“I, me, Pauline from the house of Bauer challenge the courts [sic] jurisdiction over me, a living woman, one of we the people, creator of Government.”[1] So begins a rambling—and often incoherent—114-page notice to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. This notice declared that Pauline Bauer, a Pennsylvania woman who was charged with disorderly conduct and trespass after her involvement in the Capitol Riots on January 6, 2021,[2] is not a person,[3] but instead a “living soul.”[4] Because of this, Bauer claims she is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States judicial system.[5] Between alleging that she is a victim of both entrapment[6] and libel,[7] Bauer argued that due to illegitimacy of judges, lawyers, and the federal government as a whole, she is not subject to American laws, taxes, and judgements.[8] Her arguments, while bizarre, are not new. Bauer claims to be a “sovereign citizen.”[9]
II. WHAT IS A SOVEREIGN CITIZEN?
The term “sovereign citizen” is a catch-all phrase referring to several loosely connected groups centered around a similar theme.[10] They are “anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or ‘sovereign’ from the United States.”[11] Over the past sixty years, several distinct groups evolved and merged to form the modern idea of sovereign citizenship; accordingly, these groups do not belong to a centralized organization with joint leaders or official beliefs but instead share similar broad beliefs about the government’s jurisdiction and ability to govern its citizens.[12] The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that there are over 300,000 purported sovereign citizens in the United States.[13]
The modern-day legal philosophies of sovereign citizens are based on reinterpretations of the Constitution of the United States, the Uniform Commercial Code, the Magna Carta, the Bible,[14] and other archaic documents using selective readings of legal dictionaries,[15] baseless interpretations of capitalization and punctuation, and conspiracy theory.[16] Most sovereign citizens are united in their belief that, at some disagreed upon time, the common law legal system set up by the Founding Fathers was replaced by admiralty law.[17] “Some sovereign [citizens] believe this perfidious change occurred during the Civil War, while others blame the events of 1933, when the U.S abandoned the gold standard.”[18]
Sovereign citizens believe that this change from common law to admiralty law means that judges, lawyers, and some law enforcement officials are actually foreign agents,[19] acting out against sovereign citizens due to the law enforcement’s “treasonous loyalty to hidden and malevolent government forces.”[20] Sovereign citizens are split, though, on whether lawyers and judges are aware of the switch to admiralty law and are hiding it or whether they are uninformed, indoctrinated by government propaganda.[21]
Sovereign Citizens have a complex, multi-faceted network of conspiracy ideals upon which their movement is based.[22] Such beliefs include that once the United States moved away from backing the U.S. dollar with gold to instead backing it with the “full faith and credit” of the federal government, the government began to use its citizenry as collateral; that the government has “s[old citizens’] future earning capabilities to foreign investors,” starting at birth with the issuance of a birth certificate and Social Security number; and that the government uses the “birth certificate to set up a [secret] corporate trust in the baby’s name,” creating a corporate shell account with which the baby now must split their rights.[23] These theories argue that the government thus created two citizenships: sovereign citizenship and federal citizenship.[24] The sum of these theories purportedly supports the sovereign citizens’ belief that the United States is not a country, but a corporation, and they, as the citizens who reject their part in this corporation, are not subject to the laws and taxes the corporation sets.[25]
Admittedly, the explanation above is a vast oversimplification of the beliefs of the sovereign citizen movement. Depending on the particular strain and variant of the sovereign citizen, details of the government’s timing, motivation, and purpose vary.[26] Varying even more are the remedies a sovereign citizen might take to reclaim their corporate shell account, which they refer to as their corporate “artificial person” or “strawman[].”[27] They believe that the government only has the authority to exercise jurisdiction over these strawmen, and thus sovereign citizens are not subject to laws, taxes, or the authority of the federal government.[28] Most sovereign citizens declare this immunity to laws of the United States corporation by filing non-legal documents, in which they renounce their citizenship in the federal corporation of the United States.[29] Instead, they declare themselves citizens of only their state, or in some cases, simply free people living under God.[30]
