Is there any legitimacy to the Sovereign Citizen argument?

That’s actually a very apt analysis. Unenforced law isn’t really law.

The fantasy of “A certain combination of words will get me things” is a common one - the old Challenge Death thing is a cool one, or consider the various myths around vampires, such as the “rule” that a vampire can’t come into your house unless invited by the owner.

We make fun of sovereign citizens here a lot because they deserve to be made fun of, but there is an understandability to the psychology of it. People, I think, often feel very powerless and hopeless. The human experience is such that most of the way your life goes is determined by forces not only beyond your control but beyond our very understanding - the law and politics are hard to understand beyond a veneer of understanding and most people don’t understand economics at all. Government, law, economy, and the tidal wave of societal expectations are tough to deal with and there isn’t shit you can do about them and the sheer complexity of it is simply overwhelming.

Much of our daydream fantasy lives are about being powerful and above that. My #1 fantasy, by far, is winning the lottery. Why? Because that puts me above the power of the labor economy that drags my ass to work every day. The power the bank holds over me, the utility bills, all that shit I can do nothing about except grind away at with the hopes of retiring decades hence, all gone. Poof. It’s a freedom fantasy, not a money fantasy. So every couple of days I drop three bucks on a lottery ticket despite that being financially irrational; the fantasy alone is so powerful it’s worth it. Same with daydreaming about being an action hero or the President or whatever - it’s the fantasy of finally having the control essentially none of us really have. To be able to do as you please.

That’s the appeal of the sovereign citizen stuff. It’s the reason so many sovereign citizens are people who have already had unusually adversarial relationships with the government - big tax bills, summary law problems like moving violations, family court disputes and the like. They feel powerless, beaten up by a hulking opponent that not only can’t be defeated or reasoned with but can barely be understood, and someone comes along and says “I have a solution. They have so many rules. Well, guess what? Here’s some secret rules you can use that will defeat them. Say this and that, invoke these and those, and the tax problem goes away, the tickets don’t count, you’ll be FREE.”

Everyone knows about how somebody got let go due to a technicality. They want to believe that there is a technicality that they can somehow invoke to get themselves let go.

To the desperate, ignorant or selfish, the SovCit incantations and rituals don’t sound all that different from legitimate legalisms.

A SovCit favorite is the Uniform Commercial Code. The UCC is a genuine body of laws that primarily address sales, contracts, and other commercial transactions. There are two problems with the way sovereign citizens attempt to apply the UCC.

First, while the UCC has been broadly adopted, states have not all adopted the same versions and many haven’t adopted the whole thing. So you can’t cite directly to the UCC in an argument over state law; you have to cite to the relevant portion of your state’s statutes where it is codified.

Second, the UCC doesn’t do any of the things that sovereign citizens think it does. It mostly just fills in gaps in contracts. For example, company X agrees to sell widgets to company Y, and the widget sales agreement provides for “payment upon delivery.” But there is a third party to the transaction - company Z will be shipping the product. Does payment upon delivery mean payment should be made when X drops of the widgets with Z? Or only when Z delivers the widgets to Y? The UCC has a provision that fills in the missing term.

SovCits think a portion of the UCC (§1-308, formerly 1-207) somehow compels the U.S. Treasury to give them all the gold they’ve been unlawfully holding on account for the citizen. It doesn’t; it just says a party in a contractual dispute can accept less-than-perfect “performance” from the other party without waiving its rights so long as it says it is reserving its rights. For example, if a painter refuses to finish painting your house, you can let him paint three walls under a “reservation of rights” and then go sue him for the cost to hire someone else to paint the fourth.

And then there’s the Canadian SovCits who get really upset when you tell them the UCC doesn’t have any application in Canada. :rolleyes:

I think this is a key factor. There are people who don’t understand the law. So they assume nobody understands the law. They can’t accept that lawyers and judges actually know the law and are applying it. In their mind, it’s just a jumble of words with no meaning. So they figure one jumble of meaningless words is as good as another.

You see the same behavior in the New Age crowd when they invent pseudo-scientific explanations for “alternative medicines” they’re promoting.

Short answer:No.Long answer:Hahahahahahaha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha hahahahaha ha no.

While I’m not casting aspersions on you, I’ll say that most of the full-time, non-corporate, Western expats that I’ve come across in Thailand were people that we would consider social misfits back here in the states. You know: the kind that might easily fall into the sovereign citizen lifestyle.

Granted, I’ve only spent about four months in Thailand over five years, and only in Pattaya, which of course tends to draw certain types of crowds, so my perspective is limited compared to yours, especially given the “Pattaya factor”!

Wha…? How could it possibly not apply? It says “uniform”, right there on the tin! It must apply everywhere! :smiley:

No.

Thanks for the feedback, people. Very fascinating.

Cecil talked about the SovCit phenom in this column from 2012 -

Can I avoid paying a tax bill by writing “accepted for value” on it?

It includes a bibliography for further study.

It’s not that those things don’t exist: common law, admiralty law, and so on.

It’s that the SovCits take those standard parts of the law and give them the most twisted, crazy interpretations possible, which just happen to favour their own position.

As I mentioned up-thread, Canadian SovCits love to cite the Uniform Commercial Code: which is an American model law that has zero status in Canada. But they don’t let that bother them. They’ll cite particular sections, giving them a meaning that no-one in a sane universe would ever give them, and then get outraged when you point out that the UCC doesn’t have any legal status in Canada.

My favourite example is the treatment some of them give to the Statute of Westminster. That’s a pretty key statute in the Commonwealth, because it was the British Parliament’s formal recognition that each of the Dominions was legally autonomous and equal to the United Kingdom. It’s a short statute, easily read. Here’s link to it; give it a read. Pretty straightforward, right?

Except…

I’ve had documents cross my desk explaining that the Statute of Westminster was really an Act of the Admiralty courts, whereby the Corporation known as the “United Kingdom” abandoned its salvage claims to Her Majesty’s Ship Canada, and therefore anyone who wanted to could take a salvage claim on the abandoned ship Canada, forcing the Corporation known as the “Government of Canada Inc” to pay over gobs of money in gold sovereigns to the smart salvage operator.

It’s cloud-cuckoo-land to the max.

And this is a big point that should suggest how accurate the SC theories are.

I suppose it’s possible that there is a country somewhere that has some sort of legal system that encompasses some sort of contradictory laws, in which you can apply one law to get away with breaking another law.

But these guys would have you believe that virtually every major government in the world is this screwed up, and that they are all screwed up in exactly the same way.

That’s just not plausible.

SovCitz waste a lot of time with their arguments. They should go to court and simply say “I reject your reality and substitute my own”. The result will be the same.

If they weren’t so damn dangerous, I would find sovcits rather amusing. It’s funny, in a way, how at the same time they reject a government’s authority, they are seeking validation from the very same government.

I’m reminded of the case of the German SovCit equivalent who tried to pull a similar stunt to get out of a parking ticket. In response, the authorities in question pulled his drivers license, pending a psychological examination, on the grounds that given the writing he had sent them, he was clearly deranged.

Well, the flag has a leaf on it, so they know regular U.S. law doesn’t apply.

Most of them are in court because they’ve been charged with a crime (or civil infraction). It’s not as though they just show up there - though certainly there are some who have used SC arguments to pursue civil action rather than “defend” themselves.

I may not agree with an anarchist but I’ll acknowledge their ideological system is self-consistent. But as you point out, sovereign citizens are making a ridiculous argument; they’re claiming the protection of a set of laws which they’re simultaneously denying the validity of.

It’s arboreality law.