Abstract
This article examines the global rise of “pseudolaw”—an umbrella term encompassing “sovereign citizens,” “Freemen on the Land,” “Reichsbürger,” and related movements that reject state authority while performing their own versions of law. Building on examples from Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and North America, it argues that pseudolaw cannot be understood merely as pathology or delusion. Instead, it should be seen as a form of prefigurative legality: a performative practice through which adherents enact alternative legal orders “as if” their desired sovereignty already exists. By drafting documents, issuing liens, or conducting courtroom rituals, participants embody legality without institutional sanction, challenging the state’s monopoly over lawful meaning and subjection. There are, however, differences between pseudolaw and other forms of prefigurative practice. Accordingly, evaluating pseudolaw as prefigurative legality extends our understanding of legal prefiguration.
I. Introduction
In a video shared on Facebook, an energetic man with a microphone and his friend stand in front of a courthouse in Western Australia, interviewing people who walk by. They approach a lady in a pink top and ask her name and how she’s doing. 1 “I’m Carol. I know a little bit about some stuff that’s going on behind the scenes.” When prompted about the “scenes” and what’s “behind them,” Carol begins: “I’ve had big dealings with the magistrates’ court because I’ve been assaulted by the police, and I was torn out of my car, and I won my court case.” She continues, “However, the magistrate court is actually a foreign tribunal, so they’re actually. . ..”
The interviewer’s friend interjects, “Are you a Sovereign Citizen?”
She answers: “And there you go. So, the ‘sovereign citizen’ is actually an oxymoron because . . . a citizen is dead. CPR—Citizens, Persons, and Residents are deemed to be dead. So, I mean, we’re all meant to be sovereign. We were all born of this land, and we’re all equal under the law. So these corporations as such—they are corporations that are ruling under the Roman Catholic Church. . ..”
As the interview continues, the interviewer grows uncomfortable. Carol is monopolizing the microphone, moving rapidly between claims without resolving them. They speed up the video to skip over Carol’s talk. They slow it down. The interviewer thanks her and tries to move on. As they walk away, she follows them. “There’s a couple more things to look up. . ..” The interviewer starts making jokes about how his friend actually had more questions about the Magna Carta. As she begins to speak, they speed up the video again, indicating it is a waste of time. As they finally leave, they joke around, clearly having a laugh.
The comments read: She needs help there is a hospital down the road haha She’s actually right and police do target these types. She won her case didn’t she so its not all nonsense but it is too much real information for average npc’s maybe stick to interviewing junkies and losers.
2
And the councils are private owned by a company in Bon Germany
This episode is not unique. Variations of this script repeat themselves across North America, Europe, Australasia, and beyond. Individuals articulate heterogeneous but recognizable claims about law, sovereignty, and hidden authority. As the interviewer indicates, they are often identified as “sovereign citizens.” Although not clear about much, Carol is clear that “sovereign citizens” is not the best term. The dominant academic and legal framing, however, describes ideas such as Carol’s as “pseudolaw.” 3 The term, coined in Canada’s Meads v. Meads, encapsulates them as engaging in “Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments” (OPCA). 4
These terms do different analytical work. “Pseudolaw” exemplifies a dynamic in which scholars and legal professionals have crafted a term to better grasp and address a (new) phenomenon. They had practical aims in mind, such as managing challenging claimants and identifying a distinct argumentative pattern that differs from legal error, customary law, or delusion. Focusing on the work these arguments do in a courtroom, the label spotlights their legal appearance while positioning them as outside and unrecognized by conventional law. Where “sovereign citizens” or “conspiratorial sovereign” identifies the content, pseudolaw highlights formal characteristics.
The prefix “pseudo” frames the phenomenon as “Purporting to be [law] but not really so”—a kind of fraudulent or dysfunctional discourse. Canadian scholar Donald Netolitzky popularized the diagnosis, depicting pseudolaw as a memeplex—a viral contagion of bad legal ideas. 5 While useful, this framing carries normative commitments that stigmatize and depoliticize. 6 A few comments on Carol’s video exemplify this dynamic, oscillating between mockery and dismissal.
The normative framing risks overlooking two central features. First, these practices are clearly meaningful and attractive to participants, as evidenced by the presence of supportive audiences. Second, this attraction is often grounded in perceived harm—Carol’s account describes a violent encounter with police and an unsettling one with the courts, followed by a sense of vindication when she claims to have won her case. Reducing such practices to error or delusion neglects both their affective force and their political imagination.
This article proposes an alternative interpretation. We argue that this phenomenon is better understood as a type of prefigurative legal project, an attempt to instantiate an alternative legal order in the present. 7 Prefigurative legality is a type of performativity that refers to the practice of enacting legal norms and institutions “as if” the desired future already exists in the present. 8 It is a politics of anticipation and embodiment: living the legality that one hopes to institutionalize tomorrow.
While typically applied to progressive or egalitarian movements, 9 pseudolaw represents a structurally different, but no less real, form of prefiguration. As we argue, this has several advantages. It draws attention to why pseudolaw is appealing to so many and is now found across so many countries. It draws our attention to the fact that conspiracy theorizing is a playful exercise, and that pseudolaw adherents attempt to “gamify” law to produce a new form of agency. 10
We further conceptualize pseudolaw as a form of prefigurative subjection. By subjection, we mean not “domination” alone, but more broadly the processes through which individuals are constituted as legal subjects. 11 We understand subjection as not just produced in a one-off process such as dint of birth, but as continuously produced and reproduced through legal categorizations, administrative practices, and everyday performances. In this sense, legal subjectivity must be repeatedly enacted and recognized rather than simply possessed.
Pseudolaw adherents engage law to reimagine this process. Their central claim is that the existing legal order is corrupt and that subjection to it is harmful. Pseudolaw entails a “particular diagnosis of what the state does to people,” in which state law appears as an alienating imposition on an authentic or prior self. 12 Against this diagnosis, adherents theorize alternative legal orders that promise a different kind of subjecthood. Through alternative courts, judgments, documents, and legal rituals, adherents attempt to enact themselves as different kinds of legal subjects while instantiating what they regard as the “true” legal order in the present. This is reflected in the proliferating self-designations—freeman on the land, sovereign citizen, Reichsbürger, state national, living human being, soevereine burgers—that describe a desired subject position outside the current state regime. Pseudolaw prefigures alternative forms of legal subjection that are claimed to shield adherents from corrupt law. This also helps explain why no single term adequately captures the diverse political projects grouped under “pseudolaw”: participants continually create subject statuses in response to both evolving beliefs and the practical failure of earlier ones.
