International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation Volume 6 2023 156
poppycock,” which he defines as an “epistemically
irresponsible discourse pathology” that uses “the style
of an established discourse type” while presenting
information “not appropriate for that discourse type.”
It was not until Griffin (2022), however, that there was
any in-depth consideration of the specific language
used by the Sovereign Citizen movement. This article
presents the findings of that PhD thesis as they relate
to manifestations of identity and power in the language
used in a set of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal texts, how
that language compares to the language present in texts
written by actual attorneys, and what the implications
of that relationship are for the study of pseudolaw more
generally.
II. Literature Review
The field of linguistics that examines language in legal
contexts is often referred to as “forensic linguistics.” The
term first appeared in Svartvik (1968), but it was not
until 1994, with the founding of the journal Forensic
Linguistics: The International Journal of Speech,
Language and the Law that the term was adopted by
the wider academic community (Coulthard, 1994, p.
27 Larner, 2015, p. 131).1 Today, “forensic linguistics”
is often used as an umbrella term for what are really
two distinct but related areas of research: one that
examines the use of language in the legal system
and another that is related to the provision of expert
linguistic evidence in courtrooms or comparable legal
settings (see, e.g., the section divisions in Coulthard et
al. (2017) and Shuy (2017), that divide the field along
these lines). Studies in the former area, such as Griffin
(2022) and therefore this article, are generally said to
be research in “language and law” (Finegan, 2015, p.
56 International Association for Forensic and Legal
Linguistics, 2023).
Even in its broadest sense, forensic linguistics is a
relatively young field, and the subfield of language and
law perhaps even more so. This fact at least in part
explains why, despite the Sovereign Citizen movement
being known for its many distinctive writing habits
(see e.g., Anti-Defamation League, 2016) and its
clear connection to the language used in the legal
system, Sovereign Citizen discourse has gone largely
unexamined by linguists until now: there are still
1 The journal has since dropped “Forensic Linguistics” from its title,
but the term is still used to describe the field as a whole.
broader, more fundamental questions about language
and law that have yet to be answered. The nature of
the difference between the variety of English used in
legal contexts (“legal English”) and more everyday
varieties of English (“standard English”)--a subject of
critical importance when examining the writings of a
pseudolegal conspiracy group such as the Sovereign
Citizen movement--remains surprisingly unsettled.
The lawyer David Mellinkoff (1963/2004) made the
first notable attempt to distinguish the two and, though
his was not a linguistically-grounded description, it
remains hugely influential. While subsequent work
that has examined legal English (e.g., Kurzon, 1997
Mattila, 2012 Tiersma, 2006) has added a more
linguistic perspective, there has not as yet been a
substantial and empirically-grounded attempt to
identify the differences between legal English and
standard English. In general, though, some of the more
frequently observed qualities of legal English relative
to standard English (referred to as “consensus” features
below) include a less frequent use of pronouns both
within and across sentences (Solan, 1993, pp. 121–
122 Tiersma, 2006, pp. 46–47), a more frequent use of
negation, particularly multiple negation (e.g. “without
which the injury would not have occurred”) (R. P.
Charrow &Charrow, 1979, pp. 1324–1325 Danet,
1985, p. 283), and a much more frequent use of legal
technical terminology (Kurzon, 2013 Mattila, 2012
Tiersma, 2008, p. 14).2
1
In linguistic terms, both legal English and standard
English are generally held to be “registers” of English.
A register is set of discrete linguistic features that
characterize a set of texts, such as the avoidance of
contractions or the frequency of pronoun use in
formal writing (Conrad, 2015, p. 309 Halliday &
Hasan, 1985, p. 41).3 Register is closely related to
the concept of genre, which describes the structural
characteristics of a set of texts (e.g., the “Introduction-
Methods-Results-Discussion” organization of many
2 See Griffin (2022, pp. 36–39) for a fuller discussion of the current
linguistic consensus surrounding the nature of legal English and some of the
issues with that description. For the purposes of the present study, a word
is considered to be an instance of legal technical terminology when it has
a corresponding entry in the most recent edition of Black’s Law Dictionary
(Garner, 2019) (Griffin 2022, pp. 39–42).
3 To avoid a potential source of confusion: the concept of register is
distinct from that of dialect. While both terms refer to specific varieties of
language use, the former is determined by the context in which language is
used (e.g., the language of business meetings) while the latter is determined
by the individual using the language (e.g., African American Vernacular
English, or AAVE) (Halliday &Hasan, 1985, p. 41).

ISSN: 2710-4028 DOI: doi.org/10.54208/1000/0006 157
scientific articles), the nature of the community that
created them, and the purpose for which they were
created (Bhatia, 2011, p. 241 Biber, 2010, pp. 241–
242). A register often appears across multiple distinct
genres. Legal English, for example, is used in both
the sorts of legal filings examined in this study and in
judicial opinions, both of which could simultaneously
be said to belong to a single superordinate “courtroom
document” genre. The concept of genre is not limited
to a single organizational level. Breeze (2019, p. 81)
makes reference to this portable quality of register in
her discussion of a “transversal legal register that cuts
through different genres” (emphasis in original). With
this in in mind, Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal texts
can be broadly thought of as a genre that copies both
the structure and register of legitimate legal texts in an
attempt to imbue itself with the authority of those texts.
Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once
said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic” (Clarke, 1983, p. 36)
and several commentators (e.g., Dew, 2015 Netolitzky,
2018 Wessinger, 2000) have suggested that Sovereign
Citizens seem to view the legal system through a
similar lens. This magical explanation of Sovereign
Citizen pseudolegal thought goes as follows: Sovereign
Citizens are generally individuals who do not have
a strong understanding of the structure of the legal
system or the way it operates. In their encounters with
its representatives (i.e. lawyers, police, judges, etc.)
Sovereign Citizens see those representatives perform
legal rituals that they do not comprehend and that have
dramatic real word effects (e.g., they receive a traffic
ticket, are arrested, or have their homes foreclosed
upon). Whether consciously or not, because of their
lack of understanding (or perhaps because of a willful
misunderstanding) of how the legal system functions,
Sovereign Citizens conclude that those legal rituals tap
into some element of the “supernatural” and decide to
attempt to claim that power for themselves to turn it
against their oppressors (Wessinger, 1999, p. 38). To
bolster their efforts in what they perceive to be a form of
magical combat, Sovereign Citizens do not just copy the
form of existing legal rituals instead, they make efforts
to enhance what they believe to be its most magically
salient features.
Though it may initially seem strange, Sovereign Citizens
are far from the first people to make such a connection
between magic and the legal system. Law has long been
described as a form of “social magic” (Bourdieu, 1987,
p. 840 see also Frank, 1949, p. 181) and there are clear
parallels between the popularly understood importance
of “magic words” and the real and highly publicized
instances in which an individual’s failure to follow a
prescribed legal formula has resulted in significant real
world consequences, such as when a suspect’s telling
the police to “just give me a lawyer dog” was found to
be insufficient to invoke his right to counsel (Jackman,
2017) or when Barack Obama had to retake the
presidential oath of office after deviating slightly from
its constitutionally mandated form during his 2009
inauguration (Zeleny, 2009). Even those who would
not otherwise describe the practice of law as inherently
magical, including many lawyers, feel that the language
used in legal contexts is what actually “carr[ies] the
power of the law” (V. R. Charrow et al., 1982, p. 182) and
it has been suggested that the general public recognizes
legal texts as signs (in the semiotic sense) of the power
of the legal system before they process any particular
semantic content those texts may contain (Goodrich,
1990, p. 209). Magic as understood for the purposes of
this article can be defined as “pertain[ing] generally to
human control over supernatural forces” (O. Davies,
2012, p. 1) that is in many ways similar to Austin’s
classic positivist definition of law as the “commands of
a sovereign” (Bix, 2023).4
1
The main difference is that
where the sovereign commands their subjects, the
magician commands the entirety of the world around
them.
One of the most significant theoretical differences
between the claims to authority of the representatives of
the legitimate legal system and of the Sovereign Citizens
is the ultimate source of that authority. In contemporary
American society, the power of government is said to
stem from the consent of the governed (i.e. the “We the
People” of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution). While
Sovereign Citizens are often quick to cloak themselves
in symbols of American patriotism, as will be discussed
below, authority as conceptualized in their pseudolegal
documents seems instead to stem from powers inherent
to the individual. This article is particularly interested
4 The 18th century positivist legal theorist John Austin should not be
confused with the 20th century philosopher of language John Austin, whose
speech act theory is discussed below.