Sovereign citizen arguments often, but not always, include religious elements. They frequently use lines from religious texts as evidence of the validity of their reinterpretations of legal documents or assert that their divine rights or gifts overpower the fraudulent government.[31]
Sovereign citizens are notorious for picking fights with local government and law enforcement.[32] Sovereign citizens, usually after they have been ticketed for moving violations or unpaid taxes, subvert the legal system to try to prove their claims.[33] This is usually harmless—leading to hundreds of viral videos on the internet showing various law enforcement officials and judges castigating sovereign citizens for their nonsensical legal arguments and briefs.[34] Other sovereign citizens engage in “paper terrorism,”[35] a much more harmful approach, by filing false court documents, most notably liens,[36] against public officials.[37] These liens, which are “easy and cheap to file online but time-consuming and expensive to fight,”[38] have devastating effects on the ordinary government officials, explaining why they have become sovereign citizens’ weapon of choice.[39] These liens target local officials that have had some part in their legal trouble, from the police officer who pulled them over to the clerk who scheduled their court date to the judge who handed down sentencing,[40] and can seriously harm the credit of those filed against, leading to financial difficulties.[41] Other sovereign citizens result to violence and chaos.[42]
The sovereign citizen movement is broad, varied, and complex. Many factions exist in the movement, including tax protestors,[43] Moorish Sovereigns,[44] Galactic Sovereigns,[45] and Common Law Court and National Assembly Members.[46] Some proponents of the movement argue that all laws and amendments to the Constitution after the 1871 passage of the Fourteenth Amendment are invalid due to complex legal arguments involving the citizenship portion of the amendment.[47] The Sixteenth Amendment[48] is also often attacked, with sovereign citizens arguing that it was never ratified or was not ratified correctly and therefore is unconstitutional under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause or right against self-incrimination, or is unconstitutional because taxes in general are illegal.[49] And some sovereign citizens, although admittedly it is a small fraction, believe that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were a coordinated attempt to stop information about the fraudulent government from being exposed to the public.[50]
Sovereign citizen legal theories have been used in a plethora of legal cases dating back to the creation of the movement.[51] These theories are most often used in tax cases, arguing that a sovereign citizen is not subject to taxes by the illegitimate federal government.[52] These theories have been rejected soundly, usually being called “baseless”[53] and “frivolous.”[54] Theories of sovereign citizens have recently been tried in a new forum: criminal trials of those who participated in the disastrous January 6th insurrection at the United States Capitol.[55]
III. SOVEREIGN CITIZENS ON THE RISE
Pauline Bauer is far from the only sovereign citizen to be indicted on charges relating to the January 6th Capitol Riot. James Beeks, a Broadway actor and Oath Keeper, presented a sovereign citizen defense in his November trial, arguing that he has “’divine’ authority and [that] the government [corporation] had no jurisdiction over him.”[56] The judge in Beeks’ case, Chief Judge Beryl Howell, replied simply: “That’s all gobbledygook. Mr. Beeks, you should be quiet unless spoken to.”[57]
The presence of so many putative sovereign citizens at the Capitol Riot suggests that sovereign citizens have found a home with the far right in American politics. In fact, some journalists have suggested that sovereign citizen belief systems have merged with Q-Anon conspiracy theories, creating crossover between the two conspiracies.[58] Reportedly, those who both follow Q-Anon and subscribe to the idea of sovereign citizenship believed that the allegedly illegitimate 2020 election would be overthrown and former president Donald Trump would ascend to the presidency as the successor to Ulysses S. Grant—the last legitimate president—as the 19th president of the United States.[59]
Just like with Q-Anon, followers of an anonymous figure “Q” who revealed purported secrets about the government and global elite,[60] it can be easy to dismiss sovereign citizens as irrational conspiracy theorists. Harder to dismiss are the effects these conspiracy theorists have on the legal system, where simple court cases can be tied up for months as sovereign citizens file thousands of documents, overwhelming prosecutors, public defenders, and judges.[61] These documents are dense and convoluted, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “nonsensical,”[62] which ensures that sovereign citizen cases bog down the entire judicial system. Sovereign Citizens’ disruption to the legal system is a clear issue that will only increase in scope and size as sovereign citizen conspiracy theories bleed into mainstream American politics.
IV. RESPONSES TO SOVEREIGN CITIZEN MOVEMENT
The legal community cannot solve the problem of a conspiracy theory, especially one that is rooted in the belief that the legal community and the government are already lying to them.[63] How to mitigate the most dangerous effects of sovereign citizens, the violence and chaos of terrorist acts and riots, are beyond the scope of this article. The legal community can, however, attempt to mitigate the effects sovereign citizens have on the judicial system.
Legislatures and Courts have established rules to punish those who file frivolous or false lawsuits.[64] Some states use their criminal and civil procedure rules to ward off sovereign citizens and punish abuses of the legal system, often by awarding damages to the victims or sanctions to the attorneys who participate in these lawsuits.[65] The result is a patchwork of remedies that include administrative, judicial, civil, and criminal penalties.[66] A potential deterrent to paper terrorism is a uniform approach to those who use abuse judicial proceedings.
Several solutions to sovereign citizens’ abuses of the legal system could help mitigate or prevent their ability to abuse. One proposal is to impose harsher sanctions on attorneys who participate in these lawsuits, but this approach would likely be unsuccessful as most sovereign citizens represent themselves in court proceedings.[67] Another approach could be to make the process of filing court documents, including liens, more difficult or expensive.[68] Other commentators, particularly political scientists, suggest an internet campaign against misinformation.[69]
The most viable way to combat paper terrorists seems to be the use of “vexatious litigant” statutes.[70] These are statutes that identify and punish those who use legal action for the sole purpose of harassment.[71] Most states has passed some version of a vexatious litigant statute; the statutes usually involve specific standards that, once satisfied, are met with punishments ranging from fines to prohibition from taking legal action. [72] This approach targets both attorneys and pro se litigants that have met specific criteria, neutralizing the inevitable argument that restrictions on sovereign citizens are tantamount to discrimination based on political philosophy and creed.
There is an argument to be made that restricting sovereign citizens from engaging in paper terrorism is contrary to a person’s fundamental right to access to justice.[73] Any restriction put on sovereign citizens from having full access to the judicial system has radiating effects that will inevitably harm those who are already overlooked in the legal system. For example, increased filling costs will disproportionally affect those with the least resources. Alternatively, increasing punishments for frivolous lawsuits could discourage those from seeking judgment on legitimate issues for fear of penalty, making filing a lawsuit more difficult than it already is. Therefore, it could both discourage and disable innocent people from properly utilizing the judicial system. Additionally, any restriction, however justified and specific, will be simply a validation of sovereign citizen’s belief that the government is out to silence and punish them.[74] Legal systems must weigh the costs of allowing sovereign citizens to abuse the judicial system against the costs of both denying a political faction their right to the judicial system and potentially antagonizing them further. Ultimately, deterring sovereign citizens’ dangerous beliefs, and the means they use to wreak havoc on the legal community, are worth those possible effects.
With movement towards acceptance of sovereign citizens into mainstream politics, it is important that the legal community find a way to manage sovereign citizen tactics in the judicial system. Legal challenges to Capitol Riot-related charges signal no hesitation on behalf of sovereign citizens to fight their political battles in court, and, as Pauline Bauer’s 114-page notice to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia suggests, sovereign citizens are not easily ignored. Beyond the inconvenience these cases cause, it is the responsibility of the legal community to contest misleading and destructive legal theories with accurate information to create a more just and fair legal system for all citizens of the United States.
Footnotes
[1] Notice: Challenge Jurisdiction, at 2, United States v. Bauer, No. 21-cr-00386 (D. D.C. 2021) [hereinafter Bauer Notice], https://bit.ly/3vcDdph.
