Lexomancy:
Law and Magic in the Pseudolegal Writings of theSovereign Citizen Movement

David Griffin, J.D.
Centre for Language and Communication Research
School of English, Communication and Philosophy
Cardiff University

Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree ofDoctor of Philosophy
September 2022

Summary
The Sovereign Citizen movement is a loosely organized collection of anti-government
conspiracy theorists found around the world. According to their pseudolegal theories,
Sovereign Citizens believe that through the filing of certain forms and the raising of certain
arguments in court, they can force the legal system and its representatives to do (or not do)anything they desire, including give them access to secret government funds or dismiss
criminal charges against them. Though there are clear similarities between the documents thatSovereign Citizens submit to courts and those submitted by actual attorneys, Sovereign Citizen
documents often contain features that are completely out of place in standard legal discourse,
including the use of thumbprints as seals and atypical formatting when writing personal names(e.g. “first-middle;last”). With its focus on American Sovereign Citizens and the specific legal
documents that they are imitating, this thesis is the first thorough linguistic examination of therelationship between the Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filing (“PCF”) andlegitimate courtroom filing (“LCF”) genres. The PCF genre, it is proposed, is best understoodas a “parasitic” genre preying upon its “host,” the LCF genre. By incorporating aspects of LCFs
into their own writings, the authors of PCFs hope to imbue them with the authority of thelegitimate legal system. In this way, PCFs can also be understood as instances of imitative
magical practice and their more distinctive elements as the magical “heightening” of features
which their authors view as particularly emblematic of legitimate legal authority. Because thecomparison of the PCF and LCF genres requires a greater understanding of the natute of legal
language than currently exists in the literature, this thesis also makes a significant newcontribution to the linguistic knowledge of the register of legal English. It is hoped that anincreased understanding of the nature of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal discourse will help
representatives of the legal system understand and combat the spread of the Sovereign Citizen
movement and related conspiracy theories.

ii

Table of Contents
Summary...................................................................................................................................ii
Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... iii
Table of Figures......................................................................................................................vii
Table of Tables ........................................................................................................................ xi
Acknowledgments .................................................................................................................. xv
1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1
1.1 The Sovereign Citizen Movement ................................................................................... 1
1.2 The History and Beliefs of the Sovereign Citizen Movement ......................................... 4
1.2.1 Who Are the Sovereign Citizens?.............................................................................. 5
1.2.2 Sovereign Citizen Beliefs .......................................................................................... 6
1.2.3 The Size and Spread of the Sovereign Citizen Movement ....................................... 12
1.3 Legal Language and Pseudolegal Strategies .................................................................. 13
1.4 The Aims of this Thesis ................................................................................................. 15
1.4.1 The Literature Gap ................................................................................................. 15
1.4.2 Research Questions, Data, and Methodology......................................................... 17
1.5 The Structure of This Thesis .......................................................................................... 17
2. Literature Review .............................................................................................................. 20
2.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 20
2.2 Language and Law ......................................................................................................... 20
2.3 The Sovereign Citizen Movement ................................................................................. 22
2.3.1 Linguistic Approaches to the Sovereign Citizen Movement ................................... 22
2.3.2 Conspiracy Theories and Sovereign Citizens ......................................................... 23
2.3.3 Working Assumptions About the Sovereign Citizen Movement .............................. 25
2.4 Genre: Parasites and Hosts............................................................................................. 26
2.4.1 Defining Genre and Inter-Genre Interaction .......................................................... 26
2.4.2 Legal Genres ........................................................................................................... 28
2.4.3 Parasitic and Host Genres ...................................................................................... 31
2.5 Register and Terminology.............................................................................................. 33
2.5.1 Register and Genre Distinguished .......................................................................... 33iii

2.5.2 The Register of Legal English ................................................................................. 34
2.5.3 The Consensus Description of Legal English ......................................................... 36
2.5.4 Legal Technical Terminology ................................................................................. 39
2.6 Magic and Ritual in Pseudolegal Texts ......................................................................... 42
2.6.1 Defining Magic and Ritual...................................................................................... 43
2.6.2 Sovereign Citizen Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings as Magic Texts ....................... 44
2.7 Displays of Legal Authority........................................................................................... 47
2.7.1 Defining Legal Authority ........................................................................................ 48
2.7.2 The Semiotics of Authority in Legal Texts .............................................................. 49
2.8 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 53
3. Methodology ....................................................................................................................... 55
3.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 55
3.2 Corpus-Assisted Multimodal Discourse Analysis ......................................................... 55
3.2.1 Multimodality .......................................................................................................... 56
3.2.2 Discourse Analysis .................................................................................................. 57
3.2.3 Corpus Linguistics .................................................................................................. 58
3.3 Creating the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Corpora ........................... 61
3.3.1 Principles of Corpus Construction ......................................................................... 61
3.3.2 The Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Corpora ................................ 63
3.3.3 COCA-W: The Combined Written Subcorpora of the Corpus of Contemporary
American English ............................................................................................................. 70
3.3.4 Multimodal Annotation ........................................................................................... 72
3.4 Significance Testing and Software ................................................................................ 77
3.5 Methods of Analysis ...................................................................................................... 79
3.5.1 Overall Approach.................................................................................................... 80
3.5.2 Frequency Analysis and KWIC Lines ..................................................................... 81
3.5.3 Keyword Analysis.................................................................................................... 84
3.5.4 Lockword Analysis .................................................................................................. 86
3.5.5 Lexical Bundle Analysis .......................................................................................... 87
3.5.6 Heatmap Analysis ................................................................................................... 89
3.5.7 Prototype Analysis .................................................................................................. 91
3.6 Ethical Considerations ................................................................................................... 92
3.7 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 93iv

4. Legal English in Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings ................................. 94
4.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 94
4.2 Legal English in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Corpora............... 95
4.2.1 Consensus Features of Legal English Examined .................................................... 95
4.2.2 Negation .................................................................................................................. 96
4.2.3 Pronoun Use ......................................................................................................... 103
4.2.4 Passive Constructions ........................................................................................... 115
4.2.5 Nominalizations .................................................................................................... 123
4.3 Legal Technical Terminology ...................................................................................... 128
4.3.1 Shared Technical Terminology ............................................................................. 129
4.3.2 Distinctive Legal Technical Terminology ............................................................. 133
4.3.3 Lexical Bundles in Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings .................... 139
4.4 Prototype Analysis ....................................................................................................... 142
4.4.1 Legitimate Courtroom Filing Legal English Prototype ........................................ 143
4.4.2 Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Legal English Prototype ..................................... 146
4.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 148
5. Multimodality in Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings.............................. 151
5.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 151
5.2 Chapter-Specific Methodological Concerns ................................................................ 152
5.3 Overall Design of Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings ............................. 153
5.3.1 Typical Spacing, Alignment, and Font Families ................................................... 153
5.3.2 Captions and Opening Pages................................................................................ 160
5.4 Textual Emphasis in Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings......................... 170
5.4.1 Textual Emphasis .................................................................................................. 170
5.4.2 Bolding, Underlining, Italicization, and Capitalization ....................................... 173
5.4.3 Other Methods of Textual Emphasis ..................................................................... 176
5.5 Images in Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings .......................................... 181
5.5.1 Images Present in Both Corpora .......................................................................... 181
5.5.2 Images Unique to One Corpus .............................................................................. 199
5.6 Key Multimodal Features and Prototype Analysis of Legitimate and Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filings .............................................................................................................. 211
5.6.1 Key Multimodal Features ..................................................................................... 211
5.6.2 Legitimate Courtroom Filing Graphic Prototype ................................................. 213v

5.6.3 Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Graphic Prototype .............................................. 219
5.7 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 231
6. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 232
6.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 232
6.2 The Register of Legal English ..................................................................................... 232
6.2.1 Legal English and Standard English .................................................................... 233
6.2.2 Legal English in Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings ....................... 234
6.3 Multimodality in Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings .............................. 238
6.3.1 The Use of Textual Emphasis ................................................................................ 238
6.3.2 The Use of Images ................................................................................................. 240
6.4 The Nature of a Parasitic Genre ................................................................................... 242
6.5 The Magic of Sovereign Citizen Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings ............................... 244
6.6 The Authority of Legal Texts ...................................................................................... 246
6.7 Limitations of this Thesis............................................................................................. 248
6.8 Avenues for Future Study ............................................................................................ 250
References ............................................................................................................................. 252
Appendix 3.1: Contents of the Legitimate Courtroom Filing Corpus ........................... 279
Appendix 3.2: Contents of the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Corpus ......................... 286
Appendix 3.3: Legitimate Courtroom Filing Corpus Keywords .................................... 295
Appendix 3.4: Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Corpus Keywords .................................. 316
Appendix 3.5: Legitimate Courtroom Filing and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Corpus
Lockwords ................................................................................................................ 336
Appendix 4.1: Legitimate Courtroom Filing Legal English Prototype ......................... 344
Appendix 4.2: Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Legal English Prototype........................ 349
Appendix 5.1: Legitimate Courtroom Filing Image and Textual Emphasis Prototype.................................................................................................................................... 350
Appendix 5.2: Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Image and Textual Emphasis Prototype.................................................................................................................................... 355

viTable of Figures
Figure 1.1 Stamped vehicle purchase agreement, digitally enhanced to improve contrast ....... 2
Figure 2.1 An Instagram post in which a man holds a sign reading, “I wouldn't be able to tell
if you are saying a Harry Potter spell or a legal Latin phrase” .................................... 45
Figure 3.1 The first page of a legitimate courtroom filing with identifying information
redacted ........................................................................................................................ 65
Figure 3.2 Labeling options for the “Typical” layer of multimodal annotation as shown in
UAM Image Tool ......................................................................................................... 73
Figure 3.3 Labelling options for the “Features” layer of multimodal annotation as shown in
UAM Image Tool ......................................................................................................... 74
Figure 3.4 A screenshot of a completed “Features” layer annotation of a page from apseudolegal courtroom filing in UAM Image Tool ..................................................... 76
Figure 3.5 Structure of the analyses in Chapters 4 and 5......................................................... 81
Figure 3.6 Heatmaps showing the distribution of footers in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpora ............................................................................................ 89
Figure 3.7 Heatmap of italics in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus with a hotspot which
has misleadingly concentrated in the center of the page.............................................. 90
Figure 4.1 Excerpt from a quantum grammar pseudolegal courtroom filing ........................ 102
Figure 4.2 Second page from the legitimate courtroom filing legal English prototype ........ 144
Figure 4.3 Pseudolegal courtroom filing legal English prototype ......................................... 147
Figure 5.1 Page displaying the predominant methods of interlinear spacing, text alignment,
and font choice of the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus...................................... 155
Figure 5.2 Page displaying the predominant methods of interlinear spacing, text alignment,
and font choice of the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus.................................... 156
Figure 5.3 Typical opening page of a legitimate courtroom filing ........................................ 161
Figure 5.4 Standard legitimate courtroom filing caption with labels .................................... 162
Figure 5.5 Legitimate courtroom filing caption including the address of property relevant tothe case ....................................................................................................................... 164
Figure 5.6 Legitimate courtroom filing caption showing both a suit and a countersuit ........ 164
Figure 5.7 Captionless pseudolegal courtroom filing formatted as a letter ........................... 166
Figure 5.8 Captionless pseudolegal courtroom filing formatted as a public notice............... 167
Figure 5.9 Opening page of a pseudolegal courtroom filing containing a “pre-caption” ...... 169
Figure 5.10 Typical uses of italics in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus .................... 174
vii

Figure 5.11 Inconsistent textual emphasis in a pseudolegal courtroom filing ....................... 175
Figure 5.12 Emphatic capitalization in a pseudolegal courtroom filing ................................ 176
Figure 5.13 Block quote formatting in a legitimate courtroom filing.................................... 177
Figure 5.14 Signature block formatting in a legitimate courtroom filing .............................. 177
Figure 5.15 Alternate font size in the title of a pseudolegal courtroom filing ....................... 178
Figure 5.16 Alternate font size used to emphasize text in a pseudolegal courtroom filing ... 178
Figure 5.17 Multiple font changes in a single page of a pseudolegal courtroom filing ........ 179
Figure 5.18 Emphasized text as a watermark in a pseudolegal courtroom filing .................. 180
Figure 5.19 Footer from a legitimate courtroom filing with an internal document filingnumber ....................................................................................................................... 182
Figure 5.20 Footer from a legitimate courtroom filing with a centered page number........... 183
Figure 5.21 Spatial distribution of footers in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom
Filing corpora ............................................................................................................. 183
Figure 5.22 Footer from a pseudolegal courtroom filing with a right-aligned page number 184
Figure 5.23 Footer from a pseudolegal courtroom filing with accompanying text ............... 184
Figure 5.24 Spatial distribution of lists in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpora ....................................................................................................................... 185
Figure 5.25 List formatting in a legitimate courtroom filing ................................................. 187
Figure 5.26 List formatting in a pseudolegal courtroom filing .............................................. 188
Figure 5.27 Attorney registration stamp in a legitimate courtroom filing ............................. 190
Figure 5.28 Notary seal in a pseudolegal courtroom filing ................................................... 190
Figure 5.29 Notary seal from a legitimate courtroom filing .................................................. 191
Figure 5.30 Embossed sticker seal in a pseudolegal courtroom filing .................................. 192
Figure 5.31 Coat of arms in a pseudolegal courtroom filing ................................................. 192
Figure 5.32 Delimiter as signature line in a legitimate courtroom filing............................... 193
Figure 5.33 Delimiter separating body and footnote text in a legitimate courtroom filing ... 194
Figure 5.34 Delimiters in a notarized section of a pseudolegal courtroom filing.................. 194
Figure 5.35 Delimiters in a notarized section of a legitimate courtroom filing ..................... 195
Figure 5.36 Identical signature blocks on the same page of a pseudolegal courtroom filing 196
Figure 5.37 Signatures followed by “without prejudice” and references to the UCC in a
pseudolegal courtroom filing ..................................................................................... 196
Figure 5.38 Spatial distribution of seals in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpora ....................................................................................................................... 197

viii

Figure 5.39 Spatial distribution of delimiters in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom
Filing corpora ............................................................................................................. 198
Figure 5.40 Spatial distribution of handwriting in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom
Filing corpora ............................................................................................................. 198
Figure 5.41 Table from a legitimate courtroom filing ........................................................... 200
Figure 5.42 Spatial distribution of images unique to the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus.................................................................................................................................... 201
Figure 5.43 American flag illustration in a pseudolegal courtroom filing ............................ 202
Figure 5.44 Modified American flag illustrations in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus.................................................................................................................................... 202
Figure 5.45 Additional US-themed illustrations in a pseudolegal courtroom filing.............. 203
Figure 5.46 Moorish illustrations in a pseudolegal courtroom filing .................................... 204
Figure 5.47 Postage stamps accompanied by other distinctive Sovereign Citizen features in
the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus.................................................................. 205
Figure 5.48 Thumbprint appearing without other graphic features in a pseudolegal courtroom
filing ........................................................................................................................... 206
Figure 5.49 Thumbprint array in a pseudolegal courtroom filing ......................................... 206
Figure 5.50 Thumbprint as the “Seal of Court” in a pseudolegal courtroom filing............... 207
Figure 5.51 Pseudolegal courtroom filing containing an entire footprint .............................. 209
Figure 5.52 Opening page of the legitimate courtroom filing graphic prototype text ........... 214
Figure 5.53 Italicization of legal Latin in the legitimate courtroom filing graphic prototype.................................................................................................................................... 215
Figure 5.54 Italicization of citations in the legitimate courtroom filing graphic prototype .. 215
Figure 5.55 Bolded text in the body of the legitimate courtroom filing graphic prototype ... 215
Figure 5.56 Full capitalization of a word in the body of the legitimate courtroom filinggraphic prototype ....................................................................................................... 216
Figure 5.57 Signature Block in the legitimate courtroom filing graphic prototype............... 216
Figure 5.58 Interior page from the legitimate courtroom filing graphic prototype ............... 217
Figure 5.59 Opening page of the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype ............... 220
Figure 5.60 Legitimate courtroom filing and pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype
filing stamps compared .............................................................................................. 221
Figure 5.61 Legitimate courtroom filing and pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype
captions compared ..................................................................................................... 222

ix

Figure 5.62 Pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype section seemingly inspired by thedefinition section of a contract ................................................................................... 223
Figure 5.63 Pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype section seemingly inspired bylegitimate legal complaint texts ................................................................................. 224
Figure 5.64 Interior page from the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype ............ 225
Figure 5.65 Italics and highlighting in the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype 226
Figure 5.66 Variation in Font Choice in the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype.................................................................................................................................... 226
Figure 5.67 Variation in font size in the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype ... 227
Figure 5.68 Signature, thumbprint, and seal of “:David-Wynn:Miller” ................................ 228
Figure 5.69 Sovereign Citizen litigant signature in the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic
prototype .................................................................................................................... 228
Figure 5.70 Footer from the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype ...................... 228
Figure 5.71 An advertisement for :David-Wynn:Miller's Website in the pseudolegal
courtroom filing graphic prototype ............................................................................ 229
Figure 5.72 A section listing some of the rules of quantum grammar in the pseudolegal
courtroom filing graphic prototype ............................................................................ 230

xTable of Tables
Table 3.1 Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus size
& content summary ...................................................................................................... 68
Table 3.2 KWIC Lines showing the use of “not” in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus,
n=2225 ......................................................................................................................... 83
Table 4.1 Frequency of explicit negation in COCA-W and the Legitimate Courtroom Filing
corpus with chi-square tests for independence. Results normalized to reflect expectedoccurrences per 100,000 words.................................................................................... 97
Table 4.2 Frequency of explicit negation in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpora with chi-square tests for independence. Results normalized to reflect expectedoccurrences per 100,000 words.................................................................................... 97
Table 4.3 Selected KWIC lines showing the use of “not” in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing
corpus, n=2225 ............................................................................................................. 99
Table 4.4 Selected KWIC lines showing the use of “not” in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpus, n=2467 ............................................................................................................. 99
Table 4.5 KWIC lines showing capitalized “NO” in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus,
n=2 ............................................................................................................................. 101
Table 4.6 Selected KWIC lines showing capitalized “NO” in the Pseudolegal Courtroom
Filing corpus, n=109 .................................................................................................. 101
Table 4.7 Frequency of subject and object pronouns in COCA-W and the Legitimate
Courtroom Filing corpus with chi-square tests for independence. Results normalized
to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000 words. .................................................. 105
Table 4.8 Frequency of subject and object pronouns in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpora with chi-square tests for independence. Results normalized
to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000 words. .................................................. 105
Table 4.9 Selected KWIC lines showing the use of “I” in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing
corpus, n=183 ............................................................................................................. 107
Table 4.10 Selected KWIC lines showing the use of “I” in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpus, n=1003 ........................................................................................................... 108
Table 4.11 Percentage of “I” and “we” followed by select constructions in the Legitimate andPseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora with chi-square tests for independence ....... 109
Table 4.12 Selected KWIC lines showing “I” followed by an appositive in the Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpus, n=199 ............................................................................... 110
xiTable 4.13 Selected KWIC lines showing “I” followed by a conjugation of “to be” in the
Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus, n=193 ........................................................... 111
Table 4.14 Selected KWIC lines showing “I” followed by an explicit performative in the
Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus, n=181 ........................................................... 112
Table 4.15 Selected lines showing “You” in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus, n=73.................................................................................................................................... 113
Table 4.16 Selected KWIC lines showing “You” in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus,
n=408 ......................................................................................................................... 114
Table 4.17 Frequency of various passive constructions in COCA-W and the Legitimate
Courtroom Filing corpus with chi-square tests for independence ............................. 117
Table 4.18 Frequency of various passive constructions in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpora with chi-square tests for independence ............................ 118
Table 4.19 Selected KWIC lines showing passive constructions in the Legitimate Courtroom
Filing corpus (n=3685) .............................................................................................. 119
Table 4.20 Selected KWIC lines showing passive constructions in the Pseudolegal Courtroom
Filing corpus (n=4573) .............................................................................................. 119
Table 4.21 Frequency of notable “long passive” constructions in COCA-W and theLegitimate Courtroom Filing corpus with chi-square tests for independence ........... 121
Table 4.22 Frequency of notable “long passive” constructions in the Legitimate andPseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora with chi-square tests for independence ....... 121
Table 4.23 Selected KWIC lines showing long passives in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing
corpus (n=362) ........................................................................................................... 122
Table 4.24 Selected KWIC lines showing long passives in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpus (n=381) ........................................................................................................... 122
Table 4.25 Frequency of common nominalization suffixes in COCA-W and the Legitimate
Courtroom Filing corpus with chi-square tests for independence. Results normalized
to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000 words. .................................................. 123
Table 4.26 Frequency of common nominalization suffixes in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpora with chi-square tests for independence. Results normalized
to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000 words. .................................................. 124
Table 4.27 Nominalizations which occur at least 100 times in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpora. Results normalized to reflect expected occurrences per
100,000 words ............................................................................................................ 125

xii

Table 4.28 Selected KWIC lines showing nominalizations in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing
corpus ......................................................................................................................... 126
Table 4.29 Selected KWIC lines showing nominalizations in the Pseudolegal Courtroom
Filing corpus .............................................................................................................. 127
Table 4.30 Top legal lockwords in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora
ranked by coefficient of variance score. Finance-related lockwords are shaded ingreen and procedure-related lockwords are shaded in blue. ...................................... 130
Table 4.31 Selected KWIC lines showing finance-related lockwords in the Legitmate
Courtroom Filing corpus ............................................................................................ 131
Table 4.32 Selected KWIC lines showing finance-related lockwords in the Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpus ............................................................................................ 131
Table 4.33 Selected KWIC lines showing procedural lockwords in the Legitimate Courtroom
Filing corpus .............................................................................................................. 132
Table 4.34 Selected KWIC lines showing procedural lockwords in the Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpus ............................................................................................ 133
Table 4.35 Top positive legal keywords of the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus ranked byeffect size. Results normalized to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000 words.
Finance-related keywords are shaded in green, procedure-related keywords are shadedin blue, and case-specific keywords are shaded in yellow......................................... 134
Table 4.36 KWIC lines showing case-specific legal keywords in the Legitmate Courtroom
Filing corpus .............................................................................................................. 135
Table 4.37 Top positive legal keywords of the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus ranked
by effect size. Results normalized to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000 words.
Finance-related keywords are shaded in green, legal Latin keywords are shaded inyellow, and keywords which are not appropriate to the legal context of thePseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus are shaded in orange. .................................... 136
Table 4.38 Groupings of legal keywords in main body text from the Pseudolegal Courtroom
Filing corpus .............................................................................................................. 137
Table 4.39 Groupings of legal keywords in signature blocks from the Pseudolegal Courtroom
Filing corpus .............................................................................................................. 137
Table 4.40 Selected uses of “Affiant” in place of a first person pronoun in the Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpus ............................................................................................ 139
Table 4.41 Lexical Bundles of four or more words appearing in at least 20% of texts in the
Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus ......................................................................... 140
xiii

