A quick reminder up front: I’m not a lawyer. I have tried to avoid saying anything inaccurate in this diary, and it mostly deals with foundational principles about “how law works” rather than specifics, but don’t take anything here as more than a personal musing on the subject. I am also not a trained psychologist or sociologist. On the other hand, as I will get into, I do have some reason to think that I have a perspective on this that may be uncommon.
What on earth is going on in the head of a “sovereign citizen”? Are they just dumb? Insane? Foolish? How can they plausibly believe any court would ever buy what they’re trying to sell? Where the heck do their ideas even come from?
Here’s the thing: while they are absolutely wrong about what they believe, and it is true that “that’s not how it works”, it isn’t true to say “that’s not how any of this works”. Nor are they just insane or stupid. Foolish… possibly, but I’m not convinced that they are any more so than the average human being has been, for as long as we’ve been walking upright and capable of communicating. So far as I can tell basically everything they believe can be traced, completely and even logically, to one fairly simple misapprehension. And I’ve actually looked at this a moderate amount, since the point when the idea hit me, without yet finding a notable exception.
That misapprehension? Magical thinking. Specifically that the law is like “magic”, in the cultural sense of wizards and sorcerers. And if that seems silly, ask yourself how many people have to same impression about programming languages… there’s a reason that “a computer whiz” is a concept in our culture, and the “whiz” there isn’t from them whizzing by on roller skates. Both programming and law are fundamentally about relatively arcane, highly complex subjects that can have a profound impact on the lives of people around the world, whether those people ever agreed to that or not. Both of them are very exacting, and what you say has to fit certain forms… and both employ highly technical vocabulary that looks like normal language (well, sometimes not so much for programming, but those are usually highly specialized cases) but which can have critical differences in what something means that change the entire nature of what is being said.
An example which I will do my best to convey accurately, and which has been in the news quite a bit lately: there is a legal term “actual malice” that is used in defamation lawsuits. In English this phrase means that something was done with a intent that it result in “badness” (malice being from the root ‘mal-’, translated roughly as “bad”), and the qualifier “actual” would generally be applied as meaning that one should take care to distinguish it from other, non-malicious explanations. For example, “Alice hurt you by accident, not out of actual malice.”
The legal term, however, has a far more specific meaning, because its special nature as a legal term is actually a reference to a court case (please see the linked Wikipedia article for more details) which defined the term as “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” So at least in the context of defamation law in the United States, it means exactly that. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less. Please note that I can’t even try to speak to non-US law (other than knowing that at least UK law is significantly different) or even whether the term is meaningful outside the specific context of defamation law within the US.
A similarly basic example from the world of programming would be “a = 10; b = 20; c = a+b;”. In several programming languages that will create code that has three variables: ‘a’, with a value of 10, ‘b’ with a value of 20, and ‘c’ with a value of 30. We’ll come back to this in a few moments.
So really it is hardly surprising that folks might think that the law is about being able to say arcane phrases in specific ways and have them “take effect”. Because that actually is, in some sense, what happens with the law. Words are written down, or said in a court, and they cause a judge or jury to rule in favor or against you, and then the government acts on those results. Lawyers speak, and… things happen. And some of the terms they use aren’t just technical, but truly arcane (usually from Latin)… although many modern lawyers actually try to avoid using those too much because it makes things harder to read. But when you need to express a very particular meaning of, for example, “precedent decisions should generally be honored” that includes a whole lot of context about when they also shouldn’t be, or how to evaluate the question, it is a lot shorter to say “stare decisis” (roughly “to stand by what has been decided”).
And now we come to the catch: while this is true, it is also limited in a specific way that someone following sovereign citizen theory has overlooked. Specifically, one of the foundational bedrock principles of dealing with law is that it should be read in a way that causes it to make sense. Now, what “makes sense” is absolutely a question that requires human critical thinking to decide. If you think laws should be specific enough to not require that, consider that it is already literally difficult or impossible to even count the number of laws made by the Federal government and that trying to make them that specific would mostly mean that it would probably be an even less just system.
Looping back the programming example for a moment: I said that “in several programming languages” it would have a particular result, and that is accurate. However, in several more that look otherwise nearly identical, it would “blow up” because I did not tell the computer ahead of time what sort of variables “a”, “b”, or “c” were. And in yet other languages it wouldn’t even be close to a meaningful program. In a few cases even the concepts it expresses might not be meaningful (seriously, there are some truly weird languages out there).
Sovereign citizens simply missed the fact that the legal system does not behave like a computer and simply “blow up”. They think they’ve found that “one weird trick”… and let’s be honest, given the way some court rulings in the US have gone, can anyone entirely blame them for thinking that you can game it that way? After all, we regularly hear about folks who get away with other egregious things simply because they are not, in fact, illegal… due to some nuance of the law. A single (possibly misplaced) comma truly can sometimes be the difference between two extremely different readings of a statute. If you don’t believe me, I invite you to read through legal discussions of a textual analysis of the second amendment.
Let’s take one of their more “out there” but common arguments, that there can be two distinct “people”, legally, for a single name based solely on whether it is capitalized or not (as distinct from two human beings who happen to have the same name). Let’s say that a conventional writing of the name involved is “Rainbow Dust Western Law Elf Bishi” (blame cat breeders requiring unique names, long story). The assertion is that “rainbow dust western law elf bishi” and “RAINBOW DUST WESTERN LAW ELF BISHI” refer not to the same physical person, but to two legally distinct (but related) entities. Which will hereafter be written as “Bob”, “bob”, and “BOB” respectively, for brevity.
If you have trouble buying that such a notion could be plausible, I will simply point out that the concept of a “corporation” is literally a legal fiction of a person. No corporation anywhere, ever, has had a human body, at least to date. It would not by any stretch of the imagination be the weirdest thing in the legal world. It doesn’t happen to be true, but it is not, on its face, actually a completely implausible assertion that the law might treat these differently.
So, how might you get there from what the law actually says? I have no idea how it may have actually happened, but here’s one pretty easy path someone could rationally take:
Somewhere, a government agency decides to require that for purposes of filing financial paperwork, you must write your name in all-capitals. The actual, rational reason for this is straightforward: in English, it happens that capital letters are easier to disambiguate if they are written poorly (this same convention is used in a whole lot of legal documents, even when it isn’t required, and those of us who have to deal with OCR software trying to pick names out of those documents actually quite appreciate it).
Now, Bob files paperwork using that form of her name. The agency rejects it, but somehow Bob doesn’t get it. Maybe the rejection gets lost in the mail, maybe it just falls on the floor (literally or figuratively). Heck, maybe it arrives and just isn’t understood or gets lost. After a while, the agency sends out a letter saying that because the paperwork has not been filed, BOB (the name on their records) now owes a penalty. But Bob knows that she sent that paperwork! Heck, she sent it as registered / receipt required mail and she’s got someone’s signature to prove it. So clearly the agency thinks “Bob” and “BOB” are different people. In fact, later on when the fight reaches an administrative court there is a legal ruling that “BOB” did not file her paperwork properly and thus does owe the penalty… because she wrote ‘Bob’ instead of ‘BOB’. So clearly, from a legal perspective, those aren’t the same people, otherwise it would have counted when she submitted it… right?
Keep in mind that while such a conclusion is wrong (because the court was ruling that Bob failed to submit the paperwork the right way, not that she hadn’t submitted it), court opinions can be just as opaque as any other part of the process, if not more so. In fact, for something so basic there might be almost no opinion given (for all I know maybe there isn’t even one, in some cases — I don’t know admin law sufficiently to say). So now Bob thinks that “BOB” is legally a different person, and starts to use “bob” in every other situation just to be extra sure that there is no confusion about “which of them” is being referred to. And realizes that this might be a great way to avoid paying taxes, and starts sharing it…
So yeah. It may seem silly, and even nonsensical, but… let’s be honest. How many people here who aren’t lawyers are willing to say that they know, with absolute certainty, that there is no similarly nonsensical bit of law that is actually in force because some court ruled badly and it hasn’t yet been overruled? Especially when laws start interacting. Like, say… not being able to cross the highway at night in Kansas without wearing tail lights. Which, if you take a literal reading of the laws as written, is (well, at least was) actually a thing, because “pedestrians” are treated as “vehicles” for purposes of determining the right-of-way, while another part of the code requires that all vehicles on a highway have operational tail lights at night. To the best of my knowledge, someone eventually spotted that “vehicle” was used in a way that meant that it did not include pedestrians in the tail light section, but is it really surprising that folks figured this might not have been caught? Here’s a hint: in programming, bugs of this exact same sort (a name being used in the wrong scope) is common enough that modern assistance tools generally have automatic warnings when it happens.
In the end, the problem is that, like the wizard’s apprentice, they know just enough to end up going completely off the rails and spiraling deeper into the problem because they didn’t realize the spell would not only not stop when the broom was hacked apart, but would turn each splinter into its own complete broom. And believing that magic can work is older than civilization itself. Along with the fact that in many places and times, simply being able to write was considered magical. Hints at this show up in a wide variety of words related to writing or books — grammar and gospel being two of the better know examples. So the (flawed) logic behind sovereign citizens is quite literally “magical” thinking.