Conspiracy Theory Legal Meaning Making As a Form of Legal Alienation: Exploring the Sovereign Citizen Movement

Members of the sovereign citizen movement worldwide deny that the state they live in exists, and with it, they explicitly deny its applicable law (e.g. by writing extensive letters to authorities in which they dispute the bureaucracies’ or the states’ legitimacy). Against a world that seem to have conspired against them, they nevertheless hold in common an affinity for an alternative law: Self-made legal code and constitutions, identity cards, personal seals and coats of arms, court proceedings or set borders along one’s own property testify to the desire to own law-making as against the backdrop of (legal) alienation. The paper discusses how and why sovereign citizens establish such alternative laws and legal practices by taking the German so-called “citizens of the Reich” as an example. Based on an ethnographic study, the paper argues that the movement copies legal procedures, forms, and aesthetics to appropriate the authority and legitimacy that characterizes the applicable law to their own law. Thus, in this way law not only becomes entangled for lending strength to the group's ongoing conspiracy theoretical search for truth. Drawn upon in a fragmented and incoherent way, it becomes a form of conspiracy theory meaning making.