'Signs of Legal and Pseudolegal Authority: A Corpus-Based Comparison of Contemporary Courtroom Filings' by David Griffin and Dana Roemling in (2024) International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique comments
The purpose of this special issue is to explore the spatial dynamics of and cultural changes in contemporary legal practice. This study aims to do so by considering the layout and design features (i.e. all aspects other than literal word use) of two corpora of contemporary American courtroom filings: one comprising documents written by licensed attorneys and a second comprising documents written by members of the Sovereign Citizen conspiracy movement. Sovereign Citizen courtroom filings are notable for a legally authoritative appearance which belies their irredeemably conspiratorial character . By quantitatively comparing the layout and design features of a corpus of legitimate legal documents to a corpus of pseudolegal (i.e. legal seeming but ungrounded in actual law) documents, this study both empirically identifies the features that characterize legitimate legal courtroom filings and considers the ways in which the “authoritative indexicality” of those features appears to have influenced the appearance of documents produced by members of the Sovereign Citizen movement. Simultaneously, this study also makes a contribution to the field of corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis by outlining a novel method of visualization for the quantitative linguistic analysis of layout and design features in static texts.
2 Pseudolaw, Properly so Called
This is a multidisciplinary study which draws upon aspects of legal, semiotic, and anthropological theory. It is therefore important to establish from the outset the sense in which its key terms will be employed. This section begins with a brief description of legal positivism, after which it describes the connection between the concepts of law and authority. It then concludes with a discussion of the nature of pseudolaw and the history and beliefs of the Sovereign Citizen movement.
2.1 Legal Positivism
This study adopts the legal positivist position regarding the nature of law. In its classic formulation as Austin’s command theory, “[a law] may be said to be a rule laid down for the guidance of an intelligent being by an intelligent being having power over him”. From this starting point, two essential conclusions may be drawn: first, that a law’s validity comes from its own normative force rather than any requisite moral component, and second, that any such normative force stems from the socio-political arrangements of the society in which that law operates. This is not to say that a law cannot be ascribed a particular moral character, but rather to make clear that questions of morality are separate from those of legality and thereby obviate the need to align this study with a particular system of ethics. For the purposes of classifying the data examined below, it is therefore sufficient to say that a given text will be considered “legitimately” legal when it has been produced in line with the expectations of the relevant state or federal branch of the United States government.
2.2 Author, Actor, and Acts
Central to Austin’s command theory of law is the ability of an intelligent being to exercise power in a socially sanctioned way over another intelligent being. In practice, the being in the position to exercise power can be thought of as the state itself (or at the very least as a representative of the state) and in modern democracies the source of that social sanction is the consent of the governed (e.g. the “we the people” from the preamble to the United States federal Constitution). This can be mapped directly onto Hobbes’ description of the exercise of authority:
[S]ome have their words and actions Owned by those whom they represent. And then the Person is the Actor, and he that owneth his words and actions, is the Author: In which case the Actor acteth by Authority… So the Right of doing any Action, is called Authority. So that by Authority, is alwayes understood a Right of doing any act: and done by Authority, done by Commission, or License from him whose right it is. [6 emphasis in original]
In the context of the American legal system, the consent of the governed is the “author” from whom authority springs, the state is the “actor” empowered by that author, and the laws it passes and, when necessary, enforces are its “acts” (see also Bourdieu’s concepts of “authorized actors” and “authorized acts” in [7]). In brief, therefore, the operation of the law can be described as the exercise of authority. ...
Critically, the form taken by the acts represented in the above diagram, both in terms of their content and their ratification (via, e.g., the use of an enacting statement in a statute or an official seal in a given text), serves to reinforce their connection to the original “author”. This cyclical and self-reinforcing flow of authority within the legal system is crucial to its proper functioning. After all, a “law” in the legal sense is not the same a “law” in the scientific sense [8]; the law of gravity will function as it should regardless of its cultural context, but a speed limit is only effective to the extent that it is enforced by the state. In addition to any particular communicative aims, then, one of the primary semiotic functions of a legal object is to index its connection to authority; just as the presence of smoke likely presages the existence of fire, so too does the presence of a legal signifier point towards an instance of legitimate socially derived authority.
2.3 The Nature of Pseudolaw
Pseudolaw, for the purposes of this study, is defined as anything which is “legal-seeming but ungrounded in actual law”. Though this definition is not unusual (see, e.g., Hobbs et al.’s functionally identical definition in [10]), in practice, the terms “pseudolaw” and “pseudolegal” are generally used to refer to a particular class of conspiracy-theory-based practices. The following section will discuss pseudolaw in the context of the Sovereign Citizen movement. First, however, this section will examine the relationship between the concepts of law and pseudolaw more generally.
The mistaken idea that the legal system possesses some sort of externally verifiable authority is so widespread that it has been described as the “necessary myth [without which] the modern state would collapse” [11, see also 12]. Derrida notes that this has always been the case, claiming that “since the origin of authority… the position of the law can’t by definition rest on anything but [itself]”. Putting to the side some of the more complex ontological issues which arise when attempting to define a self-regulating field such as law, this much is clear: despite their critical role in regulating social relationships, all legal systems are ultimately ephemeral and primed to evanesce in the first moment that their societies decide they are no longer needed. It is worth noting that this conclusion is not actionable in any practical sense; a judge, for example, is unlikely to look kindly upon an argument that insists the law only exists because they pretend that it does. Nevertheless, it is exactly this existential legal ambiguity which gives rise to the existence of pseudolaw. After all, if there is no way to tell in isolation whether something is truly an exercise of socially sanctioned authority, then there is nothing to stop an individual from surrounding a legally meritless argument with legitimate-seeming legal signifiers in the hopes of imbuing that argument with the appearance of authority.
Because it needs to simultaneously serve the specific technical needs of a range of professions while theoretically remaining entirely accessible to laypeople, legal writing in particular is vulnerable to this sort of attempted authoritative appropriation. Especially in complex texts like statutes or wills, it is much easier for non-lawyers to recognize texts as legal in character than it is for them to parse their particular semantic content; Goodrich describes a person recognizing something as “legal” in this way as being akin to their identifying the use of a foreign language they do not speak. In this way, as long as a given pseudolegal text “sounds” sufficiently legal, a layperson may well interpret it as such. Elsewhere, one of the authors of this study has described the operation of pseudolaw as “parasitic” in the sense that its success depends upon the pre-existence of a “host” (in this case, legitimate legal language) with whose intended functioning it actively interferes [16]. Regardless of the underlying metaphor, what is clear is that pseudolaw cannot exist on its own but is instead dependent upon the established signs of the legitimate legal system. It is not a system of “anti-law”, but instead a derivative pretender that relies upon people’s possessing limited but extant familiarity with real signs of legal authority.
It is worth briefly distinguishing pseudolegal arguments that are conspiratorial (i.e. grounded in conspiracy theories) from those that are not. A landlord fallaciously claiming that a lease allows them to keep a tenant’s security deposit without cause is making a pseudolegal argument because they are pointing to a legitimate legal sign (in this case, a tenancy agreement) to lend the appearance of authority to a claim that the sign does not support. A landlord who additionally suggests that they are allowed to keep that security deposit because their supposed status as a “Freeman” grants them unlimited authority over the use of their property is making an argument which is both pseudolegal and conspiratorial. Not every meritless legal argument is necessarily pseudolegal; it is entirely possible for a person to make an argument which is grounded in actual law and yet still be wrong from the perspective of the legal system (e.g. because of a superseding statute or precedent of which the person was unaware). Pragmatically speaking, the answers to very few legal questions are ever fully black and white and, in that sense, an argument’s merely being plausible is likely sufficient to elevate it above pseudolegal status. With that said, the development of a full taxonomy of legal wrongness is beyond the scope of this study; it is enough for now to note that the Sovereign Citizen documents examined below can be properly deemed both pseudolegal and grounded in conspiracy theories.
2.4 “Lexomancy” and the Sovereign Citizen Movement
The Sovereign Citizen movement is a collection of loosely organized anti-government conspiracy theorists with an increasingly global membership . Despite the movement’s origins in an American far-right white nationalist group in the 1960s, Sovereign Citizens can now be found in “at least” 26 different countries and come from a wide range of racial and political backgrounds, resulting in a plethora of distinct subgroups with varying degrees of internal organization and frequently incompatible specific beliefs [10, 20]. Conspiracy theorists believe that “a secret, omnipotent individual or group covertly controls the political and social order or some part thereof” and, broadly speaking, Sovereign Citizens believe that by harnessing the methods purportedly used by those secretive omnipotent individuals, they can force the government and its representatives to do (or not do) anything they desire, including give them access to secret government funds or dismiss criminal charges against them . For the purposes of this study, the most notable quality of the Sovereign Citizens is their tendency to “[submit] verbose legal filings to various state and federal courts, dressed up in ‘pseudo-scholarly terms and meaningless Latin phrases,’ typically claiming for various reasons [that] courts have no jurisdiction over them”.
The pseudolegal documents created by members of the Sovereign Citizen movement have been described as an example of “lexomancy” in which legitimate legal signs are used in an effort to talismanically imbue texts with real authority. Law is a highly ritualized field and has been metaphorically described as a form of “social magic”. That metaphor becomes literal, however, once an individual begins to view a legal ritual as having a “special kind of efficacy" and there is broad agreement that this is the best lens through which to view Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal activities. More specifically, Wessinger describes the production of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal documents as a magical practice in which the Sovereign Citizens “‘imitate the behavior’… [of the government] in order to gain power over that government and its agents” . Essentially, even though Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theories claim that their authority stems from a distinct and decidedly superior Hobbesian “author” (often, if nebulously, referred to as the “Common Law”) as compared to that of the legitimate legal system, the form taken by their “acts” still indexes the presence of legitimate legal authority. ...
This process of indexical authoritative appropriation is the focus point of this study. Not only does it offer the opportunity to examine the metaphorical spatial and cultural dynamics of the movement of signifiers of legal authority between legitimate legal texts and their pseudolegal counterparts, but it also offers the chance to consider their literal spatial dynamics by analyzing the typical placement of those features on the page and the ways in which they contribute to a text’s overall authoritative character.
3 Methodology
This study compares the layout and design features present in a corpus of documents written by actual attorneys (the “legitimate legal document” or “LLD” corpus) to those present in a corpus of documents written by members of the Sovereign Citizen movement (the “Sovereign Citizen document” or “SCD” corpus). The semantic content of these corpora (i.e. the literal words they contain) has been analyzed elsewhere and so will be left unaddressed here. Instead, this analysis considers the contents of these corpora as composed visual artefacts, with a focus on how the presence of established legal signs contributes to their overall authoritative character, regardless of whether such authority is legitimately claimed. While reading a legal text in this way is not a novel approach, its combination with corpus linguistic methods is less common. Using the analysis in Griffin as a starting point, then, it is hoped that this study will contribute to both the fields of legal semiotics and of corpus assisted multimodal discourse analysis, as studies of both legal and pseudolegal texts would both benefit from additional empirical grounding..