[2] See Criminal Complaint, United States v. Bauer, No. 21-cr-00386 (D. D.C. 2021), https://bit.ly/3O7jSOU.
[3] See Kana Ruhalter, Sovereign Citizen’s New Capitol Riot Defense: ‘I’m Not a Person’, Daily Beast, (Sept. 25, 2021, 4:49 PM), https://bit.ly/3veizVW; see also Bauer Notice, supra note 1, at 31, 36–37.
[4] Bauer Notice, supra note 1, at 31.
[5] See Bauer Notice, supra note 1, at 29, 43, 59–60.
[6] See Bauer Notice, supra note 1, at 7.
[7] Bauer Notice, supra note 1, at 106.
[8] See Bauer Notice, supra note 1, at 56, 78–79, 82.
[9] See infra Part II for an explanation of sovereign citizenship.
[10] See Michael Mastrony, Note, Common-Sense Responses to Radical Practices: Stifling Sovereign Citizens in Connecticut, 48 Conn. L. Rev. 1013, 1013, 1015 (2016).
[11] Domestic Terrorism, The Sovereign Citizen Movement, Federal Bureau of Investigation (Apr. 13, 2010), https://bit.ly/3jrLf8t.
[12] Mastrony, supra note 10, at 1017–21.
[13] See Sovereign Citizens Movement, S. Poverty L. Ctr., https://bit.ly/3rl5V6m (last visited, Apr. 18, 2022).
[14] See Francis X. Sullivan, Note, The “Usurping Octopus of Jurisdictional/Authority”: The Legal Theories of the Sovereign Citizen Movement, 1999 Wis. L. Rev. 785, 787, 806 (1999); Mastrony, supra note 10, at 1019; Lorelei Laird, ‘Sovereign Citizens’ Plaster Courts with Bogus Legal Filings—and Some Turn to Violence, Am. B. Ass’n J. (May 1, 2014, 10:20 AM), https://bit.ly/3rAZwnx.
[15] Sullivan, supra note 14, at 795.
[16] Mastrony, supra note 10, at 1015, 1017–21.
[17] Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[18] Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[19] See Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[20] Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[21] See Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[22] See Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[23] Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13; see also Caesar Kalinowski IV, A Legal Response to the Sovereign Citizen Movement, 80 Mont. L. Rev. 153, 158 (2019).
[24] Sullivan, supra note 14, at 797.
[25] See Sullivan, supra note 14, at 798–800.
[26] See Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[27] Kalinowski, supra note 23, at 157–58; Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[28] See Kalinowski, supra note 23, at 157.
[29] See Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[30] See Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[31] See Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[32] Mastrony, supra note 10, at 1015–16; see also Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[33] Mastrony, supra note 10, at 1015–16.
[34] See, e.g., Michael Harriot, Video Goes Viral of Crazy Confrontation After Couple Refuses to Hand Over License, The Root, (Sept. 13, 2017), https://bit.ly/3uxxVWq (reporting on a video of a Colorado Springs, Colorado, sovereign citizen couple who refused to hand over identification at a routine traffic stop, leading to police smashing their window).
[35] Erica Goode, In Paper War, Flood of Liens is the Weapon, N.Y. Times (Aug. 23, 2013), https://nyti.ms/3xo3a8g; see also Laird, supra note 14.
[36] See Mastrony, supra note 10, at 1016–17; see also Goode, supra note 35.
[37] See Matt Lakin, Records: ‘Sovereign Citizens’ Waged War of Paper Terror, USA Today Network, (Feb. 18, 2017, 8:25 AM), https://bit.ly/3E3IALw; Goode, supra note 35; Laird, supra note 14.
[38] Lakin, supra note 37.
[39] See Goode, supra note 35 (discussing liens filed against the district attorney in Gadsden, Alaska, and describing dealing with these liens as “nightmarish”).
[40] See Mastrony, supra note 10, at 1024–25; Sullivan, supra note 14, at 786.
[41] See Mastrony, supra note 10, at 1026–27.
[42] One infamous example of sovereign citizen violence includes the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing. See Charles E. Loeser, From Paper Terrorists to Cop Killers: The Sovereign Citizen Threat 93 N.C. L. Rev. 1106, 1107 (2015). Other widely publicized examples include the 2010 West Memphis police shootings and 2014 Bundy family standoff. See Kalinowski, supra note 23, at 153–54.
[43] Mastrony, supra note 10, at 1018.
[44] Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13 (“Moorish Sovereigns . . . believe they were America’s original inhabitants and are therefore entitled to self-governing, nation-within-a-nation status, claiming to possess territories within the United States made up of land they do not legally own.”).
[45] Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13 (“Galactic Sovereigns . . . hold a concurrent belief that friendly aliens will visit earth and they are actively planning for this occurrence or believe that public officials and other individuals are reptilian aliens.”).
[46] Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13 (“Common Law Court and National Assembly Members . . . use a patchwork of misinterpreted old English law, constitutional text and Bible verses to form pseudo-courts, which they call common law courts, or entirely new governments, which they describe as assemblies.”).
[47] See Sullivan, supra note 14, at 801.
[48] See Sullivan, supra note 14, at 790.
[49] See Mastrony, supra note 10, at 1018; see also United States v. Cheek, 882 F.2d 1263, 1268 n.2 (7th Cir. 1989).
[50] See Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[51] See Kalinowski, supra note 23, at 154.
[52] See Sullivan, supra note 14, at 800.
[53] Neitzke v. Williams, 490 U.S. 319, 327 (1989) (“To this end, the statute accords judges not only the authority to dismiss a claim based on an indisputably meritless legal theory, but also the unusual power to pierce the veil of the complaint’s factual allegations and dismiss those claims whose factual contentions are clearly baseless.”).
[54] Reed v. Stein, No. 88-A-1392, 1990 Ohio App. LEXIS 2723, at *2–4 (Ohio Ct. App. June 29, 1990) (upholding the award of attorney’s fees against Sovereign Citizen who engaged in “frivolous conduct”).
[56] See Holmes Lybrand and Hannah Rabinowitz, ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ Actor, An Accused Capitol Rioter, Claimed ‘Divine’ Authority in Court Hearing, CNN (Nov. 29, 2021, 9:00 PM), https://cnn.it/3jyrv2O.
[58] See Gino Spocchia, QAnon Merges with White Extremists and Spreads New Conspiracy Trump Will Be President Again on March 4, The Independent, (Jan. 26, 2021, 1:56 PM), https://bit.ly/3vcaMrz.
[59] See Sovereign Citizen Ideology Increasingly Seeping into QAnon, Anti-Defamation League (Jan. 19, 2022), https://bit.ly/3rhszww.
[61] See Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[62] Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[63] See Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
[64] See Terri A. March-Safborn, Weapons of Mass Distraction: Strategies for Countering the Paper Terrorism of Sovereign Citizens (March 2018), at 41 (M.A. thesis, Naval Postgraduate School), https://bit.ly/3MeEOBR; see also Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(c), 37.
[65] See March-Safborn, supra note 64, at 46.
[66] See March-Safborn, supra note 64, at 46.
[68] See March-Safborn, supra note 64, at 102–06.
[69] March-Safborn, supra note 64, at 113–14.
[70] See, e.g., 28 U.S.C. § 1915(g); Cal. Civ. Proc. Code § 391(b) (West 1994).
[71] See Christopher Adam Coffey, Litigation Overdone, Overblown, and Overwrought: A Mixed Methods Study of Civil Litigants (2019), at 4–5 (PhD dissertation, The University of Alabama).
[73] See March-Safborn, supra note 64, at 42.
[74] See Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 13.
About the Author
Holly Christensen is a first-year J.D. candidate at Penn State Law. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Brigham Young University. While at BYU she was awarded a Global Politics Research Fellowship and the 2021 Tanner Diplomacy Scholarship. She has previously worked at the Department of State, the Utah House of Representatives, and will be externing at the Department of Justice in the National Security Division this summer.
