competency tests. It was also under this influence that licenses first began to take on the role of documentation of identity, with states gradually adding increasing amounts of identity information and photographs. By the time Reagan left office in 1988, most if not all states had shifted drivers' licenses to the role of identity documentation, and had added photographs to them. In most cases, states issuing such licenses had not yet begun attempt to arrogate the identity rights of individuals, and identity recorded on such licenses was as it was stated by the individuals. The finding by the Illinois Supreme Court, that licensing requirements imposed upon private citizens is unconstitutional, appears to have never been reversed, and appears to have been a finding repeated in other lower court cases in other jurisdictions. In short, it appears that, at law, drivers' licenses imposed upon private members of society are very likely entirely unconstitutional, and that the states have simply set out to patently ignore an inconvenient truth, the courts, and the Constitution. And, although the states like to portray driving as a "privilege", and have worked hard to establish that aura around it during the past twenty or so years, the courts appear to have already indicated that it is a right. Construing driving as a right, as courts to date appear to have done, licensing requirements themselves would have to be construed as unconstitutional. It appears that the U.S. Supreme Court has avoided ruling directly on the subject, but other rulings appear to apply to their present status. To quote one ruling, "Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperilled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy." (Miranda v Arizona (S Ct., 1966), quoting Olmstead v. U.S. (S Ct., 1928, Brandeis dissenting)). The court also said in another ruling, "The government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws and not of men. It will certainly cease to deserve this high appellation, if the laws furnish no remedy for the violation of a vested legal right." (Marbury v. Madison (S Ct., 1803)). "In the Boyd Case, supra, after citing Lord Camden's judgment in Entick v. Carrington, 19 How. St. Tr. 1029, Mr. Justice Bradley said (630): 'The principles laid down in this opinion affect the very essence of constitutional liberty and security. They reach farther than the concrete form of the case then before the court, with its adventitious circumstances; they apply to all invasions on the part of the government and its employees of the sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life. It is not the breaking of his doors and the rummaging of his drawers that constitutes the essence of the offense; but it is the invasion of his indefeasible right of personal security, personal liberty, and private property, where that right has never been forfeited by his conviction of some public offense,-it is the invasion of this sacred right which underlies and constitutes the essence of Lord Camden's judgment.' In Bram v. United States, 168 U.S. 532 , 42 L. ed. 568, 18 Sup. Ct. Rep. 183, 10 Am. Crim. Rep. 547, this court, in speaking by the present Chief Justice of Boyd's Case, dealing with the 4th and 5th Amendments, said (544): 'It was in that case demonstrated that both of these Amendments contemplated perpetuating, in their full efficacy, by means of a constitutional provision, principles of humanity and civil liberty which had been secured in the mother country only after years of struggle, so as to implant them in our institutions in the fullness of their integrity, free from the possibilities of future legislative change.'" (Weeks v. U.S. (S Ct., 1914), quoting Boyd v. U.S. (S Ct., 1886) and Bram v. U.S. (S Ct., 1897)).
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