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.