Volume 6, 2023

IJCAM

“I hereby and herein claim liberties”: Identity and power in Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings

United Kingdom
Published Date
May 21, 2023
Issue
DOI
10.54208/1000/0006/007

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.

More articles

Caring in the shadows: Emotional and caregiving challenges faced by families of individuals in coercive controlling groups and relationships

ICSA Team

Summary- Families are hidden victims, facing substantial distress, anxiety, and depression when loved ones are under coercive control. – Stigma and self-neglect are strongly linked to poorer mental health, compounding isolation and hopelessness. – Patterns

Global violence of women in cults (reprint)

Volume 1, 2020

Helen Land
Women’s voices have been silenced throughout history. Nowhere is this more evident than in malevolent groups, also known as “cults,” in which women and girls are exploited and forced into submission for the pleasure of

The grooming of children for sexual abuse in religious settings: Unique characteristics and select case studies

Volume 3, 2022

Susan Raine, PhD
This article examines how religious authority, obedience, and spiritual fear enable child sexual grooming, using cross-faith case studies to show how abuse dynamics in religious settings differ from secular contexts.

Malas prácticas en psicoterapias y pseudoterapias: Indicadores de control coercitivo

Volume 9.2

ICSA Team
The PsychoSocial Quicksand Model™ provides a new framework designed to overcome professional bias, validate survivors, and transform the systems currently failing victims of coercive control.