Understanding pseudolaw as prefigurative legality shifts the analytical focus from legal error or ideology to practice. This highlights how participants actively “do” law: experimenting with its forms, reinterpreting its symbols, and, at times, gamifying its procedures to produce a sense of agency. 13 This perspective also helps explain the global diffusion of these practices and their persistence despite consistent legal rejection.
In arguing that pseudolaw is a form of prefigurative legality, we build upon Amy Cohen and Ilana Gershon’s insightful reading of the “Global Sovereign Citizen Movement,” based on United States and Irish material. 14 However, in this paper, we draw on a more diverse archive to highlight the diversity of pseudolaw. We examine cases from Germany, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as other jurisdictions that document encounters between pseudolegal actors and state institutions, and a wide range of primary sources, including online documents, YouTube videos, chat groups, manifestos, writs, and websites. Each reveals how pseudolaw adherents prefigure futures and social worlds based on challenging dominant concepts of subjection. Drawing on empirical material from case studies set in very different legal and cultural settings further corroborates the usefulness of prefiguration in making sense of this phenomenon.
The argument developed here emerged from sustained exchanges between the authors over the past four years, during which we each conducted independent, long-term research on pseudolaw in different jurisdictions. This paper grew out of our attempts to articulate the striking parallels that emerged across our respective archives, as well as our shared difficulty in framing, describing, and articulating these practices with analytic precision.
The analysis draws on archives assembled through prolonged engagement with the phenomenon (Young: five years; Löbbert: nine years, including five years of doctoral research), comprising court decisions, legal filings, self-published legal texts, websites, videos, manifestos, and online discussion forums produced by pseudolegal actors. The case studies discussed were selected for their analytical richness, based on sustained familiarity with recurring arguments and practices. Through iterative comparison and collaborative analysis, we examined overlapping materials across jurisdictions to identify shared patterns of legal reasoning, performative practices, and claims about subjecthood and authority.
The article proceeds in four parts. In the second, we review the history and global diffusion of sovereign citizen ideas and the construction of pseudolaw in legal scholarship. In the third, we develop our core argument: that pseudolaw is best understood as prefigurative legality, which is presented through examples—alternative judgments, common law courts, and the practice of “traveling”—to illustrate how pseudolaw enacts legality in the present. In the fourth, we articulate key mismatches between prior understandings of prefiguration to show that pseudolaw is a different form of prefigurative legality. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of treating pseudolaw as a form of prefigurative legality.
II. Histories of Sovereign Citizens and the Construction of “Pseudolaw”
The concept of “pseudolaw” emerged in legal practice as a pragmatic way for courts and practitioners to describe recurring arguments associated with sovereign-citizen movements and similar groups. Within this context, the term frames the phenomenon primarily as error: a misinterpretation of law, a scam, or a failure of legality. Although this framing is useful for managing such claims within state courts, it also risks obscuring what participants themselves understand they are doing. Rather than merely misunderstanding the law, many adherents seek to establish what they regard as an alternative legal order through their own legal claims, procedures, and institutions.
The term “Sovereign Citizens” is an “umbrella term” describing a set of heterogeneous practices. 15 Its roots lie in the United States during the late twentieth century, where it crystallized from multiple strands of discontent: populist anti-government sentiment, radical religiosity, conspiracy culture, and legal experimentation. The most important precursor was the Common Law Movement of the 1970s and 1980s. 16
The Common Law Movement emerged against the backdrop of a rural economic crisis. During the Midwest Farm Crisis of the 1980s, 17 thousands of farming families lost land to foreclosure. 18 Some farmers gravitated toward conspiratorial right-wing accounts: the federal government had been infiltrated by foreign enemies—Zionists, globalists, communists—intent on destroying the white Christian farmer. 19 These individuals argued that state law had been corrupted and replaced by illegitimate statutes, while a purer common law persisted beneath the surface. Their “common law” was a mythic natural law rooted in scripture, 20 the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation.
As legal scholar Susan Koniak observed in 1996, “they are not just telling stories; their stories are [. . .] intended as law and lived as law, and I call them law for those reasons.” 21 Their narratives described a legal system, and adherents enacted it in practice. For Koniak, this constituted a parallel legality, one that deserved recognition as law in a sociological sense.
The Common Law Movement thus provided the narrative template for what would later be called “sovereign citizenship.” Its adherents believed that true legality existed beyond the state, and that individuals could access it by asserting their sovereign status. They reimagined the relationship between citizen and state. They were not subject to authority by dint of birth, but became subject to authority because of their contractual choice.
By the late 1990s, these ideas coalesced. A pivotal innovation was the invention of the “Strawman” theory, attributed to Roger Elvick around 1999–2000. 22 The Strawman argument posits that every person has two identities: a living flesh-and-blood individual and a legal “strawman” entity, rendered in all capital letters on official documents (birth certificates, licenses, passports). According to the theory, governments trick individuals into contracting with their strawmen, thereby subjecting themselves to statutory law and debt. By refusing this fiction and asserting one’s status as the “living man” distinct from the strawman, an individual could reclaim sovereignty and escape state control. This is an attempt to redefine and re-enact subjection.
This concept spread rapidly, aided by the rise of the internet. It found fertile ground among those disillusioned with mainstream institutions. Courts across North America were inundated with documents filled with arcane citations, obscure punctuation, and assertions of strawman separation.
In the early 2000s, American pseudolegal ideas found fertile ground in Germany, where individuals and groups had already developed a distinctly legal and conspiratorial style of argument rooted in the country’s fractured post-war history. 23 Following the defeat of the Third Reich, the reconstruction of “Germany” under Allied occupation and Cold War division into the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the West and the German Democratic Republic in the East fomented nostalgia for a lost imperial past and contests over desirable shapes of nationhood and state authority. These debates only became relatively closed upon reunification in 1990, when full sovereignty was restored and German borders formally fixed. 24
From the 1970s onwards, 25 some actors on the far-right began exploiting perceived inconsistencies in the FRG’s legal foundations to argue that the German Empire continued to exist and could be reactivated, 26 which cast the FRG as an illegitimate construct developed by the Allied powers. To remedy this state of affairs, they established alternative state institutions, such as provisional governments and governments-in-exile. Often, they linked these claims to individual legal status by asserting allegiance to these alternative entities. 27 They attempted to exercise special rights based on their supposedly different legal status and argued the Reich could be restored if only a sufficient number of individuals claimed citizenship in the Reich—hence the name Reichsbürger (citizens of the empire).
