This brief serves to educate readers about the sovereign citizen
movement, presenting relevant case studies and offering suggestions for
measures to address problems caused by this movement. Sovereign citizens
are considered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to be a
prominent domestic terrorist threat in the United States, and are
broadly defined as a loosely-afflicted anti-government group who
believes that the United States government and its laws are invalid and
fraudulent. Because they consider themselves to be immune to the
consequences of American law, members identifying with this group often
engage in criminal activities such as tax fraud, "paper terrorism", and
in more extreme cases, attempted murder or other acts of violence.
Sovereign Citizens is one of the first scholarly works to explicitly
focus on the sovereign citizen movement by explaining the movement's
origin, interactions with the criminal justice system, and ideology.