I Became a Sovereign Citizen, and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

Caden Bruzek*

Introduction

Have you ever been pulled over and told the police officer you were traveling, as opposed to driving? Have you ever made your own license plate for your car? Have you ever attempted to take a security interest in a Treasury Direct Account that the US government secretly created in your name that could be worth between six hundred thousand and twenty million dollars? If you said yes to any of these questions, you might be a sovereign citizen.¹

Many people have likely heard the term sovereign citizen in their lives. It typically comes up in police footage from a traffic stop where the driver claims they are exercising their “right to travel” and are not required to follow the police officer’s order. This blog serves to provide a brief overview of sovereign citizens. It will address what a sovereign citizen is, what they generally believe, and how courts often address their beliefs in legal conflicts.

What is a Sovereign Citizen?

In short, a sovereign citizen is an individual who claims not to be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States governments.² This includes rejecting the legitimacy of federal, state, and local governments.³ The term sovereign citizen is generally a catchall phrase that refers to a wide variety of anti-government individuals.⁴ Some sovereign citizens affiliate with specific anti-government groups, but many operate independently without any affiliation.⁵ The individuals and groups alike share similar views on their relationship with the government.⁶ They believe they retain a common-law identity that dates to the time of the founding, and that identity exempts them from jurisdiction of the current governmental structure, including courts and law enforcement.⁷

Sovereign citizens’ actions vary in severity. The least problematic sovereign citizens merely cause some friction when interacting with public entities, like law enforcement. These are the individuals who, when pulled over by the police, use a variety of quasi-legal terms in an attempt to assert independence from the government.⁸ As an example, sovereign citizens commonly assert that they are traveling as opposed to driving.⁹ Another example might be asserting they are using an automobile as opposed to a motor vehicle.¹⁰ These words are deliberately used in an attempt to navigate around statutory language.¹¹

The next level of sovereign citizens raises the stakes of severity. Their conduct has been widely referred to as Paper Terrorism.¹² As a method to intimidate public officials from bothering them, certain sovereign citizens may bombard the officials with “dozens of court filings containing hundreds of pages of pseudo-legal sovereign arguments.”¹³ For example, when one sovereign citizen was required to pay a dog-licensing fee by local officials, she subsequently countered the official with ten “sovereign documents” in court over two months.¹⁴ The official ultimately decided to drop the case, and the sovereign citizen proclaimed victory.¹⁵ Other examples include filing illegitimate property liens against individuals, with whom the sovereign citizens have a confrontation, with, for values of “millions, billions, or even quadrillions of dollars.”¹⁶

Finally, the most troubling sovereign citizens are those who resort to violence to protect their supposed rights. In one popular example, sovereign citizen Jerry Kane and his son shot and killed two police officers during a traffic stop in Arkansas in 2010.¹⁷ An hour and a half later, a police shootout commenced, which ultimately resulted in the police killing Jerry and his son.¹⁸ Most notable about this instance is that the Kanes were seemingly run-of-the-mill sovereign citizens with no violent history or tendencies.¹⁹ In fact, at the time of the shooting, Jerry and his son were driving through the country giving seminars on how to avoid taxes and mortgage foreclosures as a sovereign citizen.²⁰

What do Sovereign Citizens Believe?

While there is some variation in sovereign citizens’ beliefs, the central views are relatively similar. Thus, I will provide a high-level analysis of a common sovereign citizen view. At its core, the sovereign citizens’ belief system is based on a theory that the initial common-law legal system, established by the Founding Fathers, was secretly replaced and swapped out with an illegitimate legal system based on admiralty law.²¹ They believe they are truly currently living under the free, common-law regime and are “slaves” to the illegitimate admiralty law system.²² This has been referred to as the Admiralty Law Theory.²³

Beyond that, one theory derived from the previous theory is the Redemption Theory.²⁴ This theory claims that the United States bankrupted itself by abandoning the gold standard in 1933, and it began using its citizens as trade collateral with foreign nations.²⁵ To do this, the United States sets up an account for its citizens at birth and uses said account as a loan to foreign nations.²⁶ The account is paid into by citizens’ taxes.²⁷ This account creates two identities for a sovereign citizen: their government strawman identity and their true common-law identity.²⁸ In an effort to distance from their strawman identity, the sovereign citizens rebuke government constructs such as their driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, and passports.²⁹ By refusing participation in these constructs, they claim to be unbound by them along with other aspects of the government, such as the legal system.³⁰

Do Sovereign Citizens’ Arguments Work in Court?