For a long time, German scholars viewed this as a uniquely German phenomenon, attributing it to a supposed “distinctly German fixation on the authority of the law.” 28
However, by the early 2000s, these domestically developed strands began to merge with imported pseudolegal arguments. 29 Claims that the FRG was a corporation in which citizens were treated as mere employees through legal fiction began to spread. 30 This was justified, for example, by the name of German ID cards, “Personalausweis” or “personnel ID.” While the mechanism of this transfer remains underexplored, over the 2000s, German conspiratorial sovereignism hybridized with Anglo-American pseudolegal ideas—the most successful of these imports being the strawman. 31 Distinctions between natural and legal personhood in Germany, today a common marker of conspiratorial sovereignist submissions to court, regularly include references not just to German civil law and historical citizenship law but also to legal authorities popular among pseudolaw actors in other countries, such as U.S. Joint House Resolutions or the historical British Cestui Que Vie Act. 32
Similarly, in the early 2000s, Canadian courts faced a surge of such arguments, culminating in the landmark Meads v. Meads decision. 33 In that case, Associate Chief Justice Rooke of Alberta’s Court of Queen’s Bench cataloged the array of “Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments” or “OPCA” deployed by litigants. His lengthy judgment coined “pseudolaw” as a term of art, providing judges with a taxonomy of nonsense to quickly dismiss. Aspects of the OPCA spread to other jurisdictions, 34 including Australia, 35 New Zealand, 36 and elsewhere. 37 His taxonomic approach has been influential, providing judges with a toolkit for swiftly dismissing such claims. Donald Netolitzky, a microbiologist turned lawyer at the Alberta Court of King’s Bench, has been especially influential. He describes pseudolaw as a “pseudolaw memeplex,” 38 borrowing from Richard Dawkins’ evolutionary account of cultural transmission. 39 For Netolitzky, pseudolaw is akin to a mind-virus, infecting vulnerable individuals and spreading through online networks. 40
This biomedical metaphor is powerful. It provides courts and scholars with a convenient shorthand for a sprawling and confusing phenomenon, and its usefulness makes it difficult to dispense with. It offers an efficient way to signal that particular claims fall outside recognized legal reasoning. Simultaneously, calling something pseudolaw identifies it as “illegitimate and irrational,” which is a “response by courts and government agencies who have their time wasted, and it is a response by the state to the threat and exercise of violence against it.” 41 In this sense, the label also performs an institutional function: it helps “polic[e] the boundaries of ‘legitimate’ knowledge and the political consequences of this.” 42 It does more than describe a set of arguments. It situates adherents as operating outside accepted legal rationality while reinforcing state law as the baseline against which such claims are assessed. This kind of normative framing is often present in the literature as well. 43
Netolitzky, however, also considered pseudolaw an “undocumented legal system.” 44 What makes it pseudolaw is a normative question. Scholars have repeatedly noted terminological problems arising from the normative framing of this subject. In discussing the “global Sovereign Citizen movement,” Cohen and Gershon emphasize that “we need a nonpejorative term,” not least to address the question of what draws people to these arguments in the first place. 45 Melissa Demian writes, “An ethnographic problem that has obviously presented itself in my narrative is how to describe the people who subscribe to these ideas and their many subsidiary forms.” 46
German-speaking scholars are increasingly using the term “conspiratorial sovereignism.” 47 It denotes the common denominator across German and transnational variants as the aspiration “to (re)establish individual or popular sovereignty and the associated order, which is perceived as natural, against the prevailing social and political order, [and] is identified as a means of a global conspiracy with the aim of destroying one’s own group.” 48
Like pseudolaw, the term carries normative associations even when used descriptively. Unlike pseudolaw, which highlights legal form, conspiratorial sovereignism highlights political aspiration and narration. Our concern in this paper sits somewhat between these two framings, namely, how legal form and politics come together in a distinctive way.
Like Demian, we note that “pseudolaw” is problematic but continue to use it—as we sometimes use “(conspiratorial) sovereignist.” We cannot provide an alternative that neatly avoids the issues of disciplinary categorization. What we want to suggest in the following with the framing of “prefigurative subjection” is not a new terminology, but a different way of understanding what they are doing. This sheds light on aspects of the phenomenon that remain underexplored to date. Rather than merely misunderstanding law, they frequently seek to instantiate an alternative legal order in the present. In this sense, pseudolaw can be understood as a form of prefigurative legality.
III. Pseudolaw as a Form of Prefigurative Legality
In this section, we introduce the concept of prefiguration and then employ Cohen and Morgan’s dimensions of prefigurative legality—pluralism, acting “as if,” acting notwithstanding, and acting anyhow/in case—to show that pseudolaw fits. We also show that adherents are trying to become subjects of an alternative legal order.
3.1. A Short Introduction to Prefiguration and Prefigurative Legality
In 1977, Carl Boggs coined the term “prefiguration” and defined it as “the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experiences that are the ultimate goal.” 49 According to Luke Yates, prefiguration is a left-wing attempt to “prefigure” utopic alternatives, though on a limited scale, in the present. 50 Scholars have recently begun to conceptualize prefiguration’s relations to law, called prefigurative legality. Amelia Thorpe and Bronwen Morgan explain that “when the authority, legitimacy or normativity of particular laws are unclear, and there is no agreement on the authoritative source or procedures for determining which laws prevail, then space emerges for bodies to ‘give themselves the law.’” 51 It can also interrogate “the state” or “what it means to be a state?” 52 by drawing attention to state porousness while bridging the divide between possible futures and the present. 53 A body of literature on legal prefiguration has arisen, 54 largely inspired by a Collaborative Research Network convened by Bronwen Morgan, Davina Cooper, and Amelia Thorpe. 55
In Feeling Like a State, Cooper investigates how conservative Christians withdraw services and goods from members of LGBTQIA+ communities and only provide services to “desired members, service users, and customers.” 56 This type of withdrawal not only prefigures a world in which their actions and beliefs are upheld but also opposes state law’s classification and distribution, challenges the operation of antidiscrimination law, its protective status, and its coherence. 57 Cooper also identifies “pseudo-law” of “feminist and wild-law judgment writing projects’ as a type of prefigurative legal practice.” 58 It differs from the pseudolaw we discuss, but as we show throughout this paper, both are prefigurative in their own ways.
