The events of January 6, 2021, and the post-presidency period of Donald Trump have no easy analogues in American history, and they have sent lawyers scurrying to review sections of the legal code that never made it into law school syllabi. Crimes like espionage, insurrection, and seditious conspiracy are back in the headlines, and courtrooms.

A correspondingly exotic defense is emerging as well. It draws on the ideology of the “sovereign citizen” whose adherents maintain that they are not subject to American law unless they consent to its jurisdiction. The Anti-Defamation League explains that the movement seeks to restore an “idealized, minimalist government that never actually existed.” 

According to the ADL, those who call themselves sovereign citizens argue that the government “tricked people into entering into its jurisdiction” by “having them sign contracts with it.” These “contracts” include “Social Security cards, drivers’ licenses, car registrations, wedding licenses,” and “ZIP codes.”

Sovereign citizens think of themselves as nonresident aliens rather than Americans and generally refuse any kind of government paperwork or documentation. They largely deny the validity of the post-Civil War amendments, which the historian Eric Foner thought amounted to a “second founding” of America.  

Sovereign citizens have taken to representing themselves “in Propria Sui Juris” — “in one’s own right.” By this they mean that they are not beholden or accountable to any greater authority. One Oathkeeper member on trial for his participation in January 6, James Beeks, signed court documents by dipping his fingerprint in blood.  

Another January 6 defendant, Greg Rubenacker, who eventually pleaded guilty to a range of felonies, has alleged that the “United States District Court is a private for profit corporation.” He went on to argue that “this court was created in 1871” without the “backing of the 1787 Constitution.” Had he known that sequence, he “would never” have pleaded guilty.    

Rubenacker is far from the only one to invoke this line of reasoning. The Daily Beast finds that at least “11 defendants have deployed what experts describe as sovereign citizen talking points, either during their arrests, their trials, or even after pleading guilty.”

One of these defendants is Pauline Bauer, a pizzeria owner who on January 6 was filmed telling police officers to “bring Nancy Pelosi out here now” and expressing her desire to “hang” Speaker Pelosi. Ms. Bauer referred to Mrs. Pelosi in coarse terms. She later told a judge, “I do not stand under the law” because “under Genesis 1, God gave man dominion over the law.”

The sovereign citizen argument has never been successful in court, but according to the FBI’s Counterterrorism Analysis Section, the movement constitutes a “growing domestic threat to law enforcement.” While some of its actions are “quirky” but “not crimes,” the FBI considers its extreme adherents a “domestic terrorist movement.” They point toTerry Nichols, convicted of helping Timothy McVeigh plan the Oklahoma City bombing, as one example.

The Department of Justice’s Domestic Terrorism Operations Unit and Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit adds that sovereign citizens pose a particular danger because they “do not recognize federal, state, or local laws, policies, or regulations.”