Abstract
Individuals express sovereign citizen pseudolaw when they claim they are not subject to the jurisdiction of a national government and, instead, assert they are ‘freemen’, ‘natural men/women’ or ‘citizens of a sovereign state’. They do so to disclaim any authority held by a government they view as corrupt and illegitimate. Today, there are numerous ways that individuals express and justify these claims. They may point to archaic and obsolete legal instruments that they insist still represent the good or true law. They may destroy and renounce any state-issued identification document they possess, believing its existence constitutes their acceptance of a contract. They may also sign their names in non-standard ways or file paperwork with the courts self-identifying as sovereign or outside the court’s jurisdiction. These actions are understood to comprise sovereign citizen tropes. For this reason, individuals acting in this way are characterised as sovereign citizens and their legal arguments as sovereign citizen pseudolaw.