Amelia Thorpe and Bronwen Morgan extend Cooper’s insight in articulating the concept of “prefigurative legality” as a “strategy to explore potentially transformative legalities.” 59 Amy Cohen and Bronwen Morgan have further developed the notion. 60 They identify four features of prefigurative legality:
Pluralism: Law is indeterminate, open to diverse interpretations.
Acting “as if”: Engaging law as though one already possesses the authority claimed.
Acting notwithstanding: Persisting in legal action despite a lack of official recognition.
Acting anyhow/in case: Enacting legality without guarantee of reform, as a way of collapsing means and ends. 61
They emphasize that prefigurative legality is often marked by left commitments: egalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism, and open-ended experimentation. 62 They also caution that prefiguration is open-textured and can be appropriated by the right. 63 Others have noted that prefigurative structures are not inherently egalitarian. Cooper’s examination of conservative Christian withdrawal is one such example. 64
As the next sections reveal, pseudolaw fits Cohen and Morgan’s dimensions of prefigurative legality, but, like Cooper’s Conservative Christians, it is not necessarily leftist. 65
3.2. Alternative Judgments
In the alternative judgment projects, legal scholars rewrite (in)famous judicial opinions in ways that “reimage legal doctrine as if the feminist critique of liberal equality were already really integrated into law.” 66 We suggest that pseudolaw adherents engage in similar practices. It is worth noting at the outset that pseudolaw adherents engage in a more drastic form of reinterpretation. They take greater liberties with legal texts and doctrine than other judgment projects. The difference is that these pseudolegal rewritings and reinterpretations are meant to produce alternative legal authorities that individuals enact.
In the United States, for instance, sovereign citizens have reinterpreted Erie Railroad v. Tompkins. Tompkins was injured while walking along a railroad in Pennsylvania and sued Erie Railroad, incorporated in New York. Because the incident occurred in Pennsylvania but involved a New York corporation, Tompkins brought his case in federal court. The jury found Erie liable under general common law, and the Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed. 67 The U.S. Supreme Court reversed, holding that Pennsylvania law applied because there was no general federal common law. 68 While this denied the existence of a transnational federal common law, it did not deny the ongoing relevance of state common law when not superseded by legislation.
Sovereign citizens uphold this decision as meaning that U.S. common law and the Constitution have been entirely replaced by contractual law, creating a corrupt federal state. One sovereign citizen, Howard Freeman, explains that “Tompkins was not under any contract with the Erie Railroad, so he lacked standing to sue the company. Under the Common Law (Natural Law), he was damaged and he would have had the right to sue.” 69 He further insists that “all our courts since 1938 were Merchant Law courts and not Common Law courts,” 70 because America is bankrupt and controlled by creditors who own Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary, and the State, such that courts now operate under Maritime/Admiralty law. 71 Freeman concludes that all cases are based on commercial law with criminal penalties. 72
Freeman is not literally rewriting the case in accordance with established legal moves. But his reinterpretation is unrecognizable—playing according to different legal rules altogether. He is also committed to enacting his version of legality as real. It is not a thought experiment about how law could be different—how it could be written from a feminist view or an Indigenous view; rather, it is a claim that law already is different. Adherents insist they have uncovered a buried legality. They do not simply argue that institutions are influenced by commercial interests; instead, they maintain that the U.S. “Uniform Commercial Code has somehow replaced the Constitution of the United States as our fundamental social contract.” 73 This inspires the creation of alternative institutions such as courts and tribunals. 74
Adherents do similar actions in different jurisdictions. For instance, in 1963, in Germany, a Federal Administrative Court ruled that ordinances must precisely define the land they apply to. 75 Although Conventional interpretation holds that federal laws apply nationwide, and state laws within each Land, 76 adherents reinterpret the 1963 ruling as voiding whole areas of law because, “everyone must be able to determine the territorial scope of a law in order to adjust their behaviour accordingly. A law that creates doubt about this is vague and thus invalid.” 77 The most radical reinterpretation is the claim that this applies to the post-war federal constitution, the Grundgesetz, rendering it invalid. Before reunification, Article 23 left open the possibility for “other parts of Germany” to accede, naming each federal state in which the Grundgesetz should already take force “for the time being.” 78 With reunification achieved, it was removed. Instead of seeing the Grundgesetz as applying to all of Germany, adherents point to the removal of Article 23 as leaving the German constitution without a territorial basis. For them, this means they are not subject to the law. Instead, since July 1990, Germans have lived under a “simulated liberal-democratic basic order of the Basic Law, which you have only been pretending to uphold,” and all citizens are in fact citizens of the German Reich. 79
Adherents rely on legal texts as sites of transformation. Even as they depart from conventional doctrine, they retain legal form to claim authority. These rewritings assert a higher, hidden legality that exists beyond the corrupted state. Cases such as Erie and the 1963 German decision circulate across jurisdictions as foundational texts in pseudolaw narratives, underpinning claims that the state is bankrupt, defunct, or captured by commercial interests.
The feminist judgment project is a self-consciously counter-factual exercise that takes care to consider the law as it stood at the time of the rewritten judgment, a balance described by Erika Rackley as being “both subject to, and exploitative of, the freedoms and constraints of judgment-writing.” 80 Some Indigenous rewritings of judgments go further, sometimes explicitly resetting the legal frame of reference. 81 Pseudolaw adherents go even further when they drastically reinterpret cases—typically taking words out of context and without sufficient regard for legal interpretation or precedent—so that the cases are reconfigured to align with their narratives of conspiracies, natural law, or common law. While the extent of doctrinal fidelity and the goals pursued differ from the alternative judgment project, adherents’ rewritings mirror the performative use of legal form to contest the authority of existing decisions and reimagine what law could be, aligning the judgment with a desired future.
Adherents are not just rewriting judgments as symbolic political performance; they uphold and enact their visions of these judgments as the law. In rejecting their subjection to state law, adherents claim authority as subjects of an alternative legal order—one they seek to give effect by creating courts of their own.