Table 4.42 Lexical bundles of four or more words appearing in at least 20% of texts in the
Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus ....................................................................... 141
Table 4.43 Selected KWIC lines showing legal doublets in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing
corpus ......................................................................................................................... 141
Table 4.44 Selected KWIC lines showing “Code of Civil Procedure” referring to the Illinois
Code of Civil Procedure in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus ....................... 142
Table 4.45 Examples of tonal variation in the legitimate courtroom filing prototype text ... 145
Table 5.1 Predominant design choices in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpora. Features highlighted in green are the most frequent in their category. ....... 154
Table 5.2 Textual emphasis in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora.
Features highlighted in green are the most frequent in their category. ...................... 172
Table 5.3 Graphic features in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora.
Features highlighted in green are the most frequent in their category. ...................... 181
Table 5.4 Key multimodal features in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus................... 212
Table 5.5 Key multimodal features in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus................. 212
Table 6.1 Summary of findings regarding some “consensus” features of legal English
observed in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus relative to their frequency in
COCA-W ................................................................................................................... 234
Table 6.2 Summary of findings regarding some “consensus” Features of legal English
observed in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus to their frequency in the
Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus ......................................................................... 235

xiv

Acknowledgments
Writing a thesis is an intense process at the best of times, and even more so when one iscompleted in the midst of a global health crisis. While a full list of those for whose assistance
I am indebted would run at least as long as the rest of this document, there are a number ofindividuals whom I would like to single out for particular thanks:•

My supervisors, Chris Heffer and Dawn Knight, who have provided essential guidance
and feedback since I was an MA student just beginning to contemplate this project.

•

My parents, Gene and Karen, whose love and encouragement saw me through even thedarkest nights of the soul over the past several years.

•

My brothers, Adam and Matt, whose own adventures in higher education are a constantsource of inspiration.

•

Alex Moe, who has been an invaluable sounding board for even my strangest ideas andwho helped generate the initial idea for this thesis.

•

Caitlin Hakala, whose consistently insightful life advice and crack proofreading skills
have aided me time and again on both this thesis and beyond.

•David Kirby and Kamila Bushell, as well as Maddyson Chan and Annabel Corlett, allof whom were kind enough to form household bubbles with me at various points in the
COVID-19 pandemic.

•

Lucy Chrispin, Kate Barber, Kate Steel, Emily Powell, Piotr Wegorowski, and all of
the other PhD students in CLCR, whose camaraderie has meant so much to me over theyears.

•

Kirsty Reynolds, whose encouragement and support has been critical, particularly inthe final stages of this thesis.

•

And finally, my dog Cori, who has now been with me across two continents, multiple
rounds of graduate school, and through a pandemic.

xv

“The Law is scarce expressible properly in English”-The Hon. Roger North, Attorney General 1686-88
A Discourse on the Study of the Laws (1824, p.13)

1. Introduction
1.1 The Sovereign Citizen Movement
On January 5th, 2017, a group of men entered a car dealership in Chicago, Illinois1 with thestated intention of purchasing five vehicles. When presented with a contract to finalize the sale,
however, instead of signing it, they affixed a postage stamp in the bottom right-hand corner
and a separate stamp across the middle of the first page which read:“ACCEPTED FOR VALUEEXEMPT FROM LEVY
RETURN FOR SETTLEMENT
January 5, 2017
Exemption ID #456127893
Deposit to UNITED STATES TREASURY
And charge the same to
SARA GOMA ARRINGTON EL
Social Security #456-12-7893”
A scan of that first page is included on the following page as Figure 1.1.2
Because the men would not conventionally sign the agreement, the dealership refused
to move forward with the transaction, and the men left. Shortly thereafter, those same men filed
a complaint for replevin3 against the dealership in state level civil court, alleging that throughthe use of those stamps they had, in fact, legitimately purchased the cars, and that the dealershipwas unlawfully withholding their property.
Due to the provenance of the documents examined in this thesis as well as the author’s academic background,
all references to specific legal concepts or to the operation of the legal system more generally should be understoodto refer to the legal system of the United States unless otherwise stated. For a general explanation of how acommon law legal system such as the one in the United States functions, as well as how it compares to some ofthe other major legal systems found around the world, including civil law systems, see Dibble (2018a) and(2018b).
2
Throughout this thesis, including in this figure, personally identifying information has been anonymized
wherever possible (see the discussion in Section 3.6 for more details).
3
A complaint for replevin asks the court to force a defendant to return personal property which they had
wrongfully taken from the complainant (Garner 2019). Though in many jurisdictions a court may issue a “writ ofreplevin” in such cases, the state of Illinois largely eliminated the issuance of writs in the 1980s and replevin is
now a statutory cause of action under the Replevin Act, 735 ILCS 5/19-101 et seq. Per Section 19-104 of the Act,
actions for replevin are initiated with a “complaint” rather than a “petition,” where the latter term would be more
typical of the equitable (i.e. non-statutory) variety of replevin (Illinois General Assembly 2022d).
1

1

Figure 1.1 Stamped vehicle purchase agreement, digitally enhanced to improve contrast

2

1. Introduction
The court quickly found that neither the addition of the postage stamp nor of the“ACCEPTED FOR VALUE” stamp had been legally sufficient to complete the purchase andthe men inevitably lost their case against the dealership. Though that outcome is unremarkable,
the fact that the case was filed in the first place is just the opposite: since those men went to thetrouble of taking such a step (i.e. of asking the State government to step in and force thedealership to give them the vehicles for such an obviously groundless reason), they seem tohave believed that their actions were truly legally effective. While, at a glance, the stamp in the
middle of the page may look somewhat official, even a moment’s consideration will likely lead
one to realize that nothing it is saying makes much sense: it is not clear why the “exemption
number” and Social Security number listed are the same (or what the former even is), forexample, and it is similarly unclear what exactly is supposed to be deposited with the “UNITEDSTATES TREASURY” and then subsequently charged to Sara Goma Arrington El. Though
their actions may be legally nonsensical, these individuals are far from alone in pursuing sucha course of action: such unwavering confidence in the efficacy of what are ultimately
completely meritless legal theories is one of the hallmarks of the Sovereign Citizen movement,a loose confederation of anti-government conspiracy theorists found around the world.
Despite the global proliferation of Sovereign Citizen ideology in recent years and themany striking textual and multimodal elements of the documents they produce, such as thestamps used in Figure 1.1, the linguistic practices of the Sovereign Citizen movement remain
relatively underexplored. This thesis examines the pseudolegal (i.e. legal-seeming but
ungrounded in actual law) writings of American Sovereign Citizens, the relationship of thosewritings to legitimate courtroom filings written by lawyers, and what that relationship reveals
about the nature of legal English and textual displays of legal authority more generally.
It is important to clarify from the outset of this thesis that the use of the descriptors“legitimate” and “pseudolegal” to describe writings by lawyers and Sovereign Citizens,
respectively, is not intended to communicate any sort of moral evaluation; instead, these terms
are employed to describe the status of those writings from the perspective of the legal systemitself. Texts written by lawyers are deemed “legitimate” because they fit within the parametersthat are expected of a document operating in the legal system, while texts written by Sovereign
Citizens are “pseudolegal” because they are written in the style of legitimate legal texts while
being grounded in conspiracy theories which the legal system (i.e. the grantor of legitimacy inthis context) regards as completely meritless. Asserting that the entire American legal system
has been secretly replaced by admiralty courts and that this is proven by the color of the fringeon the flag hanging in a courtroom, as many Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal texts do, is not3

simply some form of heterodox legal argumentation; it is instead a demonstrably incorrectconspiracy theory. The use of the term “pseudolegal” to describe Sovereign Citizen writings
also aligns this thesis with the literature which examines the wider movement (e.g. Netolitzky2016b; McRoberts 2019); see the discussion throughout Sections 2.3 and 2.4 in the following
chapter for more on the the relationship between the legitimate and pseudolegal documents
examined in this thesis.
This chapter discusses the historical and cultural context which gave rise to the Sovereign
Citizen movement, the movement’s belief system and current status, and the ways in which an
examination of its pseudolegal writings stands to benefit the fields of both linguistics and law.
Section 1.2 reviews the history and current status of the Sovereign Citizen movement as wellas the main elements of its belief system. Section 1.3 discusses the movement’s distinctive
style of pseudolegal discourse displayed in its writings and the apparent relationship of thosewritings to actual legal documents. Section 1.4 lays out in more detail the gap in the existing
literature on language and law that this study aims to fill and establishes the specific researchquestions of this thesis. Finally, Section 1.5 explains the structure of the remaining chapters of
this thesis.

1.2 The History and Beliefs of the Sovereign Citizen Movement
To paraphrase Polonius, though Sovereign Citizen writings be madness, there is method inthem. Despite how they may appear to those not previously aware of the Sovereign Citizen
movement, there is a high degree of internal logic and consistency to these pseudolegal texts
and to the conspiracy theories in which they are grounded. To better familiarize readers withthis context, this Section summarizes the history and beliefs of the Sovereign Citizen
movement from its origins through to the current day. It also seeks to explain why, despite themovement’s highly decentralized nature, it is possible to speak of it coherently as an overall“Sovereign Citizen movement.” Section 1.2.1 provides an overview of the movement from its
inception in the United States in the 1960s through to its international proliferation in the 1980s
and beyond. Section 1.2.2 describes the fundamental beliefs about history and the legal system
which permeate Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal thought. Section 1.2.3 then presents what is
known about the movement’s current size and geographic dispersion.

4

1. Introduction
1.2.1 Who Are the Sovereign Citizens?
The Sovereign Citizen movement has its origins in the Posse Comitatus, a far-right whitenationalist group that was founded in the United States in 1969 and reached the height of its
influence during the recession and farm crisis of the 1980s (Sullivan 1999, p.787; Fenster 2008,
pp.55–56; Anti-Defamation League 2012, p.3). According to the Posse, there was no legitimate
governmental authority in the United States higher than the county sheriff and only the firsttwelve amendments to the US Constitution were valid (Sullivan 1999, pp.787–788).4 In a signof things to come, Posse members would hold seminars advising attendees that they could
refuse to pay taxes on constitutional grounds and instructing them on how to file pro se lawsuitsand liens5 against public officials in order to delay a bank’s foreclosure on their property(Sullivan 1999, p.788). Though the Posse Comitatus had largely faded away by the end of the
1980s (Anti-Defamation League 2012, p.3), the core of these ideas (i.e. that one can use thelegal apparatus of the government against itself while simultaneously denying that government
has any legitimate authority) would go on to find purchase in the Christian Identity and Patriot
movements, as well as the much broader (though less organized) tax protest movement(Sullivan 1999, pp.789–792). Roughly coincident with the decline of the Posse Comitatus,
conspiracy groups outside of the United States began to adopt similar strategies, perhaps mostsignificantly including Canada’s “Freemen-on-the-Land” movement (Kent 2015, p.4). As the
Posse’s ideas grew and spread nationally and internationally, they largely lost their explicit
connections to white supremacy (Thomas 2015; Mallek 2016, p.24) and there are now several
notable groups espousing similar conspiracies with primarily African American membership,including the Washitaw Nation and a section of the larger Moorish movement (Pitcavage2016).
As a result of the decline of the Posse Comitatus and the subsequent ideological andgeographic dispersion of its pseudolegal conspiracy theories, there is no overarching leadershipor organizational structure to the modern Sovereign Citizen movement (Anti-Defamation

4

There are currently 27 amendments to the United States constitution, with the most recent having been passed
in 1992 (United States Senate 2022). The 12th Amendment was passed in 1804 and was the last amendment to theConstitution prior to the US Civil War. By choosing it as the final supposedly legitimate amendment, Posse
members were able to ignore those amendments which most clearly contradicted their emerging pseudolegal
theories, such as the 14th Amendment, which defined US citizenship, and the 16th Amendment, which establishedthe power of the federal government to levy an income tax.
5
A lien is “a legal right or interest that a creditor has in another’s property [which usually lasts] until a debt or
duty that it secures is satisfied” (Garner 2019). Having a lien filed upon one’s property (even a meritless one) can,among other factors, limit one’s ability to sell that property and negatively affect one’s credit score. The filing of
bogus liens against their perceived enemies has long been one of the hallmarks of the “paper terrorism” strategyof the Sovereign Citizen movement (Southern Poverty Law Center 2017).

5

League 2012, p.6; Southern Poverty Law Center 2015). In fact, the term “Sovereign Citizen”
itself is largely one of convenience used by those outside the movement to describe its
adherents; though some individuals within the movement have described themselves as
Sovereign Citizens, others prefer terms like “constitutionalists,” “freemen,” “state citizens,” orsomething else which better suits their particular conspiratorial ideology (Anti-Defamation
League 2012, p.3). Despite this diversity, as will be discussed in the following section, all
Sovereign Citizens appear to share a fundamental set of beliefs about the specific pseudolegal
conspiracies they allege. Because of this shared belief system, it is possible to speak coherentlyof these various disparate groups as constituting a wider Sovereign Citizen movement rather
than looking at them as series of “lone wolves” coincidentally acting in similar manners(Barkun 2013, pp.196–198). In other words, though the reasons why a given group or its
members hold Sovereign Citizen-style beliefs may vary, the core conspiracies that they allege
and the ways in which they act upon those allegations are consistent to the extent that they can
all reasonably be considered members of the same movement.6 For the purposes of this thesis,
the conspiracy groups which today promulgate Posse Comitatus-style pseudolegal ideas arewhat collectively form the Sovereign Citizen movement. The key factor in identifying a
Sovereign Citizen conspiracy group is whether the alleged conspiracy is fundamentallyconcerned with the legal system and the government’s purportedly illegitimate authority overthe people; as will now be discussed, Sovereign Citizens do not deny that legitimate legal
authority exists, but they do insist that they are the only ones who properly wield it.

1.2.2 Sovereign Citizen Beliefs
Sovereign Citizens believe that at some point in the past, the “common law” of the people (aterm which, in their pseudolegal parlance, refers to a nebulously-defined body of law generally
considered to have been based in a combination of the U.S. Constitution, the Bible, and/or
some other sort of divine mandate (Berger 2016, p.4)) was hidden away by the government andreplaced with an irredeemably corrupt institution which masquerades as the legitimate legal
system (Anti-Defamation League 2012, pp.3–5; Barkun 2013, p.198; Loeser 2015, p.1120;
Berger 2016, pp.3–4; Slater 2016, pp.7–8). The government has systematically suppressed

Though Barkun (2013, pp.196–197) feels that “there is sufficient commonality in [Sovereign Citizen] beliefs sothat they form a distinctive population,” he actually disfavors the use of the term “movement,” explaining that“[Sovereign Citizens do] not have the kind of organizational framework that might give [them] unity of purpose
and action.” Nevertheless, in line with general practice in both academia and news reporting (e.g. Anti-Defamation
League 2012; Southern Poverty Law Center 2015; NZ Herald 2020), this thesis will refer to Sovereign Citizens
considered collectively as a movement.
66

1. Introduction
knowledge of that original “common law” legal system but, through various maneuvers,
including the filing of certain forms and the raising of certain arguments in court, it is possible
for Sovereign Citizens to access it, remove themselves from the jurisdiction of the illegitimate
government, and live outside of its influence (Anti-Defamation League 2012; Melle 2013,
p.554; Berger 2016, pp.4–6; Slater 2016, pp.7–8).
In the US Sovereign Citizen context, one of the moments most frequently pointed to as
the instance in which the illegitimate government suppressed the “common law” is the passageof the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 (Berger 2016, p.3; Kalinowski IV 2019, p.158). While
the generally acknowledged purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to grant citizenship toformerly enslaved people following the American Civil War (hence at least in part its rejection
by the white nationalist members of the Posse Comitatus mentioned above), according to theSovereign Citizens, it actually created a new form of “federal citizenship” which one mustrenounce in order to free oneself from the authority of the illegitimate government (Berger
2016, pp.3–4; Kalinowski IV 2019, pp.158–161). The US abandonment of the gold standard
in the early 20th century is another moment which is commonly chosen because, according tomany Sovereign Citizens, U.S. currency has no real value if it is not backed by a fixed quantityof actual gold (Berger 2016, pp.8–10), and therefore the buying or selling of anything withsuch “fake” currency is akin to entering into a contract with the government giving it powerover oneself. Some Sovereign Citizens will go a different route and claim a kind of diplomatic
immunity derived from citizenship in a fictional country or Native American tribe instead, suchas the “United States of America Republic” (Reed 2022) or the “Ancient Black Nation [knownas] Washitaw De Dugdahmoundyah” that supposedly existed in what is now the United States
as far back as 3,000 B.C. (Dew 2015, pp.65–67; Pitcavage 2016).
Regardless of their explanation for why the government’s authority over them isillegitimate, Sovereign Citizens are remarkably consistent (though also just as mistaken) in theways in which they believe the “true” legal system operates. Netolitzky (2020, pp.733–34, 738)
heroically attempts to present a coherent explanation of those beliefs via what he calls the“Pseudolaw Memeplex,”7 a set of six concepts that appear to be fundamental to the legal system
as it exists in Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal thought.8 Ranging from invented legal maxims to

A “meme” is a “[unit] of culture that [spreads] from person to person by copying or imitation” (Shifman 2014,p.2). “Memeplex” as used by Netolitzky (2020) refers to a related series of such units, or, in other words, a“complex” (i.e. network) of memes.
8
Netolizky uses the term “Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument litigants” or “OPCA litigants” in his
writings instead of “Sovereign Citizens,” but, for the purposes of this thesis, this term can be understood to referto the same conspiracy movement. Additionally, though the article cited is discussing the presence of the77

an omnipresent assumption that the government lacks any relevant authority, those six
pseudolegal memetic concepts are as follows:
1. Everything is a contract.
2. Silence means acceptance or agreement.
3. The law may only act where there is an injured party.
4. State authority is defective or limited.
5. The “Strawman” duality.
6. Financial conspiracy misconceptions (Netolitzky 2018a; Netolitzky 2020,
pp.733–734, 738).
To be clear, though there may be specific instances in which elements of the first three of thesepseudolegal concepts align with the operation of the legitimate legal system (lack of an explicit
response can indicate acceptance in certain contractual situations, for example, and the third
point seems inspired by the concept of standing9), the absolute nature of the ways in which
Sovereign Citizens rely on these concepts has no real-world legal basis. While the meanings ofthe first four elements of the memeplex are relatively straightforward, if legally incorrect,
points 5 and 6 likely merit an additional degree of explanation for those not previously versedin Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theory.
According to Sovereign Citizen “Strawman” theory (point 5 above), for every fleshand-blood person (referred to in this context as a “natural” person) there exists a legal construct
created by the government, generally referred to as an “artificial” person or “strawman”(Kalinowski IV 2019, p.158). As a creation of the government, this artificial person is subject
to its jurisdiction while the natural person is not. Somehow (often said to be via the issuanceof a birth certificate or assignment of a social security number), the government attaches theartificial person to the natural person, granting them a kind of derivative jurisdiction over thenatural person as well (Sullivan 1999, pp.801–804; Kalinowski IV 2019, pp.158–161). Whilean artificial person may appear to have the same name as the natural person it is attached to,the two can be differentiated in written contexts by the ways in which they are capitalized andpseudolaw memeplex in the Canadian Sovereign Citizen context, he notes that its concepts originated with US
Sovereign Citizens and subsequently “spread internationally” (Netolitzky 2020, pp.719, 732–33).
9Standing refers to “a party’s right to make a legal claim or seek judicial enforcement of a duty or right” (Garner2019), and, in civil law contexts, generally requires the party initiating a lawsuit to demonstrate that they havebeen injured (often in a financial, rather than physical, sense) before the court will allow that suit to proceed. As
the government always has the authority to enforce criminal laws, issues of standing do not arise in criminal
contexts. Nevertheless, Sovereign Citizens may attempt to raise this as a defense when charged with a crime byarguing, for example, that no one was harmed by their driving above the speed limit (this is a frequent occurrence
because many Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theories claim that there exists an inalienable right to travel (Sullivan
1999, pp.798–800; see also Marquis 2022)).

