Author: jpm

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Sovereign Citizens are not just an American problem

If you’ve never dealt with one of these Freemen, or Freemen of the Land, or Sovereign Selves, or any number of terms for the same phenomenon/affliction, you are missing out. They sign their names as strange code with colons and internal capitalizations, claim the court is one of Admiralty or Military in jurisdiction, and, if you wait long enough, they all cite the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC).

A Canadian judge had enough, and he wrote a lengthly explication of what he calls OPCA litigants: Organized Pseudological Commercial Argument litigants.

What made that case particularly amusing was the use of the UCC, an American legal creation, with no applicability north of the border.

We have a few of these living here in Centre county, but none active in the court right now (at least none that I’m aware of). It makes for fascinating reading, as OPCAs tend to ride the line between mental illness and obstinate assholery in the face of legal obligations.

If you have a free afternoon, give that judge’s piece a read. It lays out the structure of the arguments as presented by OPCAs. I recognize some of them from my time as a law clerk. Others were new to me. All of them are just plain wrong. The judge also proposes some effective sanctions for this disruptive, vexatious behavior.

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A Certain Type of Empire

America is an odd empire. For one thing, it both denies and doesn’t know it is one. It does, nonetheless, have a globe-spanning military presence, spending more than the next thirteen countries combined and with a presence in at least 38 countries, consisting of at least 662 bases and other facilities (pdf).

More importantly, America is a new type of empire (although not that new), a financial empire. The currency of the world is the US Dollar.

Pieces like this one today by Liu Chang in China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency should be a wake-up call. When your creditors start talking about divesting, it may be too late to turn it around.

(It should be noted that, hysterical media yammering aside, China doesn’t not own our country; we do. Most US debt is owned by the American people, individually and through their government. But that doesn’t make good headlines.)

I’m not stuffing my mattress with Euros and burying gold the back yard, but I’m not optimistic.

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A certain type of client

Amongst my clients, a sense of morality and a code of ethical behavior manifest themselves. I would never have predicted it, but it occurs again and again, and each time maintains an impressive internal consistency, even when it is contradicted by the evidence.
For instance, take what I will call the casually violent man. He gets in fights in bars, settles disputes amongst his peers with his fists, and generally lives a very physical existence. But he doesn’t do drugs. “Look at my record, Mr. Miller, look at my record.” He’ll repeat himself, thus making his truth self-evident. “I don’t do drugs.” “I get into fights, but I’m no drug dealer!”
This scenario plays itself out over and over again. “I’m not a violent person, I just like to steal things.” “I am a drug dealer, not a thief.” Each time, I run up against this personal, internally consistent sense of morality with clients. No matter how serious the offense with which they have been charged, there’s some further crime they would never commit.
Prosecutors find this boundary laughable, and see all criminals as alike, as “Bad Dudes.” But defense attorneys see things differently. For me at least, this sense of right and wrong, even among the most hardened offenders, gives me hope. It isn’t much, but I’ll take it.