3.3. Tribunals and Common Law Courts
Cohen, Morgan, and others discuss People’s Tribunals as examples of prefigurative legality. 82 Notwithstanding the lack of faith in state and international law, these tribunals are not legally authoritative but redeploy the legal forms to draw attention to the law and how it could be employed. 83 Across the pseudolaw world, some adherents create their own courts and tribunals—their own institutions—to give their laws effect.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the United States-based Common Law movement had its own sheriffs and courts. 84 These institutions enabled individuals to file “Quiet Title Actions” and present their birth certificates as evidence of being born in a state rather than under federal jurisdiction. 85 Unlike quieting title in state law, these actions remove the “cloud of title” that bound them as “slaves” to the federal government. 86 In doing so, adherents become “Freemen” or “Sovereign Citizens,” no longer subject to federal jurisdiction. These are attempts at withdrawing from the state by appealing to a higher legal authority. The contemporary version of “sovereign citizens,” which self-identify as “American State Nationals,” 87 continues this tradition, but has expanded their functions. They invite individuals to correct their status under the 1779 Naturalization Act via notarized declaration, enabling participation in “State Assemblies” and receipt of “State-issued Travel ID” or private property plates. 88 Correcting their subject status supposedly frees them from statutory laws, taxes, mortgages, and courts, returning them to life as “Freeholders.” 89
Similar dynamics appear in Germany. In 2010, a network led by Erhard Lorenz announced the recommencement of the Reichsgericht (imperial court), citing the 1877 statute as its legal basis. 90 The group’s primary goal is to allow followers to change their status from a “stateless” and thereby rightless person to a citizen by transporting the holder into the “jurisdiction of the Empire.” 91 For this purpose, the Reichsgericht does not just keep a registry of new citizens, but also of those who have been excommunicated for “treason,” and whose “rights” have therefore been “revoked.” Within a network of interconnected websites, this “government” allows individuals to purchase personal documents, including passports and birth certificates—a service reportedly earning the group a six-figure revenue. 92 Their goal is the creation of a sovereign state, which “can ONLY be realised through sovereign decisions, actions, and the application of sovereign laws through the German people.” The group adjusts subject status through law to enact their vision for a desirable future in a way where means and ends correspond. 93
Other German groups, such as the Global Court of the Common Law (GCCL), combine UK-imported and German-origin arguments. The GCCL claims to have branches in seventeen countries, including the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Austria, and Liechtenstein. 94 The GCCL established the trappings of a legal system, including a constitution, appointed “judges” and “sheriffs,” issuing “verdicts” and “arrest warrants.” 95 They issue “live-life claim” certificates, described as the “very first step to be able to claim our rights” as “living beings” [sic], not “dead entities.” 96 They claim to have produced “over 4000 affidavits,” which allegedly caused state courts to close their cases.
GCCL asserts that only two biblical-natural rules are enforceable—love God and love your neighbor. 97 Like American State Nationals, GCCL members regard state law as corrupted, a tool of Satanists that confuses through double meanings. 98 Their courts, instead, promise clarity and finality: decisions are unappealable, rules are self-evident, and authority is unquestionable. 99 Yet this purported natural order is enforced through hierarchical institutions where members arbitrate without review.
Notwithstanding their rejection of state law, these groups recreate court forms to give effect to the common law, natural law, or God’s law. Like People’s Tribunals, pseudolegal courts appeal to higher-order law. Although they typically do not have enforcement, they maintain that their law has an immediate real-world effect. Their “as if” law is serious and determinative. 100 It is not appealable. 101 But unlike People’s Tribunals, it seems more obsessed with precision and truth. GCCL insists: “One word[,] one meaning is correctness. By default non correctness is fiction.” 102 Such deterministic approaches foster charismatic leaders, as the insistence on a single correct meaning discourages contestation and authority becomes concentrated in figures who present themselves as uniquely capable of accessing and applying the correct meaning of legal text.
3.4. From PARK(ing) to Traveling
Cohen and Morgan describe PARK(ing) Day as an example of prefigurative legality: activists lease parking spots and transform them into miniature parks, reimagining urban space through legal reinterpretation. 103 They use the established legal concept of “lease” but act on an interpretation of it that goes beyond the established doctrinal meaning, without intending to break the authority of law itself. Adherents likewise reinterpret established foundational principles in law. They reframe and reconstruct legal categories as lived law in the present.
Former pseudolaw adherent Robert Sudy explains that according to Bouvier’s Law Dictionary, a “driver” is “one employed in conducting a coach, carriage, wagon, or other vehicle.” 104 The United States Federal Code defines a motor vehicle as any “carriage or other contrivance propelled or drawn by mechanical power and used for commercial purposes.” 105 And “used for commercial purposes” means that “the carriage of persons or property” is used “for any fare, fee, rate, charge or other consideration . . . in connection with any business . . . for profit.” 106 Adherents believe these definitions hold extraordinary significance. It fits their belief that commercial interests have overtaken state law, and that individuals not engaged in commerce do not need to comply with state regulations on “driving.” Instead, they retain their universal, inalienable right to travel. 107 If they are “traveling” in their “automobile” rather than “driving” a “vehicle,” they are not subject to corporate or corrupt state law. Setting aside jurisdictional limits, this demonstrates the indeterminacy of law and its plurality, as even fundamental terms can be reinterpreted. By reclaiming the vehicle as a private noncommercial automobile, adherents attempt to transform the ordinary and routine practice of driving or traveling into an act of anti-subjection.
There are cases from all over the world that show precisely this. The Australian case Van den Hoorn v. Ellis exemplifies how such arguments are meant to work. 108 “Sovereign Freeman JOHAN,” an agent, appeared on behalf of “J. H. VAN DEN HOORN,” appealed convictions for driving an unregistered, uninsured vehicle with canceled plates and without a license. 109 He explained that he was merely the “owner of the created fictions known as JOHAN HENDRICK VAN DEN HOORN and JOHN HENRY VAN DEN HOORN,” identities supposedly controlled by corporate fictions like “australia inc.” 110 The basis of appeal was that the magistrate had assumed unlawful jurisdiction over a “freeman.” 111 He also reinterpreted terms like “vehicle,” “transport,” “includes,” and “driver,” arguing that a “person” meant a “corporation,” which he was not. 112 The judge dismissed the appeal. 113
Mr Van Den Hoorn employed the well-known “strawman” or “dual-personality” argument. 114 He claimed that he was distinct from his legal identity, written in capital letters, which belonged to the state corporation. This occurs across jurisdictions, 115 and is a typical “right to travel” case. Having withdrawn from state law, Van den Hoorn claimed he did not need a license, registration, or insurance. They claim that holding such documents concedes subjection to state authority. This is not an isolated case: adherents routinely use homemade identification or claim exemption from licensing. 116
A similar practice has emerged in Germany. Adherents argue that laws on car registration, insurance, and licenses do not apply to them, and symbolically alter plates to mark this distinction. 117 A Bavarian group issued plates reading “MENS:CH” (“mensch” means “human”), mirroring the man/juristic person duality in Van den Hoorn. Users claimed these plates signaled exemption from Federal Republic law, which governed legal persons, not humans. This is occurring throughout Germany, 118 as it is in Australia, the United States, and elsewhere.