8

1. Introduction
punctuated: the name of an artificial person is generally said to be written in all capital letters(e.g. JOHN ROBERT SMITH) while, when properly formatted, the name of a natural person
will be written with initial capitals only and generally accompanied by flourishes such ascommas or semicolons between the middle and last names (e.g. John Robert; Smith) (Sullivan
1999, p.803; Berger 2016, p.5).10 To emphasize the difference between the two, Sovereign
Citizens may refer to both the natural and artificial persons at the same time, using language
along the lines of “I, a Man, of the Family Smith, representing the Artificial personhood of
JOHN ROBERT SMITH” (Kalinowski IV 2019, p.158). Some Sovereign Citizens believe thatevery variation in the spelling of their name used by the government creates an additional
artificial person attached to them which is why names and their punctuation are often of suchparamount importance to their pseudolegal theories (Sullivan 1999, p.803). In fact, many ofthe more arcane-seeming aspects of Sovereign Citizen behavior in legal settings are attempts
to divorce the artificial person from the natural person, thereby removing the natural personfrom the government’s jurisdiction (Berger 2016, pp.5–6; Kalinowski IV 2019, pp.161–164).
Though not all of the “financial conspiracy misconceptions” referenced at point 6 of
the memeplex are related to Strawman theory, many are. One of the most prominent such
pseudolegal memetic concepts, generally known as “Redemption theory,” holds that the UnitedStates went bankrupt when it abandoned the gold standard in 1933 (Berger 2016, p.6;
Kalinowski IV 2019, pp.164–167). In order to survive this bankruptcy, the theory goes, theU.S. government was forced to take on a substantial amount of foreign debt which it secured
using the future earnings of its citizens as collateral. The strawman is therefore not just thevehicle through which the government obtains its illicit jurisdiction over its citizens; it is also
the mechanism by which that debt was collateralized. By divorcing themselves from theirrespective strawmen, Sovereign Citizen proponents of Redemption theory believe they canboth free themselves from the government’s jurisdiction and gain access to the money that theirstrawmen represent. That money is often said to be held in “Treasury Direct Accounts,” andclaimed to be worth anywhere from $650,000, to $1,000,000, to $20,000,000 per person(Kalinowski IV 2019, p.165); the stamp across the center of the page shown above in Figure
1.1 is likely referencing a version of Redemption theory when it mentions depositing something
in the United States Treasury. Other varieties of Sovereign Citizen financial conspiracy
10

Though there is no consistent explanation for this belief from the Sovereign Citizens themselves, it has beensuggested that it likely stems from the tendency of the government to print names in all capital letters on birthcertificates and other important documents (Williams 2016); by declaring such capitalization evidence of the“strawman” Sovereign Citizens can start any interaction with the legal system armed with clear “proof” of theirpseudolegal theories.

9

misconceptions proceed along similar lines, promising either access to untold riches or theelimination of personal debts via their secret formulae; see Netolitzky (2020, pp.734, 739) for
examples of similar theories.
It should be kept in mind that the elements of the pseudolaw memeplex given above
are not competing strands of conspiracy theories but rather the building blocks of those theories
which the Sovereign Citizen movement puts forward. These theories generally originate withmovement leaders referred to in the literature as “gurus” (Rooke 2012, p.19) such as the selfstyled “Judge Plenipotentiary David-Wynn: Miller” (Netolitzky 2016a, p.40; Hay 2020).
Miller instructs his followers that legal documents are only valid if they use his system of“QUANTUM-LANGUAGE-PARSE-SYNTX-GRAMMAR” (discussed at length in Section
5.6.3) and other gurus are similarly insistent on the power of their personal pseudolegal
strategies. These ideas are promulgated through Sovereign Citizen seminars and workshops aswell as through the extensive sharing of pseudolegal document templates authored by thesegurus (see, e.g., Netolitzky 2016a).
There are many accessorial elements of pseudolegal color which can appear as part ofSovereign Citizen theories. References to the Uniform Commercial Code, or “UCC,” abound,for example, in many different areas of Sovereign Citizen thinking. Unlike strawmen or otherobjects of their fixation, the UCC actually exists: it refers to a set of laws which govern
commercial transactions that have been uniformly adopted in all 50 states (Uniform Law
Commission 2022). According to Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theorists, because “everything
is a contract” (point 1 above) (Netolitzky 2020, pp.733–34, 738), the UCC is therefore theofficial rulebook by which the government must operate (Sullivan 1999, p.806; Loeser 2015,
p.1125; Berger 2016, p.5; Kalinowski IV 2019, p.166). Sovereign Citizens will often attempt
to exploit perceived loopholes in the text of the UCC in their interactions with the legal systemby, for example, appending phrases such as “Without Prejudice UCC 1-308” to their signatures(Berger 2016, p.5).11 1-308 is a real section of the Uniform Commercial Code that addresses
how one party to a contract can explicitly reserve certain rights while performing a duty
required by the other party which would normally waive those rights. It even recommends theuse of words such as “Without prejudice” or “Under protest” to note such a reservation (Legal
Information Institute 2022a). The UCC, of course, does not actually apply to these sorts ofinteractions with the legal system; it only applies to legitimate commercial transactions.
Older Sovereign Citizen documents will instead reference “UCC 1-207” (Sullivan 1999, p.807); the number ofthis section was changed to 1-308 in 2004 (Legal Information Institute 2022d) and Sovereign Citizens appear tohave subsequently updated their documents accordingly.
1110

1. Introduction
Nevertheless, it remains a frequent feature of many a Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theory anddocument.12 As mentioned above, some Sovereign Citizens allege that instead of (or perhaps
in addition to) everything being based on contract law, the entire legal system is constructed toforce people into consenting to admiralty jurisdiction, and that courtrooms are constructed insuch a way as to symbolically transform them into the bridge of a ship, with the judge serving
as captain (Sullivan 1999, p.806; Patrice 2013; Berger 2016, pp.4–5); proponents of thisparticular pseudolegal theory will also point to a yellow or gold fringe around the American
flag in a courtroom as (legally meritless) evidence that the judge is sitting in admiralty (Sullivan
1999, p.205; Loeser 2015, p.1123; Kalinowski IV 2019, p.174). Regardless of the pseudolegal
color added to a given conspiracy theory, however, their intended functioning and outcome
remains the same: the Sovereign Citizen is free and clear of any government influence, andoften significantly financially better off for the experience.
Though this thesis is only examining the writings of American Sovereign Citizens, boththe broad strokes of their alleged conspiracies and the elements of the “Pseudolaw Memeplex”
appear to remain consistent regardless of the country or jurisdiction in which a given branch of
the movement operates (see, e.g., Rooke 2012, p.35; Kent 2015; Netolitzky 2016b). In
Germany, for example, the Sovereign Citizen group known as the “Reichsbürgers” alleges thatthe current German government was illegally imposed by the Allies at the close of the Second
World War and that they are the proper inheritors of the authority of the legitimate Germanstate, though there is at least some disagreement in the movement as to whether that priorlegitimate state was the German Empire as it stood in 1871, 1918, or 1933 (Deutsche Welle
2016; Manthe 2018). Just as some American Sovereign Citizens have argued in the US context,
the Reichsbürgers theorize that Germany is not a republic, but in fact a company, and that
German citizens are its employees (Deutsche Welle 2016). Similarly, Netolitzky (2016b,
p.631) notes that many Canadian Sovereign Citizens allege “essentially unmodified” versionsof the same pseudolegal theories that American Sovereign Citizens do. Ultimately, from a legal
perspective, it appears that the arguments raised by Sovereign Citizens of all nationalities canbe categorized as equally wrong for largely the same reasons. More than the exact details of
the alleged conspiracies, however, it is the legal-seeming maneuvers of the Sovereign Citizens
that result from those beliefs and the ways in which those maneuvers relate to the forms andfunctions of legitimate legal discourse that are of particular interest to this thesis.

12With that said, a few Sovereign Citizens caution against mentioning the UCC at all, believing that its mere
invocation is sufficient to place oneself under the government’s jurisdiction (Sullivan 1999, p.807).

11

1.2.3 The Size and Spread of the Sovereign Citizen Movement
Given the ideological and geographic spread of the Sovereign Citizen movement over the past
several decades, it is difficult to get a sense of the number of currently active Sovereign Citizens
either in general or in any specific national context, but there is broad agreement that that
number has risen in recent years. It is estimated there were somewhere between 12,000 and
50,000 members of the Posse Comitatus in the 1970s (Wessinger 2000, p.175), and the numberof Sovereign Citizens in the United States alone as of 2011 has been placed at approximately
300,000 (Southern Poverty Law Center 2015). Though that particular figure is disputed(Mallek 2016), a separate analysis found a substantial increase in the amount of reported court
cases involving Sovereign Citizen litigants in the United States between the years 2008 and2015 (Slater 2016, pp.4–7) which others, noting a striking parallel to the rise of the Posse
Comitatus as a result of the farm crisis of the 1980s, have connected to the 2008 mortgage
foreclosure crisis (Conroy 2017). Such calculations have become even more complicated sincethen as Sovereign Citizen-style pseudolegal arguments have gained popularity with otherconspiracy theorists, particularly followers of the QAnon (Kelley 2019a; Merlan 2020; Neiwert
2022) and anti-vaccine/COVID protest movements (McIntyre and Sarre 2020; Kesvani 2021;
Hume 2022a). As a result, though it is not possible to precisely quantify the number ofindividuals who currently believe in the sorts of conspiracies that the Sovereign Citizen
movement espouses, it seems safe to assume that those numbers have continued to increase.
Though the sheer outlandishness of their claims may make it seem otherwise, Sovereign
Citizens are more than just a harmless curiosity: not only is every interaction that they havewith the legal system at a minimum a waste of police, judicial, or other governmental resources,
but their anti-authority attitudes can and have resulted in real world harms. The most significant
incident in the United States is likely the Montana Freemen Standoff, a three month long
showdown between the FBI and a group of armed Sovereign Citizens13 that occurred in 1996
(Wessinger 1999). The Freemen sought to overthrow the federal government and establish theirown “united States of America” (with “united” purposefully left uncapitalized) which wasintended to be “an association of sovereign state republics governed by the pre-Civil War
constitution, which [would] enforce the laws given by Yahweh in the Old Testament”(Wessinger 1999, pp.37–38). Though that was ultimately resolved without violence, this is not
13

Relatedly, the Montana Freemen can also be considered members of the Christian Identity movement, one of
the groups mentioned above as successors to the Posse Comitatus after its collapse in the 1980s (Wessinger 1999,p.37).

12

1. Introduction
always the case; in May of 2010, for example, two American Sovereign Citizens shot and killed
two police officers during a traffic stop (MacNab 2010), and threats of violence or even murder
against those who are perceived to be agents of the illegitimate government are far fromuncommon in the wider movement (Kent and Wiley 2013, p.320; Laird 2014; Manthe 2018;
Sarteschi 2020).14 The FBI has considered the Sovereign Citizen movement to be a domestic
terrorist organization for over a decade (FBI Counterterrorism Analysis Section 2011), thoughgiven the movement’s international spread, it is at this point far more than a simply “domestic”
matter. Sarteschi (2022) suggests that the Sovereign Citizen movement has spread to “at least”
26 separate countries; in addition to the US, Canada, and Germany, there have also been notable
reports of Sovereign Citizen activity in the United Kingdom (Hume 2021a; Hume 2021b),
Australia (Thomas 2020; Wilson 2020; McIntyre 2021), France (Hinnant 2021), Austria(Deutsche Welle 2019; Marko 2020), Ireland (Gilbert 2021b), Taiwan (Hioe 2018), New
Zealand (Reeve 2022), and Singapore (NZ Herald 2020), and there are likely more which have
not yet been reported in English-speaking media. The Sovereign Citizen movement is now amatter of worldwide concern.

1.3 Legal Language and Pseudolegal Strategies
What makes Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal discourse of such interest to this thesis (anddistinguishable from other theories such as those put forward by conspiracists like 9/11 truthers
or QAnon adherents) is the way in which it attempts to coopt the language and authority of thelegitimate legal system. Sovereign Citizens go to great lengths to present their conspiracy
theories as legitimate legal arguments. In justifying their beliefs to those outside the movement,
they will make reference to a “staggering” (Sullivan 1999, p.795) range of actual case law(though of course all interpreted in line with their particular flair for conspiratorial exegesis),often presenting themselves as official figures such as judges (Kelley 2017) or police officers(Hume 2022a; Hume 2022b) while doing so. In addition to holding seminars to attract new
movement members (MacNab 2010), Sovereign Citizens have also been known to create
institutions to rival those of the “illegitimate” government, including primary schools (Hume2021b), law schools (sometimes referred to as “schools of common law”) (Anti-Defamation
League 2012, p.6), and even, in some extreme cases, entirely parallel systems of government(Deutsche Welle 2019; Marko 2020).
14

See Kent and Wiley (2013, pp.319–329) for a summary of some of the other major incidents involving
Sovereign Citizens in the United States and Canada and MacNab (2018) for more on the rise of anti-government
extremism in the United States (including the Sovereign Citizen movement) in the early 21st century in general.

13

The need to appear authoritative to outsiders is central to all of these efforts and manyof the most marked ways in which Sovereign Citizens attempt to do so are found in theirwritings. Sovereign Citizen documents have been described by legal scholars as “dense,
complex, and virtually unreadable” (Sullivan 1999, p.796), and much ink has been spilled inlaw journals outlining why, for reasons both legal and historical, their pseudolegal theories are
groundless (e.g. Melle 2013; Loeser 2015; Kalinowski IV 2019; McRoberts 2019; Netolitzky2020). Similarly, in the published legal opinions in which judges have chosen to engage fully
with Sovereign Citizen arguments, they have made abundantly clear that they possess no legal
merit (see, e.g, Rooke 2012 for a Canadian example, or Delort 2013 for an American one).
Perhaps to make up for their lack of actual authority, Sovereign Citizens havedeveloped a number of distinctive linguistic and semiotic strategies that they employ to bolster
their persuasive efforts. Often, this takes the form of a co-opting of existing legal words andphrases (Southern Poverty Law Center 2010), such as the quasi-mythical importance attributed
to the UCC or their frequent use of the term “common law,” but it can also involve the additionof graphic features that seem to be without parallel in the legitimate legal system. Some of themore notable and seemingly original features of Sovereign Citizen texts include:•

Atypical formatting for names and addresses, generally as part of their efforts todistinguish the “natural” person from their strawman. As mentioned above, this often
includes the addition of punctuation to names and, in the case of addresses, a focus on
postal codes, such as “postal zone [32941]” or “near (42179)” (Anti-Defamation
League 2016, pp.3–6; Conti 2018). The use of all capital letters and red ink orsometimes even blood is also common, particularly when Sovereign Citizens are
writing their own names (Williams 2016; Conti 2018).

•

The use of postage stamps and thumbprints as personal seals. As with their use ofpunctuation in names, this is also seemingly related to the desire to emphasize theiridentity as “natural” people (Anti-Defamation League 2016, p.11; Netolitzky 2018b,
pp.1059–1061).

•

Complex disclaimers and declarations. These generally follow the name of theSovereign Citizen author of a given text and involve phrases such as “In Propria
Persona” or “without prejudice,” both of which have technical legal meanings rarely
relevant to the contexts in which Sovereign Citizens employ them (Anti-Defamation
League 2016, p.4). As discussed above, references to the Uniform Commercial Codealso frequently appear in these contexts (Anti-Defamation League 2016, p.9).

14

1. Introduction
With only minor variation, these sorts of features have been reported to appear consistently
across Sovereign Citizen writings, seemingly independent of the particular branch of the
movement which has produced a given document (Southern Poverty Law Center 2010; AntiDefamation League 2016). The only sub-variety of Sovereign Citizen discourse that has been
noted with any regularity is “quantum grammar” (mentioned in Section 1.2.2) though it appears
to be notable less for the presence of any unique features relative to pseudolegal courtroom
filings than it is for the sheer concentration of the sorts of distinctively Sovereign Citizen
features listed above it involves (Rooke 2012, pp.34–35; Anti-Defamation League 2016, p.10;
Netolitzky 2018b, pp.1061–1062; Plastow 2018; McRoberts 2019, pp.637–638; Hay 2020).
Just as it is possible to speak coherently of a larger “Sovereign Citizen movement” despite its
inherent decentralization, it is therefore also possible to speak of a single collective style ofSovereign Citizen pseudolegal discourse.

1.4 The Aims of this Thesis
Whatever the terminology or theoretical grounding used, there appears to be universal
agreement among those examining the writings of the Sovereign Citizen movement on two
points: one, that it is not the same thing as legitimate legal writing; and two, that, at the sametime, it is clearly closely related to legitimate legal writing. Beyond that, however, based on
the existing research, there is little that can be said definitively about the nature of Sovereign
Citizen pseudolegal discourse or its relationship to legitimate legal discourse. Perhaps more
surprisingly, there is relatively little that can be said definitively about the register of legal
English. This section will elaborate on the gap in the existing literature on these topics, lay out
the research questions which this thesis seeks to answer, and briefly describe both the datacollected for this thesis and methodology used to examine it.

1.4.1 The Literature Gap
Sovereign Citizen writing has been described by one Canadian judge as “a bizarre form of‘legal grammar’, which is not merely incomprehensible in Canada, but equally so in any otherjurisdiction” (Rooke 2012, pp.34–35). Other writers have been somewhat more politic in theirdescriptions, referring instead to the movement’s “unique views on the constitutionality of theUnited States’ jurisdiction” (Kalinowski IV 2019, p.154) or to their larger set of conspiracy
beliefs as “pseudolaw” (McRoberts 2019). Those who have looked at the Sovereign Citizen
movement from an anthropological or religious studies perspective have noted that the ways in15which Sovereign Citizens use legal or legal-seeming language appears to align with what would
be expected of ritual magic practice (Wessinger 1999; Wessinger 2000; Dew 2015). While thequestion of how Sovereign Citizen documents are structured is not on its own an interestingone (given that practically everything they say is legally or factually incorrect, and sometimes
both, it is hard to justify looking too deeply into them for their own sake), the clear connectionthat a multitude of commenters have made between the structure of these documents and thatof actual legal documents suggests that these two groups of documents likely provide fruitfulgrounds for comparison.
Though there is doubtlessly much that could be learned from a broader comparison of
the pseudolegal activities of the Sovereign Citizen movement to the operation of the legitimate
legal system (e.g. comparing the performance of legal authority by Sovereign Citizen
movement leaders in their seminars to that of judges in their courtrooms), this thesis is limiting
its examination of the nature of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal discourse to that which isobservable in the documents which they submit to courts. As discussed further in Section 3.6,
the extremist nature of many individual Sovereign Citizens precluded any sort of enthnographic
work from being carried out as part of this thesis. Given the absence of any prior such
ethnographic studies examining the Sovereign Citizen movement, a discussion of the intents
or purposes of any individual Sovereign Citizen litigants in the course of their pseudolegal
activities is beyond the scope of this study. The working assumptions of this thesis as to thebackground of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal texts are discussed in Section 2.3.3.
Prior to this thesis, linguistic engagement with writings of the Sovereign Citizen
movement has been primarily limited to passing mentions in Tiersma (1999, pp.212–213) and
Heffer (2020, p.201). Though Marko (2020) goes somewhat further by performing a critical
discourse analysis of a single text from an Austrian Sovereign Citizen group, the aims of that
paper are more focused on legitimation strategies and other rhetorical devices employed thanon the nature of the pseudolegal language used. Additionally, as will be discussed in more
depth in the following chapter, there has also been relatively sparse linguistic engagement with
the question of what exactly constitutes the register of legal English, at least a sense of whichmust be established before it is possible to examine how that register is used in Sovereign
Citizen texts. This thesis therefore hopes to make a meaningful contribution to several different
areas, including to the studies of pseudolegal discourse, legal genres and the register of legal
English, as well as to the understanding of legal authority more generally.

16

1. Introduction
1.4.2 Research Questions, Data, and Methodology
This thesis is interested in examining the relationship between legitimate legal documents andSovereign Citizen pseudolegal documents, and, subsidiarily, considering how authority is
manifested in legal texts. That relationship is explored through the comparison of a corpus of
legitimate courtroom filings (the “LCF” corpus) to a corpus of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal
courtroom filings (the “PCF” corpus). Specifically, these corpora will be examined to answer
the following research questions:
1. How does the use of the register of legal English compare in legitimate courtroom
filings and Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings?
2. How do the multimodal contents of legitimate courtroom filings and Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal courtroom filings compare?
3. What does the relationship between legitimate courtroom filings and Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal courtroom filings reveal about the nature of “parasitic” genres?
In answering these questions, this thesis will necessarily also engage with related topics suchas the nature of legal English, manifestations of authority in legal texts, linguistic expressionsof magic and ritual, and the nature of genre.
The LCF and PCF corpora both consist of texts filed as part of actual litigation in statelevel trial court in Cook County, Illinois. They are compared via a corpus-assisted multimodal
discourse analysis (“CAMDA”). CAMDA as a methodology involves “a large-scale analysisof relevant semiotic systems using a corpus” and “a detailed, close-reading analysis of selected
texts [from that corpus]” (Bednarek and Caple 2014, p.151). A full breakdown of the contentsof the LCF and PCF corpora and a detailed explanation of CAMDA as a methodology can befound in Chapter 3. By answering these research questions in this manner, this thesis hopes tocontribute to the fields of both language and law by enhancing the scholarly understanding ofpseudolegal discourse and its relationship to legitimate legal discourse.