Individuals who claim to be free from the government’s jurisdiction are bound to run into problems with the justice system when conflicts arise. Sovereign citizens wrongly believe they can insulate themselves from a court’s jurisdiction by taking actions to distance themselves from their so-called strawman identity.³¹ When these conflicts arise, though, courts have little tolerance for sovereign citizens’ arguments.³² Repeatedly, courts have ruled that sovereign citizens’ legal defenses are frivolous and without merit.³³

In a case in West Virginia, the court was faced with a case involving a sovereign citizen’s property.³⁴ The court spent part of the opinion describing the sovereign citizen’s position and called it “equal parts revisionist legal history and conspiracy theory.”³⁵ To pay her mortgage, the sovereign citizen “undertook the arduous process of implementing the supposed remedy” to tap into a secret debt the government owed her.³⁶ To do this, she filed various UCC Financing Statements in Michigan and Virginia, where she listed herself as both the secured party and the debtor.³⁷ With this, she could tap her strawman identity’s financial interest that the US government created for her at birth.³⁸ The court said the sovereign citizen’s theory was “clearly nonsense in almost every detail,” and the document she provided for the mortgage was “rather a worthless piece of paper.”³⁹ The court cited a litany of other court opinions from across the country that had similar findings.⁴⁰

In another case, where the defendants were facing the death penalty, the court responded to the sovereign citizen’s asserted defenses by calling them “bizarre and misguided contentions which have never proven effective and will not prove effective in their capital case.”⁴¹ The court then urged them to stop their disruptive behavior and cooperate with their counsel, who “want desperately to save their lives.”⁴²

However, an Eighth Circuit opinion that summarizes courts’ general thoughts on the matter best. In United States v. Jagim, a sovereign citizen appearing pro se claimed he could not be punished under the tax laws of the US because he was a citizen of a sovereign state.⁴³ The court responded to his arguments in one sentence: “These issues are completely without merit, patently frivolous, and will be rejected without expending any more of this Court’s resources on their discussion.”⁴⁴

Conclusion

The long arm of the law finds a way to reach almost everyone, including sovereign citizens. While sovereign citizens may be confident in their theories, they still face the same justice system as you and I. Thus, carefully consider if you really want to try to list your government strawman trust as collateral on your next loan application.

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*Caden Bruzek, J.D. Candidate, University of St. Thomas School of Law Class of 2027 (Associate Editor).

1. J.J. MacNab, ‘Sovereign’ Citizen Kane, Intel. Rep., Fall 2010, at 16, https://www.splcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ir139-fall-2010.pdf [https://perma.cc/5UMN-MTMC]. ↩︎
2. What Is a Sovereign Citizen? Definitions, License Plates, Arrests and More, Police 1 (Apr. 23, 2025, at 17:58 CT), https://www.police1.com/sovereign-citizens/what-is-a-sovereign-citizen-definitions-license-plates-arrests-and-more [https://perma.cc/XHU7-K8SZ]. ↩︎
3. Id. ↩︎
4. Michael Crowell, A Quick Guide to Sovereign Citizens, Admin. of Just. Bull., Nov. 2015, at 1, https://www.sog.unc.edu/sites/default/files/reports/aojb1504.pdf [https://perma.cc/9QEF-JWDC]. ↩︎
5. Id. ↩︎
6. Id. ↩︎
7. Id. at 1–2. ↩︎
8. Id. at 1. ↩︎
9. Sovereign Citizens Movement, S. Poverty L. Ctr., https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/sovereign-citizens-movement/ [https://perma.cc/NZG4-63VN] (last visited Apr. 11, 2026). ↩︎
10. Caesar Kalinowski IV, A Legal Response to the Sovereign Citizen Movement, 80 Mont. L. Rev. 153, 168–69 (2019). ↩︎
11. Id. ↩︎
12. Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 9. ↩︎
13. Id. ↩︎
14. Id. ↩︎
15. Id. ↩︎
16. Id. ↩︎
17. Charles E. Loeser, From Paper Terrorists to Cop Killers: The Sovereign Citizen Threat, 93 N.C. L. Rev. 1106, 1127 (2015). ↩︎
18. Id. at 1127–28. ↩︎
19. Id. at 1128. ↩︎
20. Id. ↩︎
21. Id. at 1120; Sovereign Citizens Movement, supra note 9. ↩︎
22. Loeser, supra note 17, at 1120. ↩︎
23. Loeser, supra note 17, at 1120. ↩︎
24. Loeser, supra note 17, at 1120. ↩︎
25. Loeser, supra note 17, at 1120. ↩︎
26. Loeser, supra note 17, at 1120–21. ↩︎
27. Loeser, supra note 17, at 1121. ↩︎
28. Loeser, supra note 17, at 1121. ↩︎
29. Loeser, supra note 17, at 1121. ↩︎
30. Loeser, supra note 17, at 1121, 1125. ↩︎
31. Loeser, supra note 17, at 1125. ↩︎
32. What Is a Sovereign Citizen?, supra note 2. ↩︎
33. Id. ↩︎
34. Bryant v. Washington Mut. Bank, 524 F. Supp. 2d 753, 756 (W.D. Va. 2007). ↩︎
35. Id. at 758. ↩︎
36. Id. at 759. ↩︎
37. Id. ↩︎
38. Id. ↩︎
39. Id. at 760. ↩︎
40. Id. ↩︎
41. United States v. Mitchell, 405 F. Supp. 2d 602, 606 (D. Md. 2005) (cleaned up). ↩︎
42. Id. (emphasis in original). ↩︎
43. United States v. Jagim, 978 F.2d 1032, 1035 (8th Cir. 1992). ↩︎
44. Id. at 1036. ↩︎