Like the rewriting of judgments and the establishment of tribunals, the subversion of established legal concepts in this milieu is equally structured by the subjectivities adherents believe these concepts encode. They seize on ambiguous or archaic legal definitions to enact alternative subjectivities, which they claim authorize their alternative uses of cars and roads. But where PARK(ing) Day is playful, experimental, and tolerated, those who “travel” are often confrontational, determinative, and criminalized. PARK(ing) Day participants know their acts are experimental interventions; travelers insist their acts are binding assertions of law.
3.5. Commonalities
Building on Cohen and Morgan’s four dimensions of prefigurative legality, the legal order pseudolaw adherents seek to create is one based on proper subjection to a different legal authority. Because the state authority has been corrupted, they seek to create the “true” hidden law and subject themselves to it.
Regarding pluralism, adherents multiply legal orders rather than abandoning legality altogether. They have no intention of breaking the authority of law itself. They reinterpret Erie (in the United States) or the 1963 German decision to create parallel accounts of law: courts aren’t applying “real” law but commercial, maritime, or corporate law. From that reinterpretation, adherents build alternative legal institutions, like common law courts, assemblies, sheriffs, ministries, vehicle registries, and ID systems. In appealing to prior states—whether it is Reich-based or the U.S. Constitution before the Fourteenth Amendment—they reject state law and assert a higher, legal order that is natural, biblical, or rights-granting. Even when claims contradict orthodox doctrine, they retain legalistic form, showing that law itself (rather than politics or morality) is their idiom of legitimacy. While they are reacting to neoliberalism, 119 they are themselves engaged in politics through legality.
Like Cohen and Morgan’s PARK(ing) Day example, adherents act as if their reinterpretations were already binding law. Freeman’s reading of Erie treats the United States as if it were already operating under Uniform Commercial Code/Admiralty law, and therefore as if ordinary courts lack jurisdiction. German adherents act as if the repeal of Article 23 erased the Federal Constitution, confirming that it is only a corporation. “Travelers” act as if licenses, registration, and insurance are irrelevant because they are not “drivers” but “living men” or “humans.” Homemade ID cards, altered license plates, and “quiet title actions” all perform legality as though an alternative order were already in place.
The examples also demonstrate acting notwithstanding official rejection. Adherents have lost faith in state courts—declaring them illegitimate—and they repeatedly lose in state courts. Nonetheless, they continue to engage with the law. Courts in the United States, Germany, and Australia consistently dismiss adherents’ arguments as legally baseless. This does not stop adherents from filing liens, appeals, or defenses. Mr Van den Hoorn pressed the “strawman” argument despite certain defeat, and GCCL members continue to issue life-live claims notwithstanding the non-recognition of their court and prosecution of its agents. These actions underscore how prefigurative legality operates through persistence: the claim is carried forward despite repeated nullification by state authorities. Many believe that they are destined to lose—it confirms that state actors are corrupt. But it is not just persistence.
We describe a relatively serious phenomenon, but pseudolaw is a playful form of legal contestation. As Jelle van Buuren has noted, pseudolaw involves performing and role-playing a different form of justice. 120 The “play,” according to Van Buuren, is what makes it appealing. Löbbert observes that “doing law,” developing and applying pseudolegal rituals in writing and court, is experienced as “thrilling, collective, and endless games of interpretation.” 121 The fact that these are playful activities similar to role-playing does not imply that sovereignists themselves consider their actions “fake” or merely a game. This coincides with Cooper’s notion that play—as articulated in Feeling Like a State—can be serious and, indeed, harmful. 122 As much as they try to escape the state and its legal constructs, they prefigure an alternative legality, a type of constructive resistance. 123 The playful, agentic form of pseudolaw is “simply more attractive than resigning oneself to a passive role in a detached, technocratic, protocol-driven, disenchanted, and complex reality.” 124
Finally, adherents act anyhow or in case, often pre-emptively. Templates circulate online for letters voiding laws with vague territorial scope, and sovereign citizens routinely carry homemade travel IDs or affix alternative plates in case they encounter police. Filing “quiet title actions” or recording declarations of status is prophylactic: a way to secure freedom from statutory jurisdiction before a conflict arises. The proliferation of alternative ministries, registries, and IDs illustrates an attempt to inoculate themselves against the state’s reach. These practices are not contingent on recognition but on the possibility that, when challenged, adherents will have already laid down their protective paper trail.
This shows that pseudolaw is not “strong legal pluralism” nor merely “anti-law.” Instead, it is prefigurative: it pluralizes legality by positing hidden or higher orders; enacts them as if they already govern; persists notwithstanding repeated rejection; and develops protective practices to act anyhow/in case. They aim to create a particular relationship with the authority. They want to follow correct legal formulas, produce the right documents, interpret and recognize legal documents and authorities. Through these practices, they subject themselves to the imagined legal order they are trying to instantiate. Participants act as if the alternative order already exists, and in doing, so they discipline themselves into its structures of authority.
IV. Mismatches: Pseudolaw as Prefigurative Subjection
Following Cohen and Gershon, we argued that pseudolaw is best understood as a form of prefigurative legality, enabling us to take the political worldbuilding inherent in pseudolaw seriously. While pseudolaw exhibits characteristics associated with pre-established views of prefigurative legality, we agree with Cohen and Gershon that its practices also depart in important ways from the forms of experimentation, indeterminacy, and egalitarianism often associated with prefigurative politics. While these departures might appear to mark the limits of the prefigurative framework, they are better understood as revealing the particular orientation of pseudolaw’s prefigurative project. Rather than prefiguring more open or egalitarian legal relations, pseudolegal practices attempt to stabilize authority, clarify hierarchy, and construct highly structured relationships to an imagined legal order. In this sense, the divergences explored in this section do not simply mark a mismatch between pseudolaw and prefigurative legality. Instead, they illuminate the specific form that prefiguration takes in this context: a process by which participants attempt to enact what they perceive as the “true” legal order in the present, even as doing so entails new and intensified forms of legal subjection. The ways pseudolaw departs from emancipatory models of prefiguration are precisely what reveal its orientation toward subjection.
4.1. From Indeterminacy to Determinacy
Prefigurative legality on the left often embraces indeterminacy. Law is plural, open-ended, and subject to reinterpretation. Feminist judgments demonstrate that law could be otherwise; PARK(ing) Day shows that space can be reimagined. The point is experimentation, play, and openness.
Pseudolaw, by contrast, occupies a paradoxical stance that combines legal indeterminacy with an insistence on determinacy and closure. On the one hand, adherents embrace the interpretive openness of legal texts. Just as critical legal scholars have demonstrated that cases and statutes are rarely self-executing, 125 pseudolaw relies on the fact that texts can be reinterpreted against their conventional meaning. Freeman’s reinterpretation of Erie and German pseudolaw adherents’ reliance on the 1963 Federal Administrative Court decision exemplifies this: judgments become sites of possibility, where seemingly settled principles can be re-cast to support alternative narratives. This indeterminacy is what allows them to seize upon technical wording (such as the deletion of Article 23 in Germany, or the absence of contractual privity in Erie) and amplify it into system-defining transformations.
However, and at the same time, pseudolaw insists on determinacy—that there is one true meaning. 126 Freeman declares that U.S. law after Erie must be admiralty/contract law; German adherents insist that the removal of territorial provisions voids entire legal codes. Both claim a “truer” version of law. These are not tentative possibilities. Law is fixed, its meaning clear, and its implications totalizing. This determinacy is part of pseudolaw’s appeal. It offers structure, certainty, and clear rights in an uncertain world that seems to work against their interests.
Left prefiguration often treats legality as open-ended, a field of experimentation. Pseudolaw, by contrast, asserts closure. The one true law has been revealed. The task is not to imagine possibilities but to uncover and enact the determinate truth and justice. This closure lends pseudolaw both its stability and its vulnerability: stability because adherents are certain of their law, vulnerability because contradictions must be explained through ever-expanding conspiracies. Adherents develop their ideas about what true legal order looks like and how it can be realized. Claiming these ideas are true and enforceable, they are regularly tested by adherents. 127 This determinacy partially explains why sovereignists, unlike other prefigurative movements, actively seek out state institutions such as the courts—they believe their law to be authoritative and closed. However, sovereignist arguments generally do not prevail in conflicts with authorities, which tend to enforce their understanding of the law coercively if needed. This causes friction, both in the sense of escalating individual problems and within groups that are confronted with the unattainability of their “true” law. It is precisely the claim to immutability that makes the worldview utopian and vulnerable. Many groups cope with this by developing ever more encompassing conspiracy narratives, or by simply splitting into more groups. 128 In this way, pseudolaw exploits the instability of law’s meanings while denying its own instability. Adherents play with interpretation, construct new institutions, and take advantage of interpretive slippage to create entry points for counter-narratives, yet it forecloses alternative readings by insisting that only one reinterpretation is valid. Legal indeterminacy fuels their imaginative re-readings; legal determinacy secures their claims to authority. Nevertheless, it is seriously playful and deeply agentic.
This deterministic view of a “true” law does not negate pluralism. Robert Cover argues that a single text can yield multiple interpretations, and that interpretation becomes legal when communities live by it and put it into effect. 129 As Cover notes, some individuals are so convinced that their interpretation is the right one that they become martyrs for their vision, their worldview. 130 Individuals may only see their law as binding, but legal orders proliferate. Building on Cover’s view, Koniak argues that people in the Common Law Movement reinterpret the U.S. Constitution to create a parallel legal universe. 131 Like those individuals, pseudolaw adherents today recognize that state law is powerful and dangerous. But their legality provides agency, a worldview, and either protection from corruption or the path to martyrdom. In this way, a deterministic view of legality can be consistent with pluralism.
As much as pseudolaw insists that there is one true law, they also engage in a hierarchical type of pluralism.
4.2. From Egalitarianism to Hierarchy
Pseudolaw posits a tiered legal universe in which some forms of law are superior, authentic, or “real,” while others are merely derivative, corrupt, or fictitious. The subject status of individuals relates to the legal hierarchy to which they belong.
In the U.S. context, reinterpretations of Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins are telling: sovereign citizens claim the decision subordinated the “real” common law to statutory or commercial law. Those who do not file a “quiet title” in Common Law courts remain “slaves.” 132 This is not simply pluralism; it is a ranking of legal orders, where the common law is natural and universal, whereas statutory law is artificial, corporate, and imposed. Adherents who belong to the higher order of natural/common law are freer, while ordinary courts and officials are trapped in a degraded, lower order. The effect is to hierarchize legal authority: living men and women stand at the top, while state officials are demoted to mere corporate functionaries.
The German cases reveal a similar hierarchy. By insisting the Federal Republic is only a corporation, adherents elevate the German Empire’s constitution as a higher, truer order. Here, hierarchy is temporal and nationalist: the “original” state trumps the post-war state, and present-day officials are cast as illegitimate. The altered license plates—replacing EU or federal symbols with imperial or common law ones—restore a higher subject status over a fallen or occupied polity.
Examining their treatment of the subject also reveals these layers of hierarchy. By separating the “living man” from the “juristic person,” adherents construct an ontology of legal being. The human occupies the top tier, endowed with inalienable rights, while the juristic “strawman” is a dead, corporate fiction. Courts and police interact only with the lower-tier fiction. Homemade IDs, live claims, and alternative registries thus function as instruments for asserting superiority within this hierarchy. These legal beliefs are also hierarchical in their institutional mimicry. Common law courts, registries, and ministries are not presented as experimental alternatives, but rather as higher courts or true offices that displace state institutions. The institutions themselves are hierarchical, mirroring the architecture of state law precisely to claim greater authority over it.
Thus, while prefigurative in form, pseudolaw is not necessarily egalitarian. It is unconcerned with the equal distribution of powers. It does not invite coexistence of orders or egalitarian participation in the drafting, interpretation, and use of law. Rather, it seeks to establish a vertical order of legitimacy: natural over statutory, living over juristic, original constitutions over present ones, and sovereign courts over state courts. Its world-building is therefore both plural and hierarchical, a duality that explains its persistent appeal and confrontational edge. In creating a more hierarchical and deterministic legal order, it is hoped that they can avoid the traumas associated with state law.
4.3. Pseudolaw and Subjection
Perhaps the most significant mismatch, however, concerns the object of prefiguration. Left prefigurative legality often aims to create alternative policies or practices, such as feminist doctrine, urban commons, and people’s tribunals. It is about governance, regardless of whether it is small-scale or experimental.
Pseudolaw, by contrast, is more about subjection than governance. Its primary concern is how the individual should relate to law, which, in turn, determines legal institutions and the governance of society. The primary aim is an attempt to reconfigure subjectivity. By distinguishing between the corporate fiction and the living man, adherents reimagine what it means to be a legal subject. To accept state documents is to subject oneself; to refuse them is to remain sovereign. This focus on subjection is evident in everyday practices such as refusing to obtain driver’s licenses, issuing homemade ID cards, and challenging police authority. Each act is a way of configuring oneself as subject only to higher law, not to the present state. Pseudolaw thus prefigures a new kind of government that, centrally, derives from the free subject.
James Toseland’s ethnographic work on the UK Freeman on the Land captures this shifting locus of sovereignty from collective institutions to individual selfhood. He observes that for pseudolaw adherents, sovereignty is “the most highly valued aspect of selfhood,” functioning as “gravity around which all beliefs and practices derive their order and meaning.” 133 While liberal democracies have long noted a tie between the sovereign state and the self-possessed individual, 134 pseudolaw adherents work from the subject status toward the lawful form of government, not the other way around. “In a sense, a truly sovereign individual has reflexively become aware of the social construction of socio-legal reality, and can bring about their ontological freedom by recognising this and acting accordingly.” 135 Pseudolaw is a project of sovereign individuation, subject to an alternative form of legality. In playfully appealing to a higher authority, they become agents of a new order rather than cogs in a state system of alienation and disaffection. This makes pseudolaw attractive across borders.
Understanding pseudolaw through the lens of subjection enables us to highlight how the same logic of argument and practice changes, is updated, and evolves when it is adopted by diverse communities worldwide. By sharing diagnoses of ills in contemporary society, as outlined by Gershon and Cohen, these groups can offer various visions of a prefigured future.
The “selfhoods” this pseudolegal assertion invokes are, in turn, tied to various political projects and values. The classical liberal values Gershon and Cohen identify in the United States and Ireland are one variant. German groups, however, are more likely to combine the strawman argument with nativist ideas about identity and popular sovereignty. Using the same diagnosis—that the status quo is rooted in secret contracts and that the government is a corporation—they conclude that the answer lies in an invocation of subjection tied to an organic vision of society. Often, this occurs under a charismatic leader, whether the emperor or an individual guru, who embodies the popular will. Where earlier German groups, almost by default, organized into counter-governments, the import of the strawman has offered them a way to invoke this collective identity interchangeably through both collective institutionalization and individual assertion. 136 This is observed elsewhere, too, in very different contexts. Moorish Sovereign Citizens in the United States invoke an invented subject status that troubles the history of slavery and disempowerment. 137 All of these groups imagine subjection otherwise.
This focus on subjection has profound implications. On the one hand, it explains pseudolaw’s appeal. In a world where individuals feel disempowered, alienated, and overregulated, pseudolaw offers the ability to play with law and a sense of autonomy, control, and freedom that arises from reconstituting the terms of subjection in a deterministic order. At the same time, this perspective draws attention to a set of tensions that are better understood as features of prefigurative legality. Sovereignty is asserted individually yet sustained collectively through communities of belief and shared identities. This dynamic helps explain why pseudolegal movements can accommodate ethno-nationalist fantasies of a white Christian republic, Afrocentric claims associated with Black nationalism, Indigenous uses of pseudolaw and invented claims to Indigeneity, 138 nostalgic appeals to imperial Germany, and more. Within these communities, adherents rely on others—gurus, institutions, and interpretive authorities—even as they claim personal sovereignty. Likewise, the law they imagine is frequently deterministic and hierarchical, even as it promises autonomy. These dynamics can deepen participants’ subjection to state power when assertions of sovereignty lead to arrest, fines, or imprisonment. Yet the legality they prefigure, through the “gamification” of law, also creates opportunities for agency and participation.
V. Reflections on Contribution
In the language of courts and much of the academy, “pseudolaw” is spurious, pathological, a viral memeplex. Yet labeling pseudolaw as fake law depoliticizes the movements, stigmatizes adherents as dupes or patients, while naturalizing state law as the unquestioned baseline. The label “pseudolaw” is, itself, a political project that brackets the social, political, and affective conditions that make pseudolaw attractive, obscuring further inquiry.
Building on the work of those who seek to understand the motivations of adherents, 139 we reframe pseudolaw as a form of prefigurative legality to offer a different view. It is a political, performative form of law-making. It is an attempt to live an alternative legality in the present, as if it were already binding. This reframing neither legitimizes pseudolaw’s claims nor denies its dangers. It merely allows us to recognize pseudolaw as law-like, with its own structures, logics, and appeals. Like feminist judgment projects, people’s tribunals, and PARK(ing) Day, it appropriates legal forms to enact a different legality in the present. It acts “as if,” notwithstanding, and anyhow. It reinterprets cases, creates courts, and lives sovereignty daily. But it also diverges. Rather than indicating that pseudolaw is prefigurative legality, it expands prefigurative theory to show that pseudolaw produces alternative forms of subjection. It also indicates that even if sovereign citizens or sovereignists seek freedom, they are claiming rights within a highly structured, authoritative order. It is hierarchical rather than egalitarian, determinative rather than indeterminate, and closed rather than open. Most crucially, it works from the basis of the subject, not from the government. It reconfigures what it means to be a legal subject, offering adherents a script for agency, resistance, and sovereign individuation. That is its main appeal, which also explains why generally used terms are inaccurate.
This reframing matters. It denaturalizes state law while expanding our understanding of prefiguration. It confirms that prefiguration, its creative imagination, and contestation of legalities are not the exclusive domain of progressive movements, but a broader mode of legal imagination that can arise at the level of the subject.
Ultimately, pseudolaw reveals both the indeterminacy and the determinacy of law. It demonstrates how legal texts can be mobilized to sustain alternative worlds, even as they insist on absolute truths. It demonstrates the law’s capacity to generate hope. And it challenges us, as scholars, to take seriously the ways people imagine and live legality, however strange and confrontational it may be. Law is not only the province of courts and legislatures. It is also a field of prefiguration, where people enact futures in the present, configure subjectivities, and contest the boundaries of subjection. To study pseudolaw as prefigurative legality is therefore to study law as it is lived: troubling, fragile, contested, political, and always in the making.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper draws on Dr Lӧbbert’s doctoral research supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number 2262026], the Lincoln College Kingsgate studentship, and the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford.
