ISSN: 2710-4028 DOI: doi.org/10.54208/1000/0006 155
“I hereby and herein claim liberties”: Identity and Power in Sovereign Citizen
Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings
David Griffin, PhD, JD
Cardiff University
Abstract: While the documents produced by members of the Sovereign Citizen movement are not legitimate legal
documents, there is a distinctly legal character to them. This article examines the ways that Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal documents acquire that legal-seeming character by considering the degree to which the language
present in them resembles that of documents written by actual attorneys. A comparison of a corpus of Sovereign
Citizen documents filed in an American courthouse to a corpus of attorney-authored documents obtained
from that same courthouse reveals that the authors of the pseudolegal courtroom filings (PCFs) examined are
generally adept at identifying those features of legitimate courtroom filings (LCFs) that most clearly differentiate
them from documents written in more “general” varieties of English. These Sovereign Citizen authors do more
than simply imitate, however they frequently heighten or in some way emphasize those features of LCFs that
appear to them to be the most legally or authoritatively salient. By considering both the features of LCFs that
have been heightened in this way and those features of PCFs that have no immediately clear legitimate legal
analogue, several trends become apparent: 1) PCFs are highly and perhaps primarily concerned with establishing
the identity and power of their authors as individuals 2) PCFs frame judges and other representatives of the
legitimate legal system as a single collective out-group and 3) PCFs present their authors as the wielders of true
legal authority while simultaneously, if implicitly, acknowledging the real-world power that the legitimate legal
system wields over them.
Keywords: Sovereign Citizens, Pseudolaw, Linguistics, Forensic Linguistics, Language and Law, Legal
Language
I. Introduction
The Sovereign Citizen movement is a collection
of loosely organized anti-government conspiracy
theorists found around the world. Despite the
movement’s origins with a group of far-right white
nationalists in the United States in the 1960s (Fenster,
2008, pp. 55-56 Sullivan, 1999, p. 787), Sovereign
Citizen groups can now be found in “at least” 26
different countries with members from a variety of
racial and political backgrounds (Pitcavage, 2016
Sarteschi 2022). Broadly speaking, Sovereign Citizens
believe that through the filing of certain forms and the
raising of certain arguments in court, they can force
the legal system and its representatives to do (or not
do) anything they desire, including give them access to
secret government funds or dismiss criminal charges
against them (Griffin, 2022, p. ii Sarteschi, 2023a, p.
2). While the Sovereign Citizen movement has received
notable attention from lawyers (e.g., Kalinowski IV,
2019 Netolitzky &Warman, 2020 Sullivan, 1999),
historians (e.g., Berger, 2016 Pitcavage, 2016), and
religious studies scholars (e.g. Dew, 2015 Wessinger,
1999) alike, it has until recently gone largely unnoticed
by linguists. For years, the only discussion of the
movement in linguistic literature seems to have been a
brief aside by the lawyer-linguist Peter Tiersma (1999,
pp. 212–213) in which he mentioned the Montana
Freemen and their habit of:
prepar[ing] verbose legal filings to various state
and federal courts, dressed up in ‘pseudo-
scholarly terms and meaningless Latin phrases,’
typically claiming for various reasons courts
have no jurisdiction over them.
More recently, Marko (2020) performed a close reading
of the “constitution” of the “Austrian Commonwealth”
Sovereign Citizen group and Heffer (2020, pp. 201–
202), as part of a wider discussion about the nature
of untruthfulness, classified Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal texts as instances of “pseudo-legal
doi.org/10.54208/1000/0006/007
“I hereby and herein claim liberties”: Identity and Power in Sovereign Citizen
Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings
David Griffin, PhD, JD
Cardiff University
Abstract: While the documents produced by members of the Sovereign Citizen movement are not legitimate legal
documents, there is a distinctly legal character to them. This article examines the ways that Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal documents acquire that legal-seeming character by considering the degree to which the language
present in them resembles that of documents written by actual attorneys. A comparison of a corpus of Sovereign
Citizen documents filed in an American courthouse to a corpus of attorney-authored documents obtained
from that same courthouse reveals that the authors of the pseudolegal courtroom filings (PCFs) examined are
generally adept at identifying those features of legitimate courtroom filings (LCFs) that most clearly differentiate
them from documents written in more “general” varieties of English. These Sovereign Citizen authors do more
than simply imitate, however they frequently heighten or in some way emphasize those features of LCFs that
appear to them to be the most legally or authoritatively salient. By considering both the features of LCFs that
have been heightened in this way and those features of PCFs that have no immediately clear legitimate legal
analogue, several trends become apparent: 1) PCFs are highly and perhaps primarily concerned with establishing
the identity and power of their authors as individuals 2) PCFs frame judges and other representatives of the
legitimate legal system as a single collective out-group and 3) PCFs present their authors as the wielders of true
legal authority while simultaneously, if implicitly, acknowledging the real-world power that the legitimate legal
system wields over them.
Keywords: Sovereign Citizens, Pseudolaw, Linguistics, Forensic Linguistics, Language and Law, Legal
Language
I. Introduction
The Sovereign Citizen movement is a collection
of loosely organized anti-government conspiracy
theorists found around the world. Despite the
movement’s origins with a group of far-right white
nationalists in the United States in the 1960s (Fenster,
2008, pp. 55-56 Sullivan, 1999, p. 787), Sovereign
Citizen groups can now be found in “at least” 26
different countries with members from a variety of
racial and political backgrounds (Pitcavage, 2016
Sarteschi 2022). Broadly speaking, Sovereign Citizens
believe that through the filing of certain forms and the
raising of certain arguments in court, they can force
the legal system and its representatives to do (or not
do) anything they desire, including give them access to
secret government funds or dismiss criminal charges
against them (Griffin, 2022, p. ii Sarteschi, 2023a, p.
2). While the Sovereign Citizen movement has received
notable attention from lawyers (e.g., Kalinowski IV,
2019 Netolitzky &Warman, 2020 Sullivan, 1999),
historians (e.g., Berger, 2016 Pitcavage, 2016), and
religious studies scholars (e.g. Dew, 2015 Wessinger,
1999) alike, it has until recently gone largely unnoticed
by linguists. For years, the only discussion of the
movement in linguistic literature seems to have been a
brief aside by the lawyer-linguist Peter Tiersma (1999,
pp. 212–213) in which he mentioned the Montana
Freemen and their habit of:
prepar[ing] verbose legal filings to various state
and federal courts, dressed up in ‘pseudo-
scholarly terms and meaningless Latin phrases,’
typically claiming for various reasons courts
have no jurisdiction over them.
More recently, Marko (2020) performed a close reading
of the “constitution” of the “Austrian Commonwealth”
Sovereign Citizen group and Heffer (2020, pp. 201–
202), as part of a wider discussion about the nature
of untruthfulness, classified Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal texts as instances of “pseudo-legal
doi.org/10.54208/1000/0006/007