1.5 The Structure of This Thesis
This chapter has explained the history and belief system of the Sovereign Citizen movement,
as well as laid out some of its apparent connections to legitimate legal discourse. Subsequent
chapters will further explore those connections via both an examination of the related literatureon the topic and via a direct comparison of texts belonging to the two genres.
Chapter 2 provides a critical review of the relevant literature on language and law
including prior work on register and genre as well as of the semiotics of law. It also includes a17

discussion of prior non-linguistic academic work which has examined the Sovereign Citizen
movement, focusing on discussions of the Sovereign Citizen movement as a conspiracy
movement and the ways in which both Sovereign Citizen texts and legitimate legal texts canbe interpreted as magic documents. In doing so, this chapter argues that Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal courtroom filings should be understood as instances of a “parasitic genre” which
relies upon a reader’s pre-existing knowledge of a separate “host” genre (i.e. the legitimate
courtroom filing genre) but whose discursive purposes are at odds with those of the “host.”
Chapter 3 outlines the methodology employed to answer the research questions listed
above. It begins by giving an overview of corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis(“CAMDA”) and explaining the construction of the corpora used in this thesis. The chapter
then explains the multimodal annotation scheme used to markup the LCF and PCF corpora
before reviewing the various corpus linguistic techniques employed in the subsequent analyses.
It concludes with a discussion of the various ethical factors considered in the design andimplementation of this thesis.
Chapter 4 analyzes the use of legal English in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpora, with reference to the combined written subcorpora of the Corpus ofContemporary American English (Davies 2008) to represent standard written American
English. As part of that process, it evaluates conclusions drawn by prior work in the area of
language and law regarding the features which characterize the register of legal English andexamines the use of legal technical terminology in the LCF and PCF corpora. To better examine
the use of legal English in its full context, the chapter concludes with a close reading of a fulltext from each corpus, chosen based upon their use of legal technical terminology.
Chapter 5 compares the graphic contents of the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom
Filing corpora. It begins with an examination of the layout and design choices which typify the
documents in each corpus at the whole-text level before focusing on the composition of the
documents’ opening pages. From there, the chapter proceeds to examine the methods of textual
emphasis employed in each corpus (e.g. bolding, underlining, and italicization) and the use ofindividual graphic features (e.g. stamps, seals, and thumbprints). The chapter also compares
the typical placements of these graphic features on the page between the two corpora. In thesame way as Chapter 4, Chapter 5 closes with a close reading of a full text from each corpus,
chosen this time based upon their use of the emphatic and graphic features discussed
throughout the chapter.
Chapter 6 concludes the thesis with a review and discussion of its overall findings andthe ways in which they fit within the field of language and law. It finishes with an18

1. Introduction
acknowledgement of the limitations of the present study and suggests several potential avenues
for future research.

19

2. Literature Review
2.1 Introduction
This chapter critically reviews the range of sources drawn on in this thesis. Sections 2.2 and
2.3 provide background by locating the work of this thesis in the field of language and law andby discussing what it means, exactly, for the Sovereign Citizen movement to be a conspiracy
movement. In doing so, these sections distinguish the ways in which lawyers and linguists workwith language and establish the working assumptions that this thesis makes about members of
the Sovereign Citizen movement and their pseudolegal texts. Section 2.4 reviews the linguistic
concept of genre and ultimately proposes that Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal texts belong to a“parasitic” genre which preys upon a “host” genre of legitimate legal texts. Section 2.5 turns
to the concept of register, examining what is known about the difference between legal English
and more standard varieties of English with particular attention paid to the nature of legal
terminology. Section 2.6 looks at academic understandings of both ritual and magic andsuggests that aspects of the discourse of both legitimate and pseudolegal courtroom filings canbe better analyzed with these concepts in mind. Section 2.7 then concludes with a discussionof the concept of authority and how it is semiotically manifested in legal texts.

2.2 Language and Law
This thesis draws upon both linguistic and legal research, a combination of disciplines often
referred to as either “language and law” or “forensic linguistics.” The term “forensic
linguistics” was first used by Svartvik (1968), but it was not until 1994, with the founding of
the journal Forensic Linguistics: The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law,that it was adopted by the wider academic community (Coulthard 1994, p.27; Larner 2015,
p.131).1 From the field’s inception, its exact contours have been subject to some debate2 and“forensic linguistics” is today often used as an umbrella term for two related avenues ofresearch: one which examines the use of language in the legal system and another which isrelated to the provision of expert linguistic evidence, such as authorship analysis, in acourtroom or comparable legal setting (the section divisions in Coulthard et al. (2017) and Shuy

Though the journal would later drop “Forensic Linguistics” from its title, the term is still used to describe thefield as a whole.
2
See Kurzon (1997, pp.119–123) and Durant and Leung (2016, p.3) for discussion of some of the other proposals
for the naming and subdivision of the field.
120

2. Literature Review(2017), for example, fall along these lines). The former of those two avenues, and the category
into which the subject matter of this thesis falls, is generally referred to by recent scholarshipand the International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics as either “language andlaw” or, somewhat less commonly, “language of the law” (Finegan 2015, p.56; International
Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics 2022). It is important to note here that“language and law” is distinct from “law and language”, which is a domain in philosophy not
relevant to the aims of this thesis (Hutton 2009, pp.48–61; Endicott 2016). Despite the clear
connection of its subject matter to law and the legal system, this thesis is emphatically a workof linguistics rather than a legal study. To explain what that difference means, this section will
now turn to how lawyers analyze language and explain why those methods are not suitable toanswer the sorts of linguistically based research questions that this thesis has posed.
Like many linguists, lawyers can spend a significant amount of their professional
careers analyzing texts, and just as linguists have devised their own strategies for the systematic
analysis of language, so too have lawyers. One such set of legal textual analytical techniques
are the “canons of construction” (so-called because of their essentially universal acceptancewithin the common law legal community)3 used to resolve cases of ambiguity in contracts andstatutes. The canon of “ejusdem generis” (Latin for “of the same kind”), for example, “calls forgeneral terms to be construed to include categories similar in nature to those enumerated” inthe text examined (Crystal and Davy 1969, p.214; Solan 2010, p.36). While these canons andother tools of legal textual analysis can be useful in coming to a decision regarding the operative
legal meaning of a text, they are ultimately not suitable for answering the research questions
posed in this thesis. A lawyer analyzes a text to arrive at its supposedly definitive interpretation;even in cases where multiple readings of a text are possible, legal convention is for a lawyer topresent their conclusion as inevitable (Solan 1993, p.2) and the tools used to do so (e.g. thecanon of ejusdem generis) are therefore prescriptive and formalistic. Though lawyers may
occasionally employ linguistic methods of analysis, particularly corpus linguistic techniques,in attempts to determine the so-called “original meaning” of words or phrases (Zimmer 2011;
Bowman 2020; Solan 2020; Lee and Mouritsen 2021), the nature of the conclusions drawn inlegal writing are fundamentally distinct from those drawn in linguistic analysis, and themethods used in legal analysis are therefore not generally useful to a linguistic study. Much
has been said about these tools of legal textual analysis from both legal and linguistic
perspectives (e.g. Hutton 2009; Solan 2010; Solan 2017). However, given their difference in

3

For more on the canons of construction from a linguistic perspective, see Kaplan (2020, pp.130–139).

21

purpose from linguistic methods, they will not be employed or otherwise discussed further inthis study.

2.3 The Sovereign Citizen Movement
As mentioned in Chapter 1, there appears to have been very little prior linguistic engagementwith the pseudolegal discourse of the Sovereign Citizen movement. Section 2.3.1 discusses the
only three studies identified which have done so. Section 2.3.2 then discusses what it means
for the Sovereign Citizen to be a “conspiracy movement” after which Section 2.3.3 outlines theworking assumptions this thesis makes about Sovereign Citizens and their pseudolegal texts.

2.3.1 Linguistic Approaches to the Sovereign Citizen Movement
Though the Sovereign Citizen movement has received a great deal of attention from legal andhistorical scholars (e.g. Sullivan 1999; Netolitzky 2016b), it has received very little fromlinguists. As part of a larger discussion about the use of technical terminology in legal English(a subject which itself is discussed in depth below in Section 2.5.4), Tiersma (1999, pp.212–
213) briefly describes the practices of the “Montana Freemen”, a Sovereign Citizen groupknown for “prepar[ing] verbose legal filings to various state and federal courts, dressed up in‘pseudo-scholarly terms and meaningless Latin phrases,’ typically claiming for various reasons
courts have no jurisdiction over them.” Heffer (2020, pp.201–202) uses Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal texts as an example of what he terms “pseudo-legal poppycock,” or an“epistemically irresponsible discourse pathology” that uses “the style of an establisheddiscourse type” while presenting information “not appropriate for that discourse type,” andnotes that discourse pathologies of this kind often involve a degree of self-deception on thepart of both the author and the reader to function as intended (a conclusion also reached bysome legal commentators, including Rooke (2012, p.17)). Marko (2020) engages at length witha single Austrian Sovereign Citizen text, but does so with a focus on legitimation strategies andthe use of certain rhetorical devices, rather than with the aim of making any conclusions about
the Sovereign Citizen movement and its use of legal English. These three works appear to form
the extent of the currently existing explicit linguistic engagement with the Sovereign Citizen
movement. To better understand the Sovereign Citizen movement and its pseudolegal writings,
then, it is necessary to begin elsewhere.

222. Literature Review
2.3.2 Conspiracy Theories and Sovereign Citizens
Conspiracy theories have in recent years “come to predominate American political culture”(Fenster 2008, p.1) and, in an analysis that seems to have only become more true since it was
written, been described as “a more salient part of US political discourse now than at any othertime in recent history” (Uscinski 2020, p.523). Anti-government conspiracy movements likethe Sovereign Citizen movement tend to arise “when the bureaucratic structures of adominating government are viewed as oppressive and unresponsive to the needs and petitionsof the [people, who] do not believe they will receive a fair hearing or an adequate response
from the courts and agencies of the oppressing government” (Wessinger 2000, p.160). Putting
to the side the extent to which the American government may be considered “oppressive andunresponsive,” the nature of the American legal system does present fertile ground for this sortof conspiracy movement. Bhatia (2010, p.41) goes so far as to say that “one may, with somejustification perhaps, claim that legal discourse, especially in common law jurisdictions, is an
instance of conspiracy theory, according to which legislative provisions are purposefully
written in a complex and convoluted manner, so as to keep ordinary readers out of accessible
range and to perpetuate dependence on the specialist legal community.” As is often the case inlegal contexts, the truth of that statement ultimately depends upon how one defines the terms
it contains.
Legally speaking, a “conspiracy” is “an agreement by two or more persons to commit
an unlawful act” (Garner 2019) and in that sense a “conspiracy theory” could be as simple as
the conviction that somewhere at least two people are planning to break the law. That is not thesense in which the above citations to Fenster (2008) and Uscinski (2020) employ the term,
however, nor is it the way in which it will be used in this thesis. Instead, in line with its usage
in those works, as well as with its more everyday meaning, a “conspiracy theory” here refers
to “the conviction that a secret, omnipotent individual or group covertly controls the politicaland social order or some part thereof” (Fenster 2008, p.1). Even under that more restrictive
definition, Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal beliefs clearly qualify as conspiracy theories and theSovereign Citizen movement as a whole is therefore a conspiracy movement (Barkun 2013,
pp.208–209).
The belief system of individuals who belong to conspiracy movements has been
explained as follows:[Conspiracy theorists] suffer from a ‘crippled epistemology’ in the sense that they know
very few things, and what they know is wrong… [Their] extremism stems not from23

irrationality, but from the fact that they have little (relevant) information, and theirextremist views are supported by what little they know (Sunstein and Vermeule 2009,
pp.211–212).

Conspiracy beliefs tend to become more extreme over time as conspiracy theorists use their“crippled epistemology” to explain away contrary evidence and resist the falsification of any
key tenets of their beliefs (Sunstein and Vermeule 2009, p.210).4 This is even more true when
there is a community of conspiracy theorists working and consulting together (Sunstein andVermeule 2009, p.216), as there is in the case of the Sovereign Citizen movement.
Though it does not specifically discuss the Sovereign Citizen movement (and in fact
was written before the movement existed in any notable sense), Richard Hofstader’s essay, The
Paranoid Style in American Politics, argues that there is something about American politicallife that makes it peculiarly well-suited to the formation of this sort of conspiracy theory.
Particularly on the American right, Hofstader claims, there has long been a “paranoid style” of“heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” (Hofstadter 1966, pp.xi, 3).
Conspiracy theories which stem from this school of thought have an “elaborate concern withdemonstration” and “[heroically strive] for ‘evidence’ to prove that the unbelievable is the only
thing that can be believed” (Hofstadter 1966, pp.35–36). Related writings “start with…
defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least what appear to befacts” and are “if not wholly rational, at least intensely rationalistic” (Hofstadter 1966, pp.36–
37). This certainly seems to be true of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal documents; though they
may not be legally or factually correct, as discussed in the previous chapter’s review of the“pseudolaw memeplex” (Netolitzky 2020) they do possess a strong sense of internal logic andconsistency. Though later writers (e.g. Fenster 2008, pp.23–51; Dyrendal 2016, pp.198–199)
have criticized Hofstader’s essay as overly focused on right-wing populist conspiracy theories
at the expense of those elsewhere on the political spectrum, given the right wing beliefs ofmany Sovereign Citizens (Conroy 2017), this does not limit the applicability of its points to thepresent study.

Though such a discussion is outside the scope of this study, there is a clear connection here to Heffer’s (2020,
pp.80–81) definition of “discourse pathologies”. Given the fundamental lack of legal merit to Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal conspiracy theories, they have far more in common with the “diseased” discourses Heffer describes
than they do with concepts such as that of a counter-narrative, which is a marginalized but still reality-based
challenge to an official institutional narrative (Rogers and Brefeld 2015, pp. 47–48).
424

2. Literature Review
2.3.3 Working Assumptions About the Sovereign Citizen Movement
As was discussed in Chapter 1, the visually striking character of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal
documents generally has a clear relationship to the specific conspiracies alleged by the
movement, such as the frequent connection between the so-called “strawman” theory andcertain patterns of non-standard spelling and punctuation in the writing of names. These
reasons, however, are broadly opaque to those not versed in the movement’s pseudolegal
theories and that opacity is likely a factor in the lack of linguistic attention they have received
up to this point. The inherent strangeness that suffuses many of these texts has even led some
to wonder whether adherence to Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theories can itself be evidenceof mental illness (Tiersma 1999, p.213; Kent 2015; Matheson 2018). While such anassumption, if true, could very reasonably be said to place the examination of Sovereign Citizen
discourse outside of the ambit of this study in language and law, this thesis proceeds insteadwith the assumption that individual Sovereign Citizens are either misinformed about or
misunderstand the functioning of the legitimate legal system, but are otherwise without any
relevant mental health conditions.
It is likely true that at least some Sovereign Citizens (particularly the movement leaders
often referred to as “gurus” (Rooke 2012, p.19)) are not sincere in their professed beliefs, butrather use the trappings of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theories for some form of personalor financial gain. It is not possible, however, for this thesis to gauge the intent with which atext was written, and so all Sovereign Citizen texts examined will accordingly be assumed tobe sincere (i.e. will be treated as if their pseudolegal claims were intended to be taken at facevalue). With these assumptions in place, this thesis is able to focus instead on determining thenature of the relationship between legitimate courtroom filings and Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal courtroom filings as well as the broader significance of that relationship.
Taking all of the above into account, then, it is the position of this thesis that Sovereign
Citizens are conspiracy theorists suffering from a “crippled epistemology” but that they areotherwise rational and sincere actors. The pseudolegal texts that Sovereign Citizens produce
are directly influenced by the conspiracy theories which they allege, and those theories are inturn based in significant part on both the American legal system and the texts that are produced
as part of that system’s normal functioning.

25

2.4 Genre: Parasites and Hosts
This thesis examines the relationship between legitimate and pseudolegal courtroom filings,
two distinct but closely related varieties of text. This section discusses that relationship via thelinguistic concept of genre. Section 2.4.1 reviews the definition of genre and the ways in which
multiple genres have been noted to interact with one another, Section 2.4.2 looks at prior workthat has been done on the nature of legal genres, and 2.4.3 proposes that pseudolegal courtroom
filings are best understood as instances of a “parasitic” genre which preys upon the “host” genreof legitimate courtroom filings.

2.4.1 Defining Genre and Inter-Genre Interaction
From a linguistic perspective, the concept of genre is frequently defined as follows:

A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share someset of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by expert members of
the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. Thisrationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains
choice of content and style (Swales 1990, p.58).
Though this definition has been variously described as “pioneering” (Cheng 2010, p.92) and“seminal” (Bhatia 2011, p.240), its focus on communicative purpose has also been criticizedby some as myopic, with other factors, such as medium, pointed to as just as essential in certain
contexts (an e-mail must be sent electronically regardless of its communicative purpose, forexample) (Trosborg 1997b, p.11). Subsequent work has acknowledged the above criticism bygiving greater consideration to the broader context in which a genre operates (Trosborg 1997b,
p.9; Bhatia 2011, p.240) and, in later years, Swales himself would reconsider that definition
and find it somewhat lacking, explaining that “I am [now] less sanguine about the value andviability of such definitional depictions . . . [T]he easy adoption of definitions can prevent us
from seeing newly explored or newly emergent genres for what they really are” (Swales 2004,p.61). Rather than denying the utility of the original definition, however, this later statement
should be understood as an acknowledgement of the complex and constantly shifting nature ofindividual genres. Due to the tendency of research on legal genres to make use of the definition
from Swales (1990) (e.g. Bhatia 1993; Kurzon 1997) and the lack of applicability of the26

2. Literature Review
criticisms which have been raised against it to the current study, the remainder of this thesis
will discuss the concept of genre from that perspective.5
Succinctly put, texts in the same genre will tend to share a common purpose and havea similar overall structure (Nunan 2008, p.57). Individuals who are familiar with that genre’s
purpose and structure (as well as the pragmatic rules necessary to interpret it) are deemed to be“expert users” who have acquired “genre competence” (Cheng 2010, pp.89–90; Stein 2015,p.61). An expert user of a genre is not only able to interpret and make use of that genre, butalso to adapt its conventions, and in so doing, to achieve their own situationally-determinedpragmatic aims (Bhatia 1997, pp.136–138; Nunan 2008, p.58; Bhatia 2011, p.241). The more
fixed the form of a given genre (a characteristic particularly common in institutional genres
such as those to which most legal documents belong (Gotti 2012, p.60)), the more subtle themodifications made must be for a given text to remain recognizably within the bounds of thatgenre; nevertheless, and despite the seeming contradiction, both a genre’s reliance upon
conventional features and its ability to change over time are essential to its continued use(Bhatia 2011, pp.240–241). Without those conventional features, a genre would never becohesive enough to be useful to the relevant discourse community, and without the ability toadapt itself to novel rhetorical situations, a genre would eventually fall out of use in favor ofsomething better suited to the needs of that community (Bhatia 2011, p.241; Auken 2018,
pp.17–18). Ultimately, every new instance of a genre can be said to modify it in some way
because each text must respond to the specific circumstances for which it is created (Auken
2018, p.17).
Genres change over time not only as a result of the needs of individual users but also
through their natural interactions with other genres (Bazerman 1994). The structure of atextbook on contract law, for example, will be influenced both by the structure typical of
textbooks in general and that of the sorts of contracts it examines, just as the way a lawyer
5

Genre analysis as an area of linguistic study has its origins in Bakhtin (1981) and (1987), as well as with Miller(1984), with Miller in particular pointed to as the first study to clearly define genre as a linguistic, rather thanliterary, concept (Freadman 2012, p.544; Auken 2018, p.15). Contemporary approaches to genre analysis can bedivided into three primary schools (Handford 2010, p.257; Freadman 2012, pp.544–545, 549): the first is
associated with research on English for Specific Purposes (ESP) (e.g. Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993), the second with
the New Rhetoric School (e.g. Miller 1984; Bazerman 1994), and the third with Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL) (e.g. Martin 1992). Because its origins predate those of linguistic genre analysis, SFL as a field does not
explicitly address the concept of genre until Martin (1984). Halliday is said to have felt that SFL’s conception ofregister was sufficiently broad as to include the factors considered part of genre analysis and that genre was, ifanything, a subordinate concept to that of register in SFL (Cheng 2010, p.94) (the distinction this thesis draws
between register and genre is discussed below in Section 2.5.2). Of those three, the ESP school is both the mostprominent (Handford 2010, p.257) and the school into which research on legal genres tends to fall. Regardless, it
has been suggested that these three schools of genre analysis have much more in common than not (Bhatia 2011,p.241).

