ISSN: 2710-4028 DOI: doi.org/10.54208/1000/0006 161
lawyer who is able to write an appropriate response
to an opposing party’s motion, for example, would
be considered an expert user of that genre in a way
that a lay pro se litigant (i.e. a person without legal
training representing themselves in court)8
1
would
likely not be. Given their clear disdain and disregard
for the legitimate legal system and its representatives,
Sovereign Citizens are almost definitionally not expert
users of the LCF genre, and there are a number of areas
in which a comparison of the LCF and PCF corpora
makes this clear. At times, while it seems possible to
determine what aspect of an LCF text the author of a
given Sovereign Citizen text was attempting to imitate,
they simply miss the mark. For example, the phrase
“the below signed” appears multiple times in the PCF
corpus, without ever appearing in the LCF corpus,
which exclusively uses “the undersigned” in similar
signatory contexts. More often, though, the Sovereign
Citizen lack of competence in the LCF genre is clearest
in features that they appear to have left entirely
unconsidered.
8 In most countries outside the US, people in this category are identified
by courts and legal academic commentators as “self-represented litigants” or
“SRLs.”
Table 3 presents the predominant design choices
observed at the whole-text level in the LCF and PFC
corpora (i.e. those choices that were most common
throughout each text when read as a whole).
In the above table, the most common design choice
in terms of font family, interlinear spacing, and text
alignment for each corpus has been underlined. Both
PCF and LCF texts are generally written in a serif font,
though comparatively speaking, PCF texts do use sans
serif fonts at a statistically significantly higher rate
than LCF texts. LCF texts are most likely to be double
spaced with justified text while PCF texts are most
likely to be single spaced with left-aligned text. In every
instance in which a given document design choice was
made at a statistically significantly higher frequency
in the PCF corpus than in the LCF corpus (i.e. the
use of single spacing, left-aligned text, and a sans
serif font), that choice aligns with the current default
settings of both Microsoft Word and Google Docs. This
relative tendency towards software default settings is
also visible in the placement of page numbers in the
bottom right corner of the page in PCF texts, rather
lawyer who is able to write an appropriate response
to an opposing party’s motion, for example, would
be considered an expert user of that genre in a way
that a lay pro se litigant (i.e. a person without legal
training representing themselves in court)8
1
would
likely not be. Given their clear disdain and disregard
for the legitimate legal system and its representatives,
Sovereign Citizens are almost definitionally not expert
users of the LCF genre, and there are a number of areas
in which a comparison of the LCF and PCF corpora
makes this clear. At times, while it seems possible to
determine what aspect of an LCF text the author of a
given Sovereign Citizen text was attempting to imitate,
they simply miss the mark. For example, the phrase
“the below signed” appears multiple times in the PCF
corpus, without ever appearing in the LCF corpus,
which exclusively uses “the undersigned” in similar
signatory contexts. More often, though, the Sovereign
Citizen lack of competence in the LCF genre is clearest
in features that they appear to have left entirely
unconsidered.
8 In most countries outside the US, people in this category are identified
by courts and legal academic commentators as “self-represented litigants” or
“SRLs.”
Table 3 presents the predominant design choices
observed at the whole-text level in the LCF and PFC
corpora (i.e. those choices that were most common
throughout each text when read as a whole).
In the above table, the most common design choice
in terms of font family, interlinear spacing, and text
alignment for each corpus has been underlined. Both
PCF and LCF texts are generally written in a serif font,
though comparatively speaking, PCF texts do use sans
serif fonts at a statistically significantly higher rate
than LCF texts. LCF texts are most likely to be double
spaced with justified text while PCF texts are most
likely to be single spaced with left-aligned text. In every
instance in which a given document design choice was
made at a statistically significantly higher frequency
in the PCF corpus than in the LCF corpus (i.e. the
use of single spacing, left-aligned text, and a sans
serif font), that choice aligns with the current default
settings of both Microsoft Word and Google Docs. This
relative tendency towards software default settings is
also visible in the placement of page numbers in the
bottom right corner of the page in PCF texts, rather
