How to Become a Sovereign Citizen

by Brian Dunning
February 24, 2026

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Sovereign citizens are a subculture who have embraced a belief system in which there are secret legal loopholes by which they can enjoy all the benefits of living in a country, but also be free of all the obligations like following laws and paying taxes. They’ve become somewhat YouTube famous: there are all kinds of videos of sovereign citizens during traffic stops or in court appearances, making all kinds of nonsensical arguments and claims about laws not applying to them. Often these videos are pretty funny: ludicrous arguments that always end with the cop stuffing them into the back of the police car, or the judge sending them straight into jail. Today we want to study the underpinnings and the motivations, and see if there might actually be some way for a person to obtain what all the sovereign citizens seek.

I want to be very clear that we’re not here today to make fun of sovereign citizens, which is where so many other articles and podcasts take this topic. The core motivation of these people includes no ill will toward anyone, and there is no evidence that they commit crimes against ordinary people any more often than anyone else. They mostly just want liberty, albeit a liberty on steroids that lets them ignore whatever laws they don’t like. And their ideology does correlate with an inordinate rate of non-violent crimes against the state: tax evasion; driving without a valid license in an unregistered vehicle; attempts to defraud the government (more about that in a moment), selling fraudulent documents, but almost always to one another; and obstruction of law enforcement.

Sovereign citizens are more likely to commit violent crimes against law enforcement officers. Usually this happens during traffic stops, which are common as sovereign citizens believe themselves exempt from the need to register their vehicle or obey traffic laws. When they get pulled over, they are often completely uncooperative: refusing to provide a license, registration, or proof of insurance; stating “they do not consent” to everything, and believing that has some magical powers that will force the cops to leave them alone; and refusing to do things such as exiting their vehicle in circumstances where they are legally required to do so. Such situations sometimes escalate, and all too often, one party or the other ends up being killed.

When arrested or otherwise dragged into court, sovereign citizens rely on a completely false belief system that most judges today easily recognize and have exactly zero patience for. This system includes a number of very strange beliefs, such as:

• Strawman theory. Sovereign citizens often differentiate between their true individual selves, whom they may refer to as the flesh-and-blood person; and their so-called strawman self, who is the person referred to on a birth certificate, with a name they didn’t choose and a legal status they don’t personally recognize. So when hauled into court, they will honestly (within the bounds of their belief system) deny to be the person named on the indictment.
  
  
• Redemption theory. Many sovereign citizens believe that ever since the US abandoned the gold standard, they have been claimed by the government as collateral; and that they are legally within their rights to require the government — who allegedly holds their value — to pay their debts. Thus they are often convicted of financial crimes in which they fraudulently try to make some government entity pay off their debts, which (in their minds, within the bounds of their belief system) is completely fair and just.
  
  
• Pseudolaw. A common belief is that any authority higher than county sheriff is illegitimate, thus state and federal laws are not binding. Some believe they are commercial contracts masquerading as legal authority, and by merely asserting their refusal to consent to those contracts they are immune to laws, including tax obligations. No sovereign citizen argument has ever been successful in a court of law.

However, there are so many variations and convolutions of these ideologies that to even give a comprehensive description of what a sovereign citizen believes is a fool’s errand. It is a vaguely-defined movement, with no leadership or organization.

Though not inherently evil, the movement did have a fairly dubious inception. It arose from the tax protestor movements of the 1960s, and from the far-right white supremacist group Posse Comitatus. Today there is substantial overlap between sovereign citizens and QAnon believers, militia groups, Christian Nationalist groups, populists of all types, COVID-19 deniers, antivaccine groups, and various related extremists. In Canada many sovereign citizens call themselves “freemen on the land,” which spread to the other Commonwealth countries. The movement is also popular in Germany, and there is a growing number of Black believers, many of whom identify as Moorish Sovereign Citizens.

So let’s see if we can find a way for a sovereign citizen to get what they want, and to actually be subject to nobody else’s laws. To do this, we can begin with their basic motivation. None of us asked to be born or had any control over the circumstances. We all just popped out, and found that we had a name we didn't choose, lived in a land we didn't choose, and were subject to laws that we had no say in. It's not all that outrageous to go “Hey, this is not the life I want. Let me be, and keep your own lifestyle to yourself.” In fact, it can be seen as practically an imperative of civil liberty. Political philosophers are often the first to stand up and acknowledge that not allowing an individual that kind of liberty is unfair. But the simple fact is — as George Costanza reminds us — we’re living in a society here. We’re all here together on this piece of shared land, so your fist’s liberty must end where my nose begins. Your choices on matters such as driving style, waste disposal, weapons, noise, disease control — absolutely impact the rest of us. So we, as a society, have used democratic processes to enact laws that are in the common best interest; including that they apply to everyone who’s here, including you, whether you like it or not.