27

speaks to a judge in court will be influenced by the way the law is written (Kurzon 1997, p.134).
Swales (2004, pp.18–20) describes the “genre chain”, a formalized sequence in which one
genre will necessarily follow upon another in a particular context (Auken 2018, pp.19–20). Asa genre earlier in the chain evolves, those which follow it will have to adapt in turn to remain
appropriately responsive. In the leadup to a trial, for example, if one party files a motion, theopposing party will be expected to file a response and, eventually, the judge will be expected
to issue a ruling. In such a situation, the structure of both the response and the ruling will beaffected by that of the original motion, and the structure of the ruling will also be affected bythat of the response. A genre which ignores another that precedes it in the chain runs the riskof becoming discursively nonsensical, possibly leading in this example to either an unfavorable
ruling in the case of the response or an appeal in the case of the ruling. A number of other typesof inter-genre interaction have been noted: some genres, for example, exist in a hierarchy, with
one being a “sub-genre” of another (Nunan 2008, p.58), while others are “complex” or “hybrid”
genres which blend the characteristics of multiple others (Heffer 2005, p.32). Auken (2018,p.18) reviews a number of different forms of observed inter-genre interaction; ultimately, theonly limits seem to be those inherent to the contexts in which individual genres are produced.

2.4.2 Legal Genres
There have been multiple proposed taxonomies of legal genres. Danet (1980, pp.471–473)
characterizes them according to their levels of formality while Tiersma (1999, pp.139–141)
does so by whether they are “operative”, “persuasive”, or “expository.” Gotti (2012, p.63),
adapting a discussion in Trosborg (1997a, p.20), proposes a method of classification similar to
Tiersma, though he combines the “operative” and “persuasive” categories into a singular“primary” category and deems what Tiersma calls “expository” to be “secondary” instead.
Maley (1994, pp.15–16) is more granular, dividing legal genres into “1) sources of law andoriginating points of legal process; 2) pre-trial processes; 3) trial processes; [and] 4) recordingof judgment in law reports,” and though Kurzon (1997, pp.130–131) is not attempting to be
exhaustive, he identifies more than ten distinct types of legal genre. Of the above proposedclassifications, the best fit for the genre of legal document examined in this thesis (i.e. thelegitimate courtroom filing) seems to be Tiersma’s “persuasive” category (Tiersma 1999,
p.141). Though not as rigidly structured as statutes or private legal documents (e.g. contracts
and wills), persuasive legal genres are still characterized by a notable degree of formality inboth structure and register (Tiersma 1999, pp.139–141) (see Section 2.5.1 for a discussion of28

2. Literature Review
the difference between genre and register). While all of the above classification systems forlegal genres go about it in different ways, these efforts highlight two key factors that seem toexist across all legal genres: first, they are highly formalized, and second, they are designed toeither cause or explicate a particular legal effect.
Strong adherence to conventional structure is one of the most distinguishing
characteristics of legal genres (Gotti 2012, p.60) and the legal profession seems to exert a great
deal of effort to keep it that way (Crystal and Davy 1969, p.194; Tiefenbrun 1986, p.120).
Lawyers would likely point to this as the result of a desire for economy and efficiency: a given
form may seem archaic or otherwise inaccessible to the layperson, but if it is known to workin its proper context then it would be a waste of time and money to draft a supposedly moreaccessible form only to have the same result (Charrow et al. 1982, p.187; Gotti 2012, pp.60–
61). Less charitably, it has been suggested that this adherence to form is the result of“professional gatekeeping,” where lawyers work to keep legal genres inaccessible to laypeople
out of professional self-interest (Heffer 2005, p.13).6 Regardless, this rigid adherence toconvention seems to be a key factor in the relationship between legitimate courtroom filings
and Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings.
Interestingly, like Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings, the legitimate
courtroom filing genre has received relatively little attention from linguists, and apparently
none from corpus linguists. Breeze’s DOCLEGAL corpus (Breeze 2013; Breeze 2015; Breeze2017), for example, contains only documents from commercial and corporate legal contexts(e.g. merger and non-competition agreements), Carvalho (2007) only examines contracts, andthe most relevant subcorpus of the American Law Corpus constructed by Goźdź-Roszkowski(2011) is limited to briefs filed before the United States Supreme Court. In fact, the review ofall known corpora of legal English in Fanego et al. (2017, pp.60–63) does not mention a single
corpus which has looked at anything like LCF texts, nor seemingly has anything which has
been published in the ensuing years.
In a discussion of legal genres, Bhatia et al. (2004, p.204) mention “legislation,
judgments, legal textbooks, and law cases” as part of a non-exhaustive list. Of those, it isconceivable that “law cases” refers to a genre which could encompass legitimate courtroom
Heffer (2005, p.13) also notes that “much of this gatekeeping takes place within legal education, where
apprentice lawyers learn not only how to talk about cases but also how to think about them.” While this thesis is
not equipped to evaluate that claim, it is notable that the descriptions of the “case report” genre in Bhatia (1993,
pp.127–136) and the “litigant brief” genre in Tracy and Delgadillo (2013, pp.229–233) map closely onto the“IRAC” method, a way in which law students are traditionally taught to analyze and write about legal issues(CUNY School of Law 2019). For a linguistic look at the pedagogical practices of American law schools, see
Mertz (2007).
6

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filings, though it is not clear in the context of that chapter, with the only accompanying
reference being to a study which was then in progress but that seems never to have been
published (Bhatia et al. 2004, pp.212–215). Part of that ambiguity stems from the use of theterm “law cases,” which is not common to either the US or UK legal contexts. Thatclassification is not helped by its closeness to the term “case law,” which is used frequently inboth legal contexts, though its standard meaning would be covered on the above list by the“judgments” genre. The study which has come the closest to examining the sorts of legitimate
courtroom filings of interest to this thesis is Tracy and Delgadillo (2013), though even there
the focus is on appellate level filings, rather than the sorts of trial level filings examined here.
Tracy and Delgadillo refer to the documents they examine as belonging to the “litigant brief”
genre, and describe it as:

A litigant brief is a tightly organized written genre that is persuasive in thrust. As a text
genre, litigant briefs are designed by a legal specialist (the attorney) for fellow legal
specialists (the judges) who make a final decision. Although one could describe litigant
briefs as legal-legal communication, the lay parties never entirely disappear despite
their limited role and inability to speak directly for themselves. The lay parties’ actions,sentiments, and actual words are represented and reported by the attorney in a documentthat is principle-based and drawing on abstract, historically defined legal terms. (2013,
p.233)

Though “litigant brief” may seem to be a much less ambiguous name for the genre, it stillleaves something to be desired; after all, as noted in the above description, it is neither preparedby nor for a litigant, but rather on behalf of one, and in that authorial sense ascribing themownership of the brief can be seen as somewhat misleading. Even the word “brief,” if notstrictly out of place, stands out as a distinctly non-legal descriptor. Lawyers would be much
more likely to refer to a document from this genre as a “filing,” so-called because they are filedwith the relevant clerk of court (Garner 2019). In order to better align reference to this genre
with its name as used by attorneys while still maintaining a clear indicator of its legal status,
this thesis will continue to refer to the sorts of legal documents it examines as belonging to the“legitimate courtroom filing” genre.
The qualities of legitimate courtroom filings that Tracy and Delgadillo (2013) discuss
are in keeping with the aforementioned characteristics of legal genres more generally: both the30

2. Literature Review
formalized nature of the genre (it is “tightly organized”) and its apparent purpose (to cause aparticular legal effect, i.e. persuade the judge overseeing the case) align with those noted byTiersma (1999) and others. The above description also touches upon several factors which will
be discussed below in Section 2.5, including the reliance of the genre upon technicalterminology and the liminality between professional and lay voices inherent to legal discourse.
With that said, the utility of Tracy and Delgadillo’s study beyond its description of the “litigant
brief” genre is rather limited: though it purports to present the structure of a typical “litigant
brief” text, only two documents were reviewed to determine that structure, and the six
component sections identified were simply taken from (but notably do not include) the table ofcontents of one of those documents, leaving open the question of whether additional significant
structural elements were not noted (2013, p.231). As a result, this should not be considered thedefinitive description of the legitimate courtroom filing genre. Particularly as courts and, insome cases, individual judges, are able to set their own rules regarding the structure of
documents submitted to them (e.g. Conlon 2020; United States Court of Appeals for theSeventh Circuit 2020), the genre’s exact realization likely varies at least somewhat fromjurisdiction to jurisdiction. Nevertheless, as will be discussed more throughout this and thefollowing chapter (see Section 3.3.2 in particular), despite the relative lack of attention it hasreceived up to this point, the legitimate courtroom filing genre fits well within these establishedparameters of legal genres more generally.

2.4.3 Parasitic and Host Genres
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the pseudolegal courtroom filings examined in this thesisis the tension between their obvious connection to legitimate courtroom filings and theirsimultaneous (and just as obvious) status as something other than instances of the legitimate
courtroom filing genre. It is possible, of course, that these Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal
courtroom filings are simply examples of legitimate courtroom filings created by authors who
are not sufficiently competent in that latter genre. Both legitimate courtroom filings andSovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings are produced for the same context, after all,and appear to share a communicative purpose (i.e. to further the cause of a given litigant).
Ultimately, however, despite their surface level similarities, the consistently noted presence offeatures such as thumbprints and postage stamps in Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom
filings and the conspiracy theories these documents are based in suggest that they belong to a
separate genre than that of legitimate courtroom filings.

31

While there may not be a place for a pseudolegal courtroom filing in the “genre chain”(Swales 2004, pp.18–20) anticipated by legitimate courtroom filings, the former document
cannot exist without the latter; this one-way dependency suggests some other kind of intergenre relationship. To the extent that pseudolegal courtroom filings are “socially and evenlegally proscribed” (Bojsen-Møller et al. 2020, p.8), they can be considered a sort of “illicit
genre.” However, that classification does not fully capture the complexity of the relationshipbetween pseudolegal courtroom filings and legitimate courtroom filings. This section proposes
instead that the Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filing genre is best considered to bea “parasitic” genre which preys upon a “host” genre of legitimate courtroom filings.
Though the term “parasitic genre” is occasionally used in literary criticism (e.g. Dentith
2011; Rotstein 2012), the term is employed here more in line with its linguistic sense as coinedby Cook (2001). According to Cook, parasitic genres are those which “appropriat[e] the voicesof other genres, and hav[e] no independent existence” (Cook 2001, p.219). To Cook, any genre
whose existence is dependent upon another can be considered parasitic. As he puts it, “Literary
criticism is parasitic upon literature, sports commentary upon sport. Just as many parasitic
organisms may be beneficial if not necessary to their hosts, the same may be true of parasitic
discourses” (Cook 2001, p.33). Though Cook resists any further subdivision of the concept, it
seems more useful to define a parasitic genre instead as a genre whose existence is dependent
upon the preexistence of another genre (the “host” genre), and whose existence actively
interferes with the functioning of that host genre. Such interference may take any number offorms but can be generally understood to fundamentally disrupt the host genre. Where thedependent genre’s existence does not interfere with its host (as in the case of literary criticism
and literature), that would be better considered a “symbiotic genre.” This revised definition
preserves the essential element of the original (i.e. dependence upon another genre) whileallowing for a more nuanced and contextually-derived description of the genre being examined.
It also avoids the potentially negative associations of the word “parasitic” when used todescribe genres whose existence is expected, or even welcomed, by their “host” genre.
This section has discussed the linguistic concept of genre, reviewed research on thenature of legal genres specifically, and proposed that the relationship between the Sovereign
Citizen pseudolegal document and legitimate courtroom filing genres is a parasitic one. The
analyses performed in Chapters 4 and 5 will examine the degree to which this appears to be thecase. While, as suggested above, the differences between legitimate courtroom filings andpseudolegal courtroom filings can be at least partially attributed to the fact that attempts by
non-lawyers to make use of legal language often focus on the wrong features (Tiefenbrun 1986,
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2. Literature Review
pp.99–100; Heffer 2005, pp.11, 15–17), other non-linguistic commentators (most notably
Wessinger (2000)) have suggested that many of the ways in which Sovereign Citizen texts
differ from their legitimate legal counterparts are in fact purposeful, and are best understood
through the lens of anthropological understandings of ritual and magic. To better identify theways in which PCF and LCF texts notably differ and thereby determine the extent to which therelationship between the two genres can be considered a parasitic one, the following section
explores the register of legal English and how it compares to other varieties of English, after
which Section 2.6 turns to that more magical point of view.

2.5 Register and Terminology
The attempts by the authors of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings to mimic thecharacteristics of legitimate courtroom filings mean that there is a great deal that the two groupsof documents have in common stylistically, if not substantively. This common ground is mostobvious in their use of legal (or at least legal seeming) language. This section reviews the natureof the variety of English used in legal contexts (“legal English”) via the concept of register andthe related subject of legal technical terminology. Section 2.5.1 begins by distinguishing theconcepts of register and genre. 2.5.2 then examines the existing research on the register of legal
English, after which 2.5.3 outlines the generally agreed upon qualities of that register ascompared to less specialized varieties of English. 2.5.4 concludes with a discussion of thenature of legal technical terminology.

2.5.1 Register and Genre Distinguished
Register and genre are closely related and the two terms may even appear to be usedinterchangeably in certain contexts (Conrad 2015, p.309; Goulart et al. 2020, p.436). Properly
understood, however, the two concepts are decidedly distinct: Genre is related to the structureof complete texts (e.g. the “Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion” layout of many
academic articles), the nature of the community that created them, and the purpose for which
they were created (Biber 2010, pp.241–242; Bhatia 2011, p.241; Conrad 2015, pp.309–310;
Durant and Leung 2016, pp.11–13), while register describes the discrete linguistic features thatcharacterize a set of texts (e.g. the frequency of pronoun use in formal writing) (Danet 1980,
p.471; Halliday and Hasan 1989, p.41; Biber 1995, p.1; Trosborg 1997b, p.5; Conrad 2015,
p.309; Goulart et al. 2020, p.436); see Heffer (2005, pp.11–12) and Biber (2010, pp.241–242)
for more on the general difference between the two concepts. Style guides for lawyers have33

long acknowledged the difference between the organizational structure of a text and thelanguage with which it was written, though they do not necessarily use the same terminology;
Bell (1966, p.215), for example, refers to the former category as a text’s “architectonics.”
Regardless of the vocabulary employed, drawing such a distinction is important because it
allows for the realization that one register can be used across multiple genres; this is what
Breeze (2019, p.81) is referring to when mentioning a “transversal legal register that cuts
through different genres” (emphasis in original).

2.5.2 The Register of Legal English
Following Danet (1980, pp.470–471; 1985, p.275), the consensus position in research on
language and law, as well as the position taken by this thesis, is that legal English is a register.
While the matter is now largely settled, this position has not been without its historic critics.
Some linguists (e.g. O’Barr 1981) have felt that that legal English is sufficiently distinct fromother varieties of English that it could reasonably be classified as its own language, or at leastthat it would be better considered a distinct dialect of English.7 Other classifications have been
proposed as well: Tiersma (2006, p.48) and Kurzon (1997, p.125), for example, both mention
it could be considered a “sublanguage.” While it is uncontroversial to say that legal English is
distinct from other varieties of English, the usefulness of the aforementioned designations isquestionable (Finegan 2015, pp.56–58). Particularly given the fundamental indeterminacy ofterms like “language” and “dialect” (Cysouw and Good 2013, pp.331–332), “register” is morethan sufficient for the needs of this thesis.
Goźdź-Roszkowski (2011) raises a different sort of argument against the idea of legal
English as a register: namely, that it is ultimately a category that is too broad to be useful.
Despite dismissing the idea of a register of legal English as “some vague superordinate term”
which is “practically synonymous with the notoriously imprecise notion of ‘legal language’”(Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011, p.19), he later goes on to note that that “the complexity andinterrelatedness within legal language appear to be best viewed in terms of some sort ofgrouping of genres yoked together within the same domain” (2011, p.22). At a purely practicallevel, it is difficult to functionally distinguish this suggestion from a register approach, andgiven that Goźdź-Roszkowski’s stated aim of “provid[ing] a relatively comprehensive
While both terms refer to specific varieties of language use, “dialect” is generally distinguished from the conceptof “register” by whether it is classified according to the individual using the language or the context in which thelanguage is used (Halliday and Hasan 1989, p.41). Varieties of language use falling into the former category (e.g.
African American Vernacular English, or AAVE) are considered dialects, while varieties falling into the latter
categories (e.g. the language used in business meetings) are considered registers.
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2. Literature Review
linguistic description of legal genres” (2011, p.51) sounds very similar to that of most register
analyses, this line of criticism ultimately does not need to be considered further. It does,
however, raise an important point about the connection between genre and register.
As was mentioned above, registers are frequently employed across multiple genres. The
realization of a given register is not always the same in every genre, however, with different
genres often placing greater and lesser degrees of emphasis on particular features characteristicof that register. For that reason, register analysis on its own has been noted to reveal relatively
little about the nature of individual genres (Trosborg 1997b, p.6), and the correlation between
register and genre is often weaker than what one might assume (Kurzon 1997, p.134).
Particularly in legal settings, it has been suggested that “what makes a text a legal text is thegenre to which it belongs and the register, and in that order” (Kurzon 1997, p.133). Some oral
legal genres, such as witness examinations or a trial’s opening and closing statements, makelittle to no use of the register of legal English (Hobbs 2003; Spiecker and Worthington 2003),
and even in the written legal genres in which the register is traditionally more firmly
entrenched, advocates for the “Plain English” or “Plain Language” movement have madenotable headway in encouraging the legal community to employ a more broadly accessible(though still distinctly legal) register (Tiersma 1999, pp.211–230; Adler 2012). It is importantto keep in mind, therefore, that though it is the position of this thesis that legal English is a
register and, relatedly, that such a classification is a meaningful one to make, the use of legal
English to any particular extent should not be presumed when examining a legal genre.
Regardless of the theoretical approach taken, legal English is not a monolith and should
not be treated as such (Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011, p.15). Legal English has existed in various
forms for centuries (Maley 1994; Tiersma 2012) and the register’s most salient features will
therefore depend upon when and for what purpose the legal English in question is (or was) used
(Tiersma 2006, p.45). Even within the same legal system, the legal English of a contemporary
statute, for example, is likely distinct from the legal English of a lawyer’s oral argument in a
pre-trial hearing or that of a thematically comparable statute drafted in the early nineteenth
century. This thesis examines the contemporary legal English used in written documents
authored by lawyers as part of the pre-trial process which have been submitted to a trial-level
American state court. As was mentioned in the earlier discussion of legal genres, theselegitimate courtroom filings do not appear to have been formally studied before. Perhaps dueto the greater ease of text collection or a desire for more seemingly “prototypical” legal texts(Hiltunen 2012, p.40), research in language and law tends to focus instead on subjects such as
the language of statutes (e.g. Trosborg 1995; Solan 2010) or of jury instructions (e.g. Charrow35and Charrow 1979; Gibbons 2017). Given its focus on comparing the contents of the Sovereign
Citizen pseudolegal document and legitimate courtroom filing genres, this thesis is not
equipped to give a definitive overview of the type of legal English contained in the legal
documents it examines; such a study would require both a more singular focus on the language
used in the legitimate courtroom filing genre and, as will be discussed below, a much clearer
idea of what constitutes legal English than currently exists in the literature. However,considering the apparent novelty of a study examining the use of legal English in this context,
any notable deviations on the part of the legal texts examined here from what is normally
expected from the register of written legal English will be highlighted.

2.5.3 The Consensus Description of Legal English
Most descriptions of the features that distinguish contemporary legal English from more
standard varieties of English have their origin in Mellinkoff’s The Language of the Law.
Mellinkoff (2004 [1963], p.11) identifies nine aspects of legal English that he feels moststrongly characterize it. They are:
1. Frequent use of common words with uncommon meanings;
2. Frequent use of Old English and Middle English words once in common use, but now
rare;
3. Frequent use of Latin words and phrases;
4. Use of Old French and Anglo-Norman words which have not been taken into thegeneral vocabulary;
5. Use of terms of art;
6. Use of argot;87. Frequent use of formal words;
8. Deliberate use of words and expressions with flexible meanings; and9. Attempts at extreme precision of expression.
While Mellinkoff is a seminal figure in the field of language and law, it should be noted that
he was a lawyer, not a linguist, and despite his efforts to define and distinguish these categories,
their lack of grounding in linguistic literature means that their usefulness for this study is“Argot” as used by Mellinkoff is “a specialized vocabulary common to any group” (2004 [1963], p.17). It is
used only in communication between group members (in the case of legal English, between people trained in law),and is distinguished from terms of art by being more comparable to slang, whereas a term of art is necessarily “atechnical word with a specific meaning” (Mellinkoff 2004 [1963], p.16). Concepts including “cause of action”,“issue of law”, and “reasonable man” are given by Mellinkoff as examples of legal argot (2004 [1963], p.19),
while “appeal”, “defendant”, and “judicial notice” are used to illustrate legal terms of art (2004 [1963], p.17); as
is discussed below, this ultimately seems to be something of a distinction without a difference.
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2. Literature Review
ultimately limited. It is unlikely, for example, that a specialist or professional register existsthat does not make use of its own “terms of art,” and the distinction between a term of art anda common word with an uncommon meaning is vague at best. Nevertheless, Mellinkoff’s
influence on subsequent research examining legal English is clear, particularly on Tiersma(who himself was also a lawyer, albeit one with a PhD in linguistics), who would later revise
Mellinkoff’s original list on more linguistic grounds (Tiersma 1999, pp.203–210; 2006, pp.44–
45).
More recently, a series of linguistically grounded examinations of legal English havecome to a seeming consensus about the features which most clearly distinguish it from standard
English. Though this consensus view is not without its own issues (not least among them being
the lack of any clear definition of the “standard” English against which legal English isevaluated; see Section 3.3.3 for a discussion of how it is defined in this study), it does provide
a more useful starting point than Mellinkoff’s list for the purposes of this thesis. There is no
single authoritative listing of its features, but the consensus description of legal English
generally holds to the following description.
There is broad agreement that the register of written legal English is in many ways
similar to the register of “formal” or “literary” English (e.g. Danet 1980, pp.471–473; Tiersma
2006, p.46; Mattila 2012b, p.32). What sets it apart, however, is its frequent use of legal
technical terminology (e.g. “estop”, “quitclaim” and “certiorari”) and vocabulary that can beconsidered archaic (e.g. the Latin “res” for the property constituting a trust), hyperformal (e.g.
“herein” or “thereof”), or otherwise more “difficult” than would be expected of more standard
varieties of English (e.g. the use of words like “commence” and “terminate” rather than “begin”
and “end”) (Maley 1994, p.22; Tiersma 2006, p.44; Tiersma 2008, p.14; Mattila 2012b; Kurzon
2013; Ruusila and Lindroos 2016). This purported difficulty also manifests itself in a varietyof related lexical choices, particularly its general aversion to the use of pronouns both within
and across sentences (Solan 1993, pp.121–122; Tiersma 2006, pp.46–47; Chovanec 2012, p.2;
Gotti 2012, pp.54–56; Hiltunen 2012, p.47), its frequent use of polysemous terminology(Mattila (2012b, p.30), for example, notes three distinct but co-existent meanings of the term“common law”; see also Tiersma (2008, p.16) and Bourdieu (1987, p.829)) and its preference
for nominalizations (e.g. the use of “consideration” and “injury” in lieu of “consider” and“injure”) (Charrow and Charrow 1979, pp.1321–1322; Tiersma 2006, p.45; Chovanec 2012,
p.2; Mattila 2012b, p.22).
In terms of syntax, written legal English is often characterized by clausally complex
sentences which, particularly in statutory and judicial contexts, have been found to have an37average length twice that of scientific texts and eight times that of oral texts (Danet 1985,
pp.282–283; Tiersma 2006, p.45; Tiersma 2008, pp.14–15; Chovanec 2012, p.1; Gotti 2012,
p.53; Hiltunen 2012, pp.41–47). Related to the tendency to avoid pronouns mentioned above,legal English frequently eschews anaphoric reference and other typical methods of enhancing
textual cohesion (Danet 1985, pp.285–286; Azuelos-Atias 2011, p.42; Gotti 2012, pp.54–55).
Instead, it makes frequent use of impersonal and passive constructions while avoiding first andsecond person references altogether; authors instead either refer to themselves in the third
person (e.g. “this court finds”) or remove themselves and others from the narrative entirely(e.g. “mistakes were made”) (Charrow and Charrow 1979, pp.1325–1328; Danet 1985, p.283;
Tiersma 2006, p.45; Chovanec 2012, p.3). Negation, particularly multiple negation (e.g.
“without which the injury would not have occurred”), is unusually common relative to standard
English and has been described as one of the single largest factors in reducing the overall
comprehensibility of legal English (Charrow and Charrow 1979, pp.1324–1325; Danet 1985,
p.283; Tiersma 2006, p.45; Ondelli and Pontrandolfo 2016, pp.162–166).
The accepted institutional goals for the use of legal English are the avoidance of
ambiguity and the enabling of preciseness in interpretation (Gotti 2012, pp.52–53, 58–59).
Perhaps ironically, its use can often have the opposite effect, particularly for readers without
legal training (Breeze 2017, p.2); Solan (1993, pp.125–130), for example, shows how the
avoidance of pronouns characteristic of legal English often makes a sentence lesscomprehensible, rather than more. In terms of written legal English, Crystal and Davy (1969,
pp.193–194) go so far as to say that, “[o]f all the uses of language [legal writing] is perhaps theleast communicative, in that it is designed not so much to enlighten language-users at large as
to allow one expert to register information for scrutiny by another.” Hiltunen (2012, p.48)
makes a similar point, arguing that the syntactic complexity of legal texts “strongly indicate[s]that the [texts are] written and organized from the point of view of the writer, rather than thereader.”
The problem with the preceding description of the “consensus” features of legal English
is that it is largely incidental, having been arrived at via the amalgamation of findings from avariety of studies which have been separated from their original contexts and subsequently
taken to apply to legal English as a whole. The suggestion that negation is more common inlegal English than in “standard” English, for example, seems to have originated with theinclusion of negation on a list of potentially confusing features of California jury instructionsin Charrow and Charrow (1979) and been assigned progressively more weight over time.
Despite the ad hoc nature of the consensus description, it remains highly influential: Zozula
38

2. Literature Review(2019, p.71), for one, uncritically lists all of the above features in her description of the registerof legal English, as do Fanego et al. (2017, pp.70–71), though the latter at least notes that thatthey believe these qualities apply primarily to “prescriptive, legislative texts,” implying a
degree of consideration was given to the sources from which that consensus description has
sprung. For some studies, such as Bednarek (2014, pp.63–64), reliance on Mellinkoff’s originallist alone is deemed sufficient.
On a different critical note, Tiersma (2006) points out that these consensus featuresgenerally characterize other formal registers as well, raising the question of how truly“distinctive” they are. Other than Mellinkoff (2004 [1963]) (and, derivatively, Tiersma (1999)
and (2006)), there is no single noteworthy attempt to overarchingly define the register of legal
English. Given the disparate scopes and scales of the various studies that have been used tocome to this “consensus” opinion, neither is there reliable quantitative data illustrating theextent to which legal English actually differs from more general varieties of English.
Pragmatically speaking, these problems are exacerbated by the fact that legal English
occupies a peculiar liminal space, and the question of whom, ultimately, it is for is acomplicated one (Rostain 2004, pp.157–158): unlike with the use of other professional
registers, which are primarily used by and for members of the relevant profession (e.g. medicalcase reports written and read by doctors), the writings of the legal system are theoreticallyintended to be accessible to the general public while at the same time serving lawyers’
particular technical needs (Solan 1993, p.130; Hiltunen 2012, p.39). Legal English is clearly
distinct from general English but is at the same time uniquely inseparable from it. This tension,
which from a scholarly perspective remains “as yet unsolved and barely addressed” (Schauer
2015, p.47), seems to go to the heart of the relationship between legitimate courtroom filingsand pseudolegal courtroom filings and is the focus of the analysis in Chapter 4.

2.5.4 Legal Technical Terminology
Legal English’s heavy reliance on specialist terminology has been described as “the mostobvious way in which [it] differs from ordinary speech and writing” (Tiersma 2008, p.15; seealso Azuelos-Atias 2011, p.43) and such terminology, as well as the way in which it will bedefined for the purposes of this thesis, therefore merits particular attention. Generally speaking,in linguistics, “technical terminology,” or sometimes simply “terminology,” (which is present
to some degree in any specialist or professional register) refers to a set of words which either
only appear in one register or which have meanings in that register which are clearly distinct

39

from their meanings in other contexts (Crystal and Davy 1969, p.210). In Mellinkoff’s
discussion of the characteristics of legal English mentioned above, he touches on aspects ofsuch terminology but not in a way that is particularly useful for this thesis. The closest of his
defined categories is “term of art”, which he deems to be “a technical word with a specificmeaning” (Mellinkoff 2004 [1963], p.16) (in fact, “term of art” and “technical terminology”
are sometimes used interchangeably, as in Danet (1985, p.279)). However, without clear
justification, Mellinkoff seems overly focused on the “specific meaning” part of that definition:for example, despite describing the phrase “cause of action” as “unadulterated law talk,incomprehensible to laymen” which is in “daily use” in legal contexts, he feels it is not a termof art because its meaning may vary depending on the context in which it is used (Mellinkoff
2004 [1963], p.17). Similar issues can be found with the remainder of his categories, and all
are ultimately insufficient for the purposes of identifying specific instances of legal technicalterminology in this thesis.
The technical terminology of legal English is of particular interest to applied linguists,
especially those working in contexts such as legal translation (e.g. Alcaraz Varó and Hughes
2002; Chromá 2004; Orts 2012) or the teaching of English for specific purposes (e.g. Bhatia
1983; Breeze 2015). However, studies in these areas can be surprisingly cavalier in their
discussions of the subject. In discussing whether the content of legal texts can be “simplified,”for example, Bhatia (1983, p.43) states that “it is not always possible to do much about legal
terminology. You cannot call a ‘tort’ anything else, and a ‘contract’ has to be a contract.” 9 In
other words, the existence of a set of legal technical terms is taken as a given, but there is little
engagement with the qualifications a term must possess to be included in that set. Ultimately,
there do not seem to have been any significant linguistic attempts to develop a theoretical
approach to the nature of technical terminology in legal English (Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011,
pp.56–58; Ruusila and Lindroos 2016, p.121).
This confusion surrounding the nature of legal technical terminology likely has its
origins in the study of terminology itself, which was originally conceived of as an “autonomousinterdisciplinary field of study” related to but decidedly separate from the field of linguistics(Cabré Castellví 2003, pp.165–166). From this point of view, a term is a word or phrase which“signals a concept and ‘condenses the semantic value contributed by the defining process which

9This is not strictly true; see, for example, the massive overhaul of the terminology used in civil litigation in
England and Wales brought about as part of the Woolf reforms in the 1990s (Grainger and Fealy 1999, pp.76–
77). Absent such a wide-ranging and government-sanctioned effort, however, legal technical terminology is
undeniably difficult to, as Bhatia (1983, p.43) puts it, “do much about.”40

2. Literature Review
generated it’” (Jopek-Bosiacka 2011, p.10). This reference to the “defining process” issignificant because it indicates the reliance of terminological studies on the designation of aterm as a term by the discourse community which makes use of it. Put another way, because
traditional terminological studies operated under the assumption that terms “are the units whichmost efficiently manipulate the knowledge of a particular subject” (Cabré Castellví 2003,
p.182), they also believed that only those people in possession of a full grasp on “the systemof concepts of an individual subject-field” (Chromá 2004, p.15) were properly able todetermine what the terminology relevant to that field would be. For this reason, traditional
studies of terminology were generally more concerned with promoting efforts to standardize
the terminology used across a given field than with the analysis of the ways in which therelevant terminology was generated (Temmerman 2000, p.15). Though more recent
scholarship has moved away from such a prescriptive approach towards something more inline with contemporary linguistic practice (Goźdź-Roszkowski and Witczak-Plisiecka 2011,p.5), this terminological lacuna largely remains.
Ultimately, given the indeterminacy of all of the above, the clearest proof that a
particular word or phrase is an instance of subject-specific terminology is its inclusion in a
specialist dictionary. In the legal translation context, monolingual law dictionaries written bylawyers have been pointed to as clear “codification[s] of legal terminology” (Chromá 2004,
p.16), and related studies have referenced a word’s inclusion in such a dictionary as evidenceof its terminological status (e.g. Jopek-Bosiacka 2011, p.10). Tiersma (2008, pp.15–16) has
done so as well, even making use of the same legal dictionary as Jopek-Bosiacka (2011): toindicate the breadth of technical terms present in legal English, Tiersma refers readers directly
to Black’s Law Dictionary (Garner 2019). Hiltunen (2012, p.39) also refers to Black’s to define
an instance of legal technical terminology, but does so as a one-off instance, not as a way ofidentifying a larger set of terms. It seems that, at least in the case of contemporary American
legal English, there is no more authoritative source.10 Black’s Law Dictionary, most recently
in its 11th edition (Garner 2019), has been described as “the most widely cited legal book in theworld” (Lat 2014), is the most referenced legal dictionary by the United States Supreme Court(Lillian Goldman Law Library 2020), and has been used by multiple linguists as a definitive
source for the meaning of English language legal terms (e.g. Mattila 2012b, p.37; Finegan
10

Harris and Hutton (2007, pp.133–156) discuss a number of ontological issues that arise when attempting todefine a self-regulating field such as law. While these considerations are undeniably important from a “law andlanguage” standpoint (see Section 2.2), for simplicity’s sake, this thesis assumes that assigning a definition to alegal term is both possible and that, where such definitions are referenced in this text, they have been appropriately
assigned.

41

2015, p.56). The aim of Black’s, according to its editor-in-chief, is “to define everything thatmight legitimately be called a legal term” (Garner 2003, p.38), with individual words selected
for inclusion based upon their appearance in judicial opinions and scholarly legal texts, as well
as after being identified in the course of systematic reviews of the various sub-fields of law
carried out by lawyer-lexicographers (Garner 2003, pp.41–42).
Reference to a dictionary for an objective determination of a word’s legal or
terminological status is inherently a prescriptive endeavor and it is important here to rememberthat legal and linguistic analyses of language are two very different things (Hutton 2009, pp.8595,99-101). Even within a purely legal analysis, however, the question of whether a given word
is being used in a technical sense can be difficult to answer as, depending on the circumstances,a word’s ordinary meaning may control in one case where its technical meaning is more
apposite to another. Complicating matters further, statutes and contracts will often includesections defining terms of particular relevance to their purposes in a manner completely
detached from any other accepted ordinary or technical meanings, making them technical terms
for the purposes of that text only (Tiersma 1999, pp.115–120). At the same time, Mellinkoff(2004 [1963], pp.16-17,293) sagely cautions against too broadly assigning words technicalstatus, pointing out that “not everything that has the sound of law is [a technical term]”. Shortof a complete reading of the text in which a given word appears, there is likely no perfectly
reliable method of determining whether it is being used in a technical sense. Even inclusion inBlack’s is at best an indicator that a word has an established legal technical meaning, but it
does not mean that it is always used in that sense (similarly, this does not mean that a word
without a corresponding entry can never acquire such a technical meaning). Nevertheless, inline with the practice of those who study both terminology and language and law, for the
purposes of this thesis, a word will be deemed to be an instance of legal terminology where it
has a corresponding entry in Black’s Law Dictionary (Garner 2019).

2.6 Magic and Ritual in Pseudolegal Texts
This chapter has so far discussed the relationship between Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal
documents and legitimate courtroom filings through the lenses of genre and register, proposingthat pseudolegal courtroom filings belong to a parasitic genre which preys on a host genre oflegitimate courtroom filings and that both of those genres make use of the register of legal
English. While that framework may explain most of the relationship between legitimate andpseudolegal courtroom filings, it does not account for many of the most distinctive features of42

2. Literature Review
the PCF genre. Some areas in which PCFs and LCFs differ can surely be attributed to a lack ofgenre competence (Cheng 2010, pp.89–90; Stein 2015, p.61) in the legitimate courtroom filinggenre on the part of authors of PCF texts. Other areas, however, such as the frequent inclusionof features such as formations of thumbprints and postage stamps in PCFs (Anti-Defamation
League 2016), clearly have no presence in the members of their host genre, and therefore
cannot be as easily explained as failed attempts at generic mimicry (parasitic or otherwise).
This section suggests that many of the ways in which PCF texts most notably differ from LCF
texts can be best understood as instances of ritual magic practice. Section 2.6.1 defines anddistinguishes the terms “magic” and “ritual” as they are used in this thesis, after which Section
2.6.2 discusses how Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal documents can be read as magic texts.

2.6.1 Defining Magic and Ritual
The American president has been said to be able to classify or declassify documents simply by“utter[ing] the magic words” (Wood 2022) and similar descriptions of legal language as being
akin to magic are far from uncommon. Though these suggestions are generally made in jest,from an anthropological perspective they are closer to the truth than they may first appear.
Before elaborating on that point, however, it is important to first distinguish between ritual andmagic. For the purposes of this thesis, ritual consists of “the performance of more or lessinvariant sequences of formal acts and utterances” (Rappaport 1999, p.24). It has also been
described elsewhere, though perhaps a bit too simplistically, as any instance of “formalized
speech and action” (Luhrmann 1989, p.221). Rituals form an important part of everyday life,
and often involve a linguistic component: certain habitual performatives can be considered aform of ritual (Wray 2002, p.91), as can the use of words such as “please,” “thank you,” andother practices generally associated with “good manners” (Wray 2002, pp.109–110) (in fact,
any practices relating to etiquette can likely be considered ritual in nature (Terkourafi andKádár 2017, p.179)). Magic, by way of contrast, is said to “pertain generally to human control
over supernatural forces” (Davies 2012, p.1). Though ritual often forms an important part ofmagical practices, not all magic behavior is necessarily ritual behavior, nor is the opposite true
(Rappaport 1999, p.25).11 Ritual language is, in fact, a key element of all varieties of discourse(Danet 1980, p.543) because the structure it imposes allows for more productive exchanges ofThough older anthropological literature on magic and ritual distinguishes “religious” from “magical” ritual
practices (e.g. Malinowski 1935; Mauss 2001 [1902]), this is no longer done, as the difference was often simply
a result of whether a given practice was approved of by an author at the time they were writing (Kieckhefer 1997,
pp.13–14; Chadwick 2012, pp.295–296). This thesis will consistently use the term “magic” when referring tobehavior which “pertain[s] generally to human control over supernatural forces” (Davies 2012, p.1).
11

43

information (Corsaro 1985, p.175). Any instance of language that becomes “a prescribed andconsecrated form of linguistic behavior” can be considered a ritual (Heffer 2013, p.206). Thoserituals which have as their aim some sort of influence over the world which would not beotherwise humanly attainable are also magic practices.

2.6.2 Sovereign Citizen Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings as Magic Texts
Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once suggested that “any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic” (Clarke 1983, p.36), and a number ofcommentators (e.g. Wessinger 2000; Dew 2015; Netolitzky 2018b) have suggested thatSovereign Citizens seem to be operating under a similar principle in the construction of theirpseudolegal texts. This magical explanation of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal texts goes asfollows: Sovereign Citizens are, by and large, individuals who do not have a goodunderstanding of the legal system. In their encounters with its representatives (e.g. lawyers,
judges, police, etc.), the Sovereign Citizens see those representatives perform legal rituals thatthey do not comprehend and which have dramatic real world effects (e.g. they receive a traffic
ticket, are arrested, or have their homes foreclosed upon). Consciously or not, as a result of
their lack of understanding of how the legal system functions (as well as their “crippled
epistemology” discussed above in Section 2.3.2), Sovereign Citizens conclude that those legal
rituals tap into some element of the “supernatural,” and decide to claim that power forthemselves in order to turn it against their perceived oppressors. To ensure their success inwhat they conceptualize as a form of magical combat, it is not enough to simply copy the formand structure of existing legal rituals; they instead must overpower it by enhancing what they
perceive to be its most magically salient features.
Law is widely acknowledged to be a highly ritualized field (Danet 1980, p.543) andlegal writings have frequently, if generally metaphorically, been compared to magic texts (e.g.
Crystal and Davy 1969, p.194; Danet 1980, p.545; Yelle 2006) or, more broadly, to a form of“social magic” (Bourdieu 1987, p.840). This magical impression is only enhanced by highly
publicized instances in which an individual’s failure to follow a prescribed legal formula has
resulted in significant and undesirable consequences, as when a judge ruled that a suspect’s
telling the police to “just give me a lawyer dog” was not sufficient to properly invoke his rightto counsel (Jackman 2017) or when Barack Obama needed to retake the presidential oath of
office after both he and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court deviated slightly from its
constitutionally mandated form during his first inauguration in 2009 (Zeleny 2009). Goodrich44

2. Literature Review(1990, pp.140–141) goes as far as to suggest that, historically speaking, legal systems havebeen opposed to magic practices not because such practices are ineffective, but rather because
they were seen to rival the claims of those legal systems on being the most effective way tochannel access to truth and power.
Figure 2.1 shows an Instagram post from an account dedicated to humorous discussionsof legal content in which a man holds up a sign reading “I wouldn’t be able to tell if you aresaying a Harry Potter spell or a legal Latin phrase” (litigation_god 2021, reproduced withpermission):

Figure 2.1 An Instagram post in which a man holds a sign reading, “I wouldn't be able to tell if you are saying
a Harry Potter spell or a legal Latin phrase”

As that post indicates, some features of legal English, particularly legal Latin phrases, areinterpreted by many as “magic words.” The function of such explicitly magic words(sometimes also referred to as “words of power” (Wessinger 2000, p.160)) “is not ‘meaning’in the ordinary sense, but a specific magical influence which these words are believed toexercise” (Malinowski 1935, p.213). Even many people who would not otherwise view thepractice of law as inherently magical, including many lawyers, feel that the language used inlegal contexts is what actually “carr[ies] the power of the law” (Charrow et al. 1982, p.182).
45

From that perspective, the fact that the attempted use of legal English in Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal texts may not be comprehensible to readers is not relevant; all that matters is thatthose readers perceive its supposed supernatural potency.
It is the formality of ritual acts which sets them off as “different” from the everyday
and gives them their power (Luhrmann 1989, p.221). The performance of a ritual (magic orotherwise) generally involves both a speaker and a hearer (Wray 2002, p.84) both of whom are“acting as individuals but within a social context” that has generally been sanctioned by somelarger organization (Kieckhefer 1997, p.14). Rituals, like legal English itself, are often
characterized by the frequent use of explicit performative speech acts (Tambiah 2014, pp.77–
80), and, from the point of view of the participants, the power of a ritual is therefore thought tostem from the proper words being uttered in the proper context (Tambiah 2014, p.18). Ritual
language often exists more to “[create] the illusion of certainty in a world of uncertainty” thanto communicate a particular idea (Danet 1980, p.545) and, in that sense, ritual language can besaid to exist more for the benefit of its hearer than for its speaker (Danet 1980, p.546) evenwhen a given ritual is supposedly performed for that speaker’s benefit. In fact, if theperformance of a ritual is not recognized by its observers, then it can be said to have failed,regardless of whether all of its other requisite formal elements were realized (Bourdieu 1991a,
p.113). A primary function of legal rituals, then, is to impress upon their observers (and to alesser degree, their performers) the special heightened status and importance of the legal eventsof which they are a part.
Mauss (2001 [1902], pp.23–24) notes that while legal rituals “are not magical rites inthemselves,” they can acquire a magical character if they are perceived to have “a special kindof efficacy or if they do more than merely establish contractual relations between persons.” Inother words, even legitimate legal discourse, once its form has become sufficiently divorced
from its intended meaning, can seem like a sort of ritual magic (Heffer 2013, pp.206–207). The
authors of the Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings examined in this thesis are
essentially attempting to convince their readers that they possess such a “special kind of
efficacy.” In doing so, they are also attempting to subvert the standard legal ritual process:rather than a legitimate legal ritual succeeding because its observers recognize that all therequisite formal elements were properly performed, they are hoping that the observers of theirrituals (i.e. the readers of their pseudolegal texts) will mistakenly believe those formal elements
were met and thereby attribute actual legal power to their texts.
This sort of Sovereign Citizen practice, in which a ritual is copied and “enhanced” inorder to claim its power, is known as “sympathetic magic” (Wessinger 2000, p.160). Legal46

2. Literature Review
contexts seem particularly well suited for this sort of magic as, from a practical perspective,
law and magic have been noted to operate similarly for those not versed in either (Malinowski
1935, pp.234–235). Frank (1949, p.181) asks “Do not those unintelligible words uttered by thejudge in the presence of the jury resemble the talismanic words of Word-Magic?” and someSovereign Citizens have themselves described what they are doing in those exact terms (Hume2022b), while others note that they are purposefully including magical elements such as“powerful sacred geometry” in the design of their pseudolegal texts (Netolitzky 2018b,
p.1056). Many features which have been said to characterize Sovereign Citizen texts (see AntiDefamation League 2016) have also been noted in magic contexts, such as a focus on strange
seeming “secret” names (Luhrmann 1989, pp.230–231) and “long strings of esoteric [language]and Latin-derived syntax to make [movement followers] feel elite” (Montell 2021, p.71).12
Adding to the apparent magical character of it all, even when there is broad agreement within
the Sovereign Citizen movement that a particular feature is important for legal (or magical)
reasons, there is often little agreement as to why (Netolitzky 2018b, p.1056). In other words,
even Sovereign Citizens do not necessarily understand why they are doing the things that they
are doing.13 They do not need to understand the why of it, however; all they need to do isbelieve that their pseudolegal strategies will work.

2.7 Displays of Legal Authority
Despite what Sovereign Citizens may believe, legitimate legal texts are not magical in origin.
Their ability “to decree the legal construction of reality,” however, does give these texts“enormous… power over social generalities” (Mertz 2007, p.95), and it is this power thatSovereign Citizen texts are attempting to parasitically claim for themselves. In formalized
settings such as legal contexts, the power of a speaker’s words often stems explicitly from an
institution rather than from the speaker (Durant and Leung 2016, pp.89–90). In the case of
legitimate courtroom filings, their power to affect the world around them comes from theirconnection to the legal system. Accordingly, this section explores that connection via an
examination of the relationship between the authority of the legal system and legitimate legal

12

Though beyond the scope of this thesis, Sovereign Citizen sympathetic magic practices often extend beyond
just their pseudolegal texts; at least one Canadian Sovereign Citizen has arrived in court wearing lawyer’s robes,
claiming that they gave him the power to represent others (Netolitzky 2018b, p.1056).
13
To be clear, Sovereign Citizens do not need to think of their pseudolegal practices as explicitly magical forthem to qualify as such; “magical thinking,” or the belief that one can influence the outcome of an event by
doing something with no bearing on the circumstances, is a common element of many everyday rituals, such as
knocking on wood to stave off bad luck (Raypole 2020).

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texts. Section 2.7.1 explores the concept of legal authority and Section 2.7.2 examines semiotic
manifestations of authority in legal texts.

2.7.1 Defining Legal Authority
Legitimate legal texts have the ability to affect the real world because they are officiallysanctioned by the legal system and are therefore able to access its power. Though these texts
may therefore be said to “represent” the legal system, they do not by themselves create theirown authority (Bourdieu 1991a, pp.107–109); instead, that authority has been given to them.
In Hobbes’ Leviathan, such a relationship is explained as follows:[S]ome have their words and actions Owned by those whom they represent. And thenthe Person is the Actor; and he that owneth his words and actions, is the AUTHOR: In
which case the Actor acteth by Authority… So the Right of doing any Action, is called
AUTHORITY. So that by Authority, is alwayes understood a Right of doing any act: anddone by Authority, done by Commission, or License from him whose right it is (2005[1651], pp.128–129) (emphasis in original).
More recently, authority has been defined as “the legitimate exercise of power in an
asymmetrical relationship, by those ‘in authority’ over those who are subjects of authority,either by virtue of specialised knowledge or holding a particular political or social position”(Swinglehurst 2014, p.18). From either perspective, the ability of the “actor,” as Hobbes would
put it, to affect the real world is limited only by the ability of its “author” to do so. Because theultimate “author” of the legal system is the government itself, the legitimate legal documents
which it has “authorized” can theoretically achieve any end of which the government iscapable. Though they may not express it in these terms, lawyers are very aware of theauthorized status of their documents and their resultant potential. They are taught to read legal
texts as if they were “repositor[ies] of power, whose core meaning centers on legal-textual
authority” (Mertz 2007, p.95) and that by reading them, they can “appropriat[e] the symbolic
power which is contained within” (Bourdieu 1987, p.818). That power within a legal text caneven be carried forward from one to another, as a legal text’s claim to authority is accentuated
via reference to “other legal texts that a court… can cite as authorities in deciding the case athand” (Mertz 2007, p.94).

48

2. Literature Review
Bourdieu (1991b, p.7) notes that such “social authority” which stems from institutionaldelegation “tends to become legitimized by presenting itself as pure technical reason.” This
stands in contrast to “scientific authority” which needs no such delegating body or to justify
itself because it is derived from “pure technical ability” (Bourdieu 1991b, p.7). Such a
distinction points to the essentially self-generating and semi-tautological nature of the power
accessed by legitimate legal documents: ultimately, the legal system is only powerful because
the legal system insists that it is powerful and society has agreed to go along with it (Goodrich
1985, p.103; Kuipers 2013, p.402). “Since the origin of authority,” Derrida notes, “the positionof the law can’t by definition rest on anything but [itself]” (1990, p.943). Elsewhere, this has
been referred to as a “necessary myth… [without which] the modern state would collapse”(Conklin 1992, p.168; see also Warren 2019, p.570 for a discussion of this applied tointernational law in particular). The seriousness with which law is regarded in society is so wellestablished, Goodrich suggests, and “its doctrinal adherences or allegiances sufficiently
unchallenged, to frequently dispense with any practical need for a metalanguage ofjustification” (1985, p.120). In other words, regardless of its origins, the idea that the legal
system possesses real power is essentially taken for granted at this point. Though society may
require such an assumption to function, it is likely also part of the reason why the legitimate
courtroom filing genre is such an attractive host for a parasitic genre such as that of Sovereign
Citizen pseudolegal documents. After all, if there is no “pure technical” reason (as Bourdieu
would put it) that the legal system is inherently powerful, then there is theoretically no suchrequirement stopping Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal texts from claiming that power forthemselves.

2.7.2 The Semiotics of Authority in Legal Texts
The field of law has been described as “an aesthetic enterprise” (Schlag 2002, p.1047) with an“optical apparatus that disseminates the glory of sovereignty and... [relays] power throughimages” (Goodrich 2012, p.55). This process, whereby images are on their own able tocommunicate the idea of the power of the legal system, is a semiotic one, and the practice oflaw has been noted to be an inherently semiotic exercise (Tiefenbrun 1986, p.92). Semiotics is,broadly defined, “the scientific study of communication and signification” (Tiefenbrun 1986,p.95) and anything that carries meaning is a potential subject of semiotic examination (in thissense, Eco (1977, p.7) suggests defining semiotics as “the discipline studying everything which
can be used in order to lie”). Scholars have been interested in semiotics since at least the time49

of the ancient Greeks, but semiotics in its modern form has its origins at the turn of the twentiethcentury with the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand De Saussure (Tiefenbrun 1986,
pp.101–102). Peirce’s work has been highly influential on a number of legal theorists andphilosophers (Tiefenbrun 1986, pp.109–113), but it is the work of Saussure, now considered“the father of modern linguistics,” which is of greater relevance to this thesis (Tiefenbrun 1986,
pp.113–118).14 At its most fundamental level, Saussurean semiotics examines the relationshipbetween the signified and the signifier, which, when taken together, constitute a sign (Barthes
2009, p.135). In the context of language, the signified is an abstract concept and the signifier
is a word (either spoken or written) that comes to represent the signified (Barthes 2009, p.136).
With the exception of onomatopoetic words, there is no inherent relationship between asignified and its signifier; the abstract concept of a dog is represented just as well by the words“dog” in English, “perro” in Spanish, and “chien” in French, and all are therefore equally valid
signs (Jackson 1985, pp.19–21; Tiefenbrun 1986, p.114). Taken together, the relationshipbetween the signified, signifier, and their resulting sign is considered a semiological system(Barthes 2009, p.136). As with the scope of semiotics more generally, such semiologicalsystems are not limited to the language context: anything capable of carrying meaning (e.g.
drawings, photos, or even document layout choices) can be examined through this lens (Kressand van Leeuwen 2006, pp.18–19)
Signs do not exist in isolation. Any group of coherently related signs can be considereda text (Bakhtin 1987, p.103), and the meaning of a given text is generally understood to be
more than “the simple accumulation of the atomic meaning of the individual [signs it contains]”(Jackson 1985, p.12). In this way, the process of semiotic systemization can iterate, causing asemiological system to itself become a signifier for a new signified. This resultant structure
can be thought of as a “second-order semiological system” and the original system is its “firstorder” equivalent (Barthes 2009, p.137). A sign related to the concept of “dog” may thereby
come to represent loyalty, for example, or more relevantly for the purposes of this thesis,
documents associated with the legal system can come to represent the authority of the legal
system itself (Stein 2015, p.62). This sort of accumulation of semiotic significance by
agglomeration is not limited to the text level; whole genres can be understood through this lensas well (Cheng 2010, p.111).

This is not to say that Saussure’s work is without its own influence on legal theory; a number of positivist legal
scholars, most prominent among them H.L.A. Hart, have engaged directly with his work (Jackson 1985, pp.4–11,
147–166; Tiefenbrun 1986, pp.135–138). Regardless of whether they subscribe more to the approach of Peirce orSaussure, however, such discussions of legal theory are ultimately outside the scope of this thesis.
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Instead of as an “actor” in the Hobbsean sense discussed in Section 2.7.1, Bourdieu refers
to a person acting under the authority of another person or group as an “authorized
representative” who is able to concentrate within their speech “the accumulated symbolic
capital of the group which has delegated [its power to them]” (Bourdieu 1991a, pp.109–111).
As with the performance of a ritual (see Section 2.6.1), the successful exercise of suchdelegated authority depends upon whether a “legitimately licensed” person, in a legitimate
place and before legitimate receivers, “enunciate[s] according to the legitimate forms”(Bourdieu 1991a, p.113; Heffer 2013, pp.212–213). The speech of an authorized representative
does not need to be understood to be effective; it only needs to be recognized by its receivers
as legitimate (Heffer 2013, p.212). In this way, laypeople can recognize “law” in the same waythat they recognize a foreign language that they do not speak (Goodrich 1990, p.213); they may
not understand the specific meaning of a given legal text, but they can tell from its overall
impression that it possesses a distinctly legal character, and therefore that it also possesses theinstitutional authority of the legal system. In other words, legal language itself has become asign which signifies the authority of the legal system.
In part because of the static nature of the design of many legal genres (Porter 2014,
p.1691), legal texts are often read as singular objects which in themselves have come torepresent the concept of legal authority (Goodrich 2017, p.2), much in the same way that noble
houses used to employ heraldic emblems (Goodrich 1990, pp.125–133). Similarly, the conceptof a legal contract has become so ingrained in society that it “may justifiably be regarded as
the prototypical structure of exchange in general” (Kevelson 1985, p.82). In fact, legal texts
taken as a whole are more likely to be recognized by the public as signs of the power of thelegal system than they are for any particular semantic content (Goodrich 1990, p.209). In otherwords, if something appears to be legal, regardless of the specifics of its content, the public istherefore likely to assume that it is also authoritative, and therefore powerful (Goodrich 1990,
pp.209–210).
Though it is not described in explicitly semiotic terms, this process by which a text cancome to represent aspects of a larger system is an essential part of Tiersma’s (2010, p.35)
concept of “textualization,” which he defines as “the process by which lawyers, and sometimes
ordinary citizens, make a text the authoritative expression of a legal act.”15 In being imbued
with such authority, a textualized document acquires a level of status that it would not otherwise
The term “textualization” has been used elsewhere to refer to the process by which individual sentences combine
to form a coherent text (e.g. Bhatia 2011, pp.239–240), but Tiersma’s definition is more relevant for present
purposes.
15

51

on its own possess. Though for Tiersma textualization is an active choice on the part of a text’s
author (2010, pp.40–42), a similar sort of authoritative endowment can be observed passively
occurring throughout the legal context. As a result of the high degree of formality and ritualthat characterize the legal system (Hutton 2009, p.180; Gotti 2012, p.52), it has even beensuggested that legal texts’ status as signs of authority is more fundamental to their nature thanany specific procedural goals (Goodrich 1990, pp.209–210).
The authority attributed to legal texts means that any project in language and law mustalso keep in mind law’s “inherent” performativity, or its ability to “[do] things with words”(Hiltunen 2012, p.49). This performative character can be considered “one of the mostimportant functions of legal language” (Charrow et al. 1982, p.181), and serves as a clear
indication of the authoritative status of legal texts. Law is full of explicit performativeutterances (i.e. those where “the act of speaking and the act of doing are the same” (Solan 1993,
p.154)); such sentences are, in fact, regarded as one of the most fundamental features of legal
language (Charrow et al. 1982, p.181). A judge pronouncing a defendant guilty or not guilty ofa crime, for example, legally establishes that defendant’s guilt (or lack thereof) regardless ofwhether the defendant had actually committed that crime (Bourdieu 1987, p.838; Dunn 2003;
Gotti 2012, p.57). Similarly, a government enacting a statute that proscribes a particularbehavior at once both describes and creates that proscription (Visconti 2009, p.393). Given that
fundamental connection between pronouncing the law and creating it, it has been suggested
that legal language is more explicitly performative than any other variety of specialized
discourse (Gotti 2012, p.57) and that the entire legal system can be appropriately characterized
as “a system of [performative] speech acts” (DeLong 2015, p.82).16

Though the term “speech act” itself does not appear prior to Searle (1969), the broader theory has its origins inAustin (1962) (Danet 1980, pp.457–458; Schane 2012, pp.101–102). Originally delivered as a series of lectures,
Austin begins his classic How to Do Things With Words by dividing speech into “performative” and “constative”
utterances, where performative utterances are those which perform the action denoted by their verb (e.g. “I now
pronounce you man and wife”) while constative utterances merely describe something (e.g. “The defendant ispresent”) (Austin 1962, pp.3–6; Schane 2012, p.101). However, as his argument develops, Austin ultimately
rejects that division, concluding instead that all language is performative, with the only distinction being whether
it is explicitly or implicitly so (Austin 1962, pp.147–149). From this point of view, the speaker of a supposedly“constative” utterance is in fact “performing” by vouching for the truth of what they are saying (i.e. “Thedefendant is present” can be better understood as “[I vouch that] the defendant is present”) (Austin 1962, pp.132–
146; Searle 1976, pp.10–11). The content of Austin (1962) is as much a work of philosophy as it is of pragmatics.
Possibly because its arguments are developed more along philosophical than linguistic lines (i.e. a series of
propositions are presented, evaluated, and revised over the course of the book), some more modern linguists
misrepresent Austin by presenting his initial propositions rather than his ultimate conclusions. Danet (1980,
pp.457–458) and Schane (2012, p.101), for example, both discuss Austin’s initial performative/constativeclassification without making clear that he later discards it.
1652

2. Literature Review
The aim of legal semiotics is to study “all the different means by which law iscommunicated” (Goodrich 1990, p.209). While the literal words being used are an importantpart of that process, they are by no means the only part; it has been suggested that for laypeople,
other modes of transmission, particularly the more symbolic (i.e. visual) ones, seem to carryjust as much, if not more, weight (Goodrich 1990, pp.209–210), and legal texts can becharacterized by their methods of visual emphasis (e.g. their use of capital letters, bolding, andswitching between different fonts) as well as they can be by their word choice (Crystal andDavy 1969, pp.198–199). Scholars have previously noted “the deep and close links between
law, semiotics, visuality and visual persuasion” (Pencak and Wagner 2006, p.1) and said that“the purest distillation” of legal English (Danet 1980, p.472) can be found in written texts.
Despite this, and despite the long acknowledged need for the field of forensic linguistics to pay
increased attention to principles of document design (Stygall 2002, p.40), there do not appear
to have been any prior semiotic analyses of the legitimate courtroom filing genre. Legalsemiotic analyses tend to be more general, as in Goodrich’s (1990, pp.209–259) discussion of
the semiotics of English common law, or, even when they are more targeted, concerned
primarily with the goings on of actual trials and related courtroom contexts (e.g. Jackson 1996;
Matoesian 2010). The following chapter will discuss the ways in which this thesis will consider
the full semiotic contents of the documents it examines.

2.8

Conclusion

This thesis examines two intriguingly related sets of documents: Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal
courtroom filings and legitimate courtroom filings. This chapter has proposed that the former
is a “parasitic” genre preying upon the latter “host” genre and that though the Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal courtroom filing genre has significant overlap with the legitimate courtroom filinggenre, it also possesses a distinctly magic quality that the legitimate courtroom filing genre
does not. The authors of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal documents, it has been suggested, use
this magic quality in their efforts aim to usurp the legal authority found in their host genre andachieve their conspiracy theory-based goals. Because Sovereign Citizens perceive themselves
to be in a form of magic combat with the legitimate legal system, it is not enough for them tosimply copy the existing forms of legitimate courtroom filings; instead, they must heighten
what they perceive to be the most authoritative features found in legitimate courtroom filingsin their own pseudolegal courtroom filings to achieve magical superiority.

53

In coming to that description of the relationship between Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal
courtroom filings and legitimate courtroom filings, this chapter has reviewed literature from anumber of fields, with a particular focus on the concepts of genre, register, magic, and thesemiotics of law. In doing so, it has identified a number of gaps in the existing literature which
this study hopes to address, particularly regarding the nature of legal English and studies of
persuasive legal genres. The following chapter will discuss the field of corpus assisted
multimodal discourse analysis and the various methodological choices that have been made toenable the effective study of the pseudolegal courtroom filing and legitimate courtroom filinggenres and answer this thesis’ research questions.

54

3. Methodology
3.1 Introduction
As discussed in Chapter 1, this thesis is interested in answering the following three researchquestions:
1. How does the use of the register of legal English compare in legitimate courtroom
filings and Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings?
2. How do the multimodal contents of legitimate courtroom filings and Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal courtroom filings compare?
3. What does the relationship between legitimate courtroom filings and Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal courtroom filings reveal about the nature of “parasitic” genres?
Two corpora have been constructed to answer these questions: one of legitimate courtroom
filings (the “LCF” corpus) and one of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings (the“PCF” corpus). This chapter will discuss the ways in which these corpora were assembled andthe methodological approach used to analyze them and answer the above questions.
Section 3.2 introduces corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis (“CAMDA”) and
explains why it was chosen to examine the relationship between the legitimate and pseudolegal
courtroom filing genres. Section 3.3 then explains how the LCF and PCF corpora wereconstructed and annotated, and outlines the contents of the written subcorpus of the Corpus ofContemporary American English (“COCA-W”) (Davies 2009) used for the analysis in Chapter
4. Section 3.4 reviews the statistical tests and software used in the analysis of the LCF and PCF
corpora, after which Section 3.5 explores the various corpus linguistic methods employed andSection 3.6 discusses the ethical factors considered in the design and execution of this study.

3.2 Corpus-Assisted Multimodal Discourse Analysis
This thesis uses a corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis (“CAMDA”) approach tosystematically examine and compare the full range of semiotic content present in the LCF and
PCF corpora (see Section 2.7 for broader discussion of the semiotics of law). As first definedin Bednarek and Caple (2014, p.151), a CAMDA study involves “a large-scale analysis of
relevant semiotic systems using a corpus” and “a detailed, close-reading analysis of selected
texts [from that corpus]” (see also Bednarek 2015, pp.66–69; Caple 2018, pp.85–86, 88–89).
Simply put, CAMDA uses corpus linguistic methods to supplement the analysis of multimodal
55

discourse (defined below). Corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and multimodality are allconcepts which exist independently of one another and can be used in linguistic studies invarious combinations; it is possible to combine corpus linguistics and discourse analysis
without a multimodal component, for example (e.g. Hardt-Mautner 1995; Baker 2006), or toperform a multimodal discourse analysis without the addition of corpus methods (e.g. El Refaie
2003; Thomas 2014). The remainder of this section will therefore review these three concepts
and the ways in which they combine in a CAMDA study to justify the methodological approachof this thesis. Section 3.2.1 defines multimodality and explains its relationship to the earlier
discussion of semiotics. Section 3.2.2 then reviews the field of discourse analysis, both defining
it and locating the analytical work of this thesis within it. Section 3.2.3 concludes with an
explanation of corpus linguistics and the ways in which corpus methods enhance the study ofmultimodal discourse.

3.2.1 Multimodality
Chapter 2 discussed the semiotics of law and the ways in which legal documents such as
legitimate courtroom filings have come to represent, in themselves, the concept of legal
authority to many readers. Strictly speaking, legitimate and pseudolegal courtroom filings are
multisemiotic rather than multimodal because they combine multiple semiotic systems (i.e.
writing and images) rather than multiple perceptual modalities (e.g. film, which contains bothvisual and auditory content) (Muntigl 2004, pp.31–32; Bednarek 2015, p.66; Jewitt et al. 2016,p.2). It is “general practice” (Bednarek 2015, p.66), however, to use the term “multimodal” torefer to both multimodal and/or multisemiotic content (Bednarek and Caple 2012, p.2; Caple
2018, p.86)1 and, for the sake of consistency with the wider relevant body of research, thisthesis will follow suit. It is with this sense of the term in mind that the second research question
posed in this thesis aims to compare the “multimodal” content of the LCF and PCF genres.
In a multimodal analysis, no one mode or semiotic system is inherently privileged overany other; “all are seen as equal, potentially, in their capacity to contribute meaning to acomplex semiotic entity” (Kress 2011, p.28). Under such an approach, an image, for example,
can be read to function on its own as a speech act despite a complete lack of any written
component (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, pp.122–123), and there is a recognition that multiple
signs can “cumulatively encode particular meanings” (Adolphs and Carter 2013, p.144) thatMalamatidou (2020, p.85), for example, defines multimodality “as the combination of two or more semiotic
resources (including language) within a particular communication event.”
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3. Methodology
would not be effectively communicated by any of those signs taken individually. Particularly
given this last point, from a multimodal perspective, documents are understood to represent a
series of choices which have been made in the aggregate to best communicate the desired
message (Kress 2004, pp.116–118)
As mentioned above, texts in the LCF and PCF genres make use of two primary
semiotic systems: writing and graphics. Broadly speaking, these systems interact in two ways:
either through combining text and image (e.g. a caption underneath a photograph) or throughthe typographical and layout choices made in the presentation of the writing itself (e.g. bolding
or indenting) (Stöckl 2004, pp.9, 19). Features such as capitalization, font choice, and the useof color in written text are just as significant to the analysis of a multimodal text (van Leeuwen
2006; Kress 2011, pp.40–41) as the wider relationship between writing and images (Martinec
and Salway 2005; Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, p.177). Ultimately, any text can be examinedfrom a multimodal perspective; past studies have examined subjects ranging from newspaper
cartoons (El Refaie 2003) to advertisements (Stöckl 2004, pp.19–21) to tourist brochures(Hiippala 2016). Though there are no prior multimodal analyses of legitimate courtroom filings
or Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings, the aims of this study fit well within thatwider academic tradition.

3.2.2 Discourse Analysis“Discourse” is a term which is used across many different areas of academia and accordingly
possesses a number of different, and often somewhat conflicting, definitions (Baker 2006,
pp.3–5; Kress 2011, pp.35–36). The two primary approaches to the concept of discourse inlinguistics can be broadly classed as either “structural” or “functional,” with the former
considering it to be “the organizational mechanisms at play in language above the clause level”(Partington 2013, p.2) and the latter defining discourse more broadly as “language that is doingsome job in some context” (Halliday and Hasan 1985, p.10) or simply as “how language is put
to use” (Bednarek and Caple 2012, p.2; see also Partington and Marchi 2015, p.216). This
thesis approaches discourse from that latter functional perspective, believing that discourse
analysis is more useful when it “emphasizes that language is not merely a self-contained systemof symbols but more importantly a mode of doing, being, and becoming" (He 2017, p.446). In
this way, the overarching research interest of this thesis (i.e. what the relationship between
legitimate courtroom filings and pseudolegal courtroom filings reveals about how authority is
manifested in legal texts), and therefore its three research questions, are all fundamentally57

discourse analytical in nature because they are concerned not just with the language used in
LCF and PCF texts, but also the wider social context in which that language occurs.
By engaging with the content of both legitimate and pseudolegal courtroom filings at
the individual text level with the context for which they were produced in mind, this study istherefore an instance of discourse analysis. It is important to emphasize, however, that thisthesis is not performing a “critical” discourse analysis (“CDA”). CDA is a subfield of applied
linguistics which “is interested in uncovering [the] power relations and ideologies behind [agiven] discourse” (Bednarek and Caple 2012, p.10). Studies in CDA have been criticized “fora cavalier approach to data and for allowing political commitment to obfuscate analyticalmethodology” (Partington 2004, p.13; see also Partington and Marchi 2015, p.216). While thefocus on the relationship between language and ideology inherent to CDA studies (Orpin 2005,
pp.37–38) is a worthy field of inquiry, it does not align with the research goals of this study.
This is in no small part because the nature of the relationship between the language andideology of the Sovereign Citizen movement is essentially the starting point of this thesis (seethe discussion of the dual parasitic and magical nature of Sovereign Citizen discourse in theprevious chapter), but also because CDA studies are not generally equipped for the sort ofcross-genre comparisons necessary to answer this thesis’ research questions. Therefore, neither
CDA nor any of the particular methodological considerations which normally accompany suchstudies will be addressed further.

3.2.3 Corpus Linguistics
Corpus linguistics is “that set of studies into the form and/or function of language which
incorporate the use of computerised corpora in their analyses” (Partington 2013, p.5), where a
corpus is “a principled collection of language data taken from real-life contexts” (Knight and
Adolphs 2020, p.353). While essentially defining corpus linguistics as “linguistics whichmakes use of a corpus” may seem at first glance unacceptably circular, it serves to highlight an
important point: namely, that “corpus linguistics” refers to a set of methodological choices
rather than to any particular theory of language (McEnery and Hardie 2012, pp.1–3).22

While regarding corpus linguistics as a methodological rather than a theoretical approach is both the position ofthis thesis and the mainstream position in linguistics (Baker 2010, p.6; McEnery and Hardie 2012, p.1), the topic
has historically been subject to some debate. The “corpus linguistics as theory” camp refers to its approach as“corpus-driven” (in contrast to what it describes as the “corpus-based” position of the “corpus linguistics as
method” camp) and believes that corpora should only be used to generate theories about language in the first
instance rather than to examine questions generated a priori (Tognini-Bonelli 2001, pp.84–85; see also Biber
2015). Because the “corpus-based” position rejects the idea that a corpus has any inherent theoretical status, it
similarly rejects this distinction between “corpus-based” and “corpus-driven” studies, finding it to be needlessly58

3. Methodology
The use of corpus linguistic methods allows a researcher to “[conduct] an empiricalanalysis of language” (Gries and Paquot 2020, p.647) which provides “more neutral starting
points and generalizability” of results (Marchi and Taylor 2018, p.4) when analyzing data thanis generally feasible with a purely qualitative study (Biber 2015, p.193); traditional (i.e. noncorpus-assisted) discourse analyses, for example, tend to involve only the close reading of asingle text or of a small number of texts (Partington and Marchi 2015, p.216). The empiricism
and reliability granted by properly performed corpus linguistic methods is achieved via thestatistical analysis of the language contained in a given corpus (see, e.g., Levshina 2015; Wallis
2021) which is generally performed in either specifically designed corpus analysis software
such as AntConc (Anthony 2019) or in programming environments such as RStudio (RStudio
Team 2020). The statistical tests and corpus linguistic methods employed in a given study willvary depending upon the aims of that study; those used in this thesis are discussed below in
Sections 3.4 and 3.5 respectively.
The combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis brings together “social
relevance and statistical relevance” (Marchi and Taylor 2018, p.4). The benefits of combining
the two were suggested at least as far back as Hardt-Mautner (1995) and the combination has
subsequently become so established within contemporary linguistics that some feel that
discourse analysis now cannot be considered a “mature scientific discipline” without the
support of corpus methods (Brezina 2018, p.259).3 Corpus linguistic methods both reduce thepotential for the inadvertent introduction of researcher bias into a study (Baker 2006, pp.10–
12) and provide the above-mentioned benefits of more reliable, generalizable results while
discourse analysis “guards against the commonly lamented trouble with quantitative studies,that is, their disregard for context(s)” (Marchi and Taylor 2018, p.4); these benefits are foundequally in the analysis of both mono- and multimodal discourses (Jewitt et al. 2016, pp.121–
127).4

restrictive of the types of research possible using corpus linguistic methods (McEnery and Hardie 2012, pp.5–6,
162–164). As a result, a linguist working from a “corpus-based” perspective would be unlikely to actually describe
their work as “corpus-based,” instead simply considering it to be a project within the general ambit of corpus
linguistics.
3
For practical reasons, however, the more time a researcher spends quantitatively engaging with their data theless time they are likely to have for in-depth qualitative analysis of that data; there is an inevitable tradeoff between
quantity and quality in mixed methods studies.
4
The above should not be taken to say, however, that corpus linguistic studies are purely quantitative (nor,relatedly, that a non-corpus assisted discourse analysis should by default be assumed to be purely qualitative). No
pattern in language can be identified unless it is quantifiable, nor can such a pattern be interpreted from acompletely numerical perspective (Marchi and Taylor 2018, p.2). A keyword analysis, for example (see Section
3.5.3), is not complete with the generation of the list of keywords; it also requires a manual examination of those
keywords in context to be worthwhile (Gabrielatos 2018, p.228). In this sense, the combination of corpus linguistic

59

Generally speaking, studies which make use of corpus and discourse analytical methods“use corpus tools to identify frequent or salient linguistic features, which are then subjected toa more detailed qualitative analysis” (Egbert and Baker 2020, p.8). A number of approaches tothis combination have evolved over time, including the CDA-based approach of studies such
as Mautner (2005) and Baker et al. (2008), but the most relevant to the development of
CAMDA is its precursor, corpus-assisted discourse studies (“CADS”). As coined in Partington(2004), the term CADS was intended to “[emphasize] the eclectic nature of the approach”(Partington 2013, p.10). Corpus techniques in CADS studies are “only one sort amongst others
and… CADS analysts employ as many as required to obtain the most satisfying and complete
results, hence ‘corpus-assisted’” (Partington 2013, p.10) (emphasis in original). “Corpusassisted” is used in CAMDA in the same sense (Bednarek and Caple 2014, p.141), though withthe additional explicit recognition of the multimodal content of the data examined.
There are, of course, potential pitfalls that need to be avoided when combining corpus
linguistics and discourse analysis. Mautner (2016, pp.171–174) outlines several, the most
relevant of which is the potential for a “skills gap” where a qualitative researcher is not a fullycompetent user of corpus techniques (a problem which, she suggests, is often exacerbated by
the lack of standardization across many of the more common pieces of corpus linguistic
software). Baker and Levon (2015, pp.231–232) point out two related risks: first, that theinterpretation of corpus search results will be so focused on the specific outputs that theirconnection to the underlying discourse will be lost, and second, that an inexperienced
researcher may find their corpus search results too difficult to parse at a technical level. The
steps taken to mitigate these risks are discussed throughout the following sections.
CADS research has been used effectively across a number of contexts, and isparticularly well suited for the analysis and comparison of written registers (Biber 2015, p.246;
Conrad 2015); it has even been used productively, albeit not in name, in forensic linguistic
contexts (Coulthard 1994). The CAMDA approach specifically has been used to examine
subjects such as the discourse of American newspapers and British tabloids (Bednarek andCaple 2014), narratives in film and television (Bednarek 2015), and social media posts about
the 2016 Australian federal election (Caple 2018). Given the complex multisemiotic content
present in both legitimate and pseudolegal courtroom filings as well as the largely unexamined
nature of both genres, such an approach is essential to any attempt to identify and compare theand discourse analytical methodologies is not adding new techniques to either side of the equation, but rather
enhancing elements which were already present in each.

60

3. Methodology
most salient aspects of the two genres. The following section describes the process of designingand compiling the LCF and PCF corpora, after which Sections 3.4 and 3.5 explain the ways inwhich the CAMDA methodology is operationalized in this thesis.

3.3 Creating the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Corpora
This section describes the creation of legitimate courtroom filing and pseudolegal courtroom
filing corpora examined in this thesis. Section 3.3.1 reviews the general principles of corpus
construction after which Section 3.3.2 describes the contents of the LCF and PCF corpora.
Section 3.3.3 then describes the composition of the portion of the Corpus of Contemporary
American English (Davies 2008) used in Chapter 4 and Section 3.3.4 describes the ways inwhich the LCF and PCF corpora were annotated to enable the analysis of the use of textual
emphasis and images performed in Chapter 5.

3.3.1 Principles of Corpus Construction
The LCF and PCF corpora have been constructed to grant insight into the language used inparticular genres (i.e. the LCF and PCF genres, respectively) and they are therefore considered“specialist” corpora (Handford 2010, p.257).5 Because they were created specifically to becompared to one another, the two main considerations in their construction were to ensure thatthey were both “representative” and “comparable.” Corpora can be said to be representative
when they “accurately represent the type of language under investigation” (Reppen 2010, p.32)
and comparable when the criteria used to determine which texts are included in a corpus are
sufficiently similar (McEnery and Hardie 2012, p.240). Except where a given corpus contains
literally all of the language ever produced in its target context, however, it is not possible totruly know whether it does fully represent that context, only to potentially confirm the opposite
by noticing the absence of a particular expected feature (Tognini-Bonelli 2001, p.57; Koester
2010, p.69). And if a corpus is not representative, then the usefulness of comparing it to anothercorpus will always have to be carefully considered. It is hoped that the discussion throughout
this chapter demonstrates the care and consideration given to these matters in the design of thisstudy.
For a given corpus to be considered representative, it must capture the range of bothsituational and linguistic variability within its target context. Situational variability refers to“Specialist” corpora stand in contrast to much larger “general” corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary
American English (Davies 2008), which, as that name implies, are instead constructed to examine much broader
varieties of language used above the genre level (Handford 2010, pp.256–257).
561

the range of “text types” used in that context, and linguistic variability refers to the distributionof linguistic features across those text types (Biber 1993, p.243; Koester 2010, p.69; Ädel 2020,
pp.4–6). “Text types” are groupings of texts with “shared linguistic co-occurrence patterns, sothat the texts within each type are maximally similar in their linguistic characteristics, while
the different types are maximally distinct from one another” (Biber 1993, p.245). As text typeis a classification based upon a text’s internal linguistic composition, it should not be confusedwith the concept of genre, which can be evaluated using criteria external to the corpus (Biber
1993, p.245; see also the discussion in Chapter 2). To capture the linguistic variability of atarget context, a linguist must ensure that a given corpus contains a sufficient number of texts
of a sufficient length for each text type (Koester 2010, p.70).
Specialist corpora such as the LCF and PCF corpora have been found to be very
effective at “reveal[ing] connections between linguistic patterning and contexts of use”
(Koester 2010, p.67), and the more specialized the genre being examined, the smaller a
specialist corpus needs to be to ensure it is representative (Handford 2010, p.258). Reppen(2010, p.32) notes that some specialist corpora contain fewer than 40,000 words, though
Koester (2010, p.67) describes any corpus containing 250,000 words or fewer as “small.”
While wordcount alone is not a sufficient metric by which to judge the representativeness of a
corpus (particularly in specialist multimodal contexts) (Handford 2010, p.258), by either of theabove standards, at 302,857 and 359,428 words, respectively, the LCF and PCF corpora are
relatively substantial. Given their size, the constrained nature of the two genres examined, andthe number of distinct texts each corpus contains (138 in the case of the LCF corpus and 250
in the case of the PCF corpus; see Table 3.1 below on page 68 for a more detailed breakdown),
it is felt (though, as mentioned above, can never be truly confirmed) that the LCF and PCF
corpora have likely captured the relevant ranges of situational and linguistic variability and cantherefore be considered representative.
When directly comparing corpora, it is not sufficient for those corpora to be
representative, however; they must also contain data which is relevant and appropriate for sucha comparison (Jaworska and Kinloch 2018, p.114). Corpora are considered to be comparable
in this way “if their sampling frames are similar or identical” (McEnery and Hardie 2012,
p.240). A “sampling frame,” sometimes also referred to as a “design frame,” is the set of criteria
used to determine which texts are included in a corpus, and specifies factors such as the context(i.e. the “socially defined situation of use” (Knight et al. 2021, p.28)) intended to be represented
by a corpus, how texts are selected for inclusion in that corpus, the timeframe in which those
texts were created, and other relevant factors (Biber 1993, pp.243–244; McEnery and Hardie62

3. Methodology
2012, p.250; Knight et al. 2021, p.25). The sampling frame of a corpus must always be given
explicitly as it directly affects the sorts of questions that may be answered by that corpus(Tognini-Bonelli 2001, p.59); those of the LCF and PCF corpora are given in full in thefollowing section. For the moment, it is sufficient to say that because the sampling frames for
the LCF and PCF corpora were designed at the same time and involved collecting nearly
identical types of documents from the same source, those frames are believed to beappropriately similar such that the LCF and PCF corpora are decidedly comparable.

3.3.2 The Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Corpora
All texts in both the LCF and PCF corpora were obtained between 2016 and 20196 with thehelp of an informant working in chancery court7 in a state trial-level courthouse in Cook
County, Illinois. The informant was briefed on the aims of this study and agreed to pass along
documents meeting the selection criteria for each of the two corpora outlined below; because
documents filed with courts in the United States form part of the public record (see Section
3.6) this process was without legal or ethical issue. Texts obtained in this way were generally
from matters arising in front of the judge for whom the informant worked, though the informant
would also on occasion send documents filed as part of cases heard in other courtrooms in thesame courthouse.
The texts collected were limited to those stemming from cases filed in chancery court,with the expectation that limiting the potential range of subjects under dispute in this way
would enhance the comparability of the LCF and PCF corpora. In the case of the LCF corpus,
the only other limitation imposed was that documents were written and filed by licensed
attorneys. This was intended to exclude pro se litigants (i.e. individuals representing
themselves in court) (Garner 2019) while otherwise capturing as full a range of relevant legal
discourse as possible. As for the PCF corpus, the informant was requested to identify
documents which appeared to have a legal purpose and whose arguments were fundamentally
jurisdictional in nature, but which were ultimately not grounded in law or fact. The informant
was previously familiar with the Sovereign Citizen movement and did not appear to have any
difficulty in identifying the relevant genre of document; though it is not possible to evaluate
6

The earlier end of this range predates the commencement of this PhD because the document collection process
originally began as part of an MA Thesis in Forensic Linguistics at Cardiff University; see Griffin (2017).
7
Chancery jurisdiction is traditionally associated with courts of equity (Garner 2019) and chancery courts
therefore hear a wide variety of cases. In Cook County, courts in the chancery division have jurisdiction overcases regarding “injunctions, class actions, mortgage foreclosures, declaratory judgments, contract matters,
creditors’ rights, liens, construction of wills and trusts, trusteeships, receiverships, dissolutions of partnerships
and corporations, and statutory and administrative reviews” (Circuit Court of Cook County 2022).

63the kinds of documents which the informant did not pass along, nearly every text sent forinclusion in the PCF corpus was fit for purpose.
All texts were received via email in .pdf format. Documents which were not originally
filed electronically but instead submitted as hard copies to the court were first manuallyscanned by the informant. Multiple distinct documents were often contained in a single larger.pdf file; in such cases, the files were separated into discrete texts via Adobe Acrobat. This wasa straightforward process with texts for the LCF corpus as the individual texts almost invariably
began with a clear title page, as in Figure 3.1:

64

3. Methodology

Figure 3.1 The first page of a legitimate courtroom filing with identifying information redacted

The portion of the document beginning with “IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF COOK
COUNTY” through to “PLAINTIFF’s RESPONSE TO DEFENDANT [REDACTED]’S
MOTION TO VACATE JUDGMENT” is referred to by lawyers as the “caption” (Black’s Law
65

Dictionary defines the caption as “the introductory part of a court paper stating the names ofthe parties, the name of the court, the docket or file number, and a description of the paper”(Garner 2019)). As is discussed in Chapter 5, all save one of the texts in the LCF corpus beganwith such a caption, with essentially the only variation being the names of the parties involved
and the relevant case numbers.
A degree of personal discretion was required with determining the boundaries of thetexts meant for the PCF corpus, however, as their formatting was far less consistent acrossdocuments and texts were often not paginated. Where inter-text divisions were not immediately
obvious, the contents of the PCF texts were then read to determine their most likely intended
endpoints. Once separated, each text was manually reviewed to ensure the scan was of goodquality (i.e. legible and without any portions of the original text falling outside of the scannedarea). Individual pages which were blank or contained only information which would havebