Garry Davis never studied law. After graduating from Episcopal Academy in Overbrook, PA in 1940, he entered Carnegie Tech’s drama school in Pittsburgh, but left after one year to become a dancer in the Broadway musical “Let’s Face It!”

His thinking about law began in earnest in 1944 during WWII when the incendiary and demolition bombs dropped from his B-17 flying over German cities. Killing human beings he knew is an indictable crime in civic society. But wars occur in the anarchic space “between” so-called civic societies called Nations. His elder brother having been killed at Salerno, Italy, his first reaction was to avenge his death. The contrast, however, between entertaining people and killing them shocked the former song-and-dance man into reassessing his life’s role and mission. It’s fundamental legal base was missing.

Following the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings and WWII, when the prospect of WWIII fought with nuclear bombs between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed imminent, Davis reluctantly but with an almost fanatical determination, turned from actor to “world lawyer.”

His first legal action was his renunciation of the war system itself by becoming “stateless.” The second was to declare himself a “World Citizen.” And so the trials began. This unique record chronicles his straightforward yet innovative legal defense of “world law,” “world citizenship,” and “world government,” based on fundamental human rights, in actual court cases from the US District Court in Washington, DC through the Supreme Court (where the 9th amendment was key to his defense), on to the International Court of Justice, and finally to a Complaint to the International Criminal Court in 2010 naming 9 heads of state as “enemies of humanity” for their overt nuclear policies, ending with the historic declaration of the World Court of Human Rights in 1974 following a trial in Mulhouse, France, in which he was indicted for issuing a “world passport” based on the human right of freedom of travel.

His introduction of (world) habeas corpus in the last two cases derives from Luis Kutner’s book, World Habeas Corpus (Oceana Publications, Inc., 1962), this eminent jurist-consul being appointed by Davis “Chief Justice” of the ad hoc World Court of Human Rights first declared in 1974. Dr. Kutner’s acceptance speech together with the “First World Citizen’s” July 27, 2011 declaration of the de juris status of the World Court of Human Rights rounds out this one-of-a-kind provocative book dedicated to humanity’s legitimate planetary survival.