And in most places in the world, those laws allow you to decide you don’t like it and leave. Within the United States, you’re free to move to any other state whose laws you like better. There’s even a procedure in place allowing you to voluntarily renounce your citizenship. The laws of wherever you are still apply to you, but you can emigrate to any other country that will have you.

We’ve seen from the many sovereign citizen videos on YouTube that simply leaving is not good enough for most of them. They still want the benefits of living here, just without the obligations. Well, tough. It doesn’t work that way. Refuse to follow the law, and your choices are to leave, or go to jail. And this raises an interesting question. Is there a place you can go where you are not bound by any laws? It is what the sovereign citizen yearns for.

How about international waters? The hopeful sovereign citizen might get ahold of a boat and sail it far out to sea, past the 12 nautical mile (22 km) territorial boundary, and past the 200 nautical mile (370 km) exclusive economic zone. Are you free from laws here? Nope. The laws of the state your vessel is registered in, and whose flag it should be flying, apply to you — and this is the case worldwide, as established by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. So what if you have an unregistered vessel? That’s what the Convention calls a stateless vessel. All persons on board a stateless vessel are subject to the laws of their country, but if everyone on board has renounced all citizenships, then you can — sort of — be lawless among yourselves — but not for long. Another provision of the Convention is that all nations everywhere have all rights to a stateless vessel, including imposing their own laws upon everyone on board. Any vessel from any country has the right to board you and impose their own law enforcement upon you. And board you they will; stateless vessels are a violation of international law and you won’t get away with it for long.

So — what about Antarctica? Although not all countries recognize it, the Antarctic Treaty System does indeed declare that the continent belongs to no nation. Everyone on the continent is subject to the laws of their home country, but our sovereign citizen has renounced his citizenship. Nothing would stop you from going ashore and setting up your own little settlement there. However, part of the treaty gives signatory nations the right to inspect you; and if you’re stateless, their laws are the ones that apply. You’re there without a passport? Deported. You’ve done anything illegal or flouted any of Antarctica’s voluminous environmental regulations? Jail. Antarctica is not the answer.

Then there are places like abandoned oil platforms and other oddities in international waters. Can you go there and declare it your own? Nope. In the very rare cases where some structure exists that’s truly not owned or claimed and is actually in international waters, it’s essentially the same situation as a stateless vessel, and we already know that won’t work.

About the only case I can find is that of a brand-new island, appearing volcanically in a location that is outside of every nation’s 200 nautical mile exclusion zone. Such a place becomes “claimable territory,” according to the Convention, with its own 200 nautical mile exclusion zone. This becomes the property of a claiming nation that already has things like nearby rights, and effective control and administration over surrounding areas, and has the ability to enforce control. So, in some fantasy universe where a sovereign citizen — or even a group of them — think they can get there first and make a stronger claim of existing control than all the nearby nations’ naval forces, it does appear that this would be the only way to do it.

As an aside, I’ll add that there are numerous little oddball pockets around the world where jurisdiction is unclear, or where weird circumstances make them a kind of no-man’s land. There’s a little patch in Yellowstone National Park; there’s a chunk of desert between Egypt and Sudan; there’s a weird maritime zone off the coast of Norway; there are various DMZs around the world; and any number of others. I’m not going into any of them in detail, suffice it to say that not one of them offers the hopeful sovereign citizen an opportunity to live free of anyone else’s laws.

The basic crux here is that being legally stateless doesn’t free you from everyone’s laws; it makes you subject to all of them — anybody’s. All of international law is written with the intent of leaving no such loopholes. Go wherever you want; call yourself whatever you want; wave whatever homemade ID card you want; you’re still going to the jail of whoever catches you — and they have the backing of international law to do it.

So the outlook is not good for our hypothetical sovereign citizen who yearns to live free of the shackles of law. It is a path unlikely to lead to the desired outcome. We may not all like having been born into a world of other people’s laws, but we do have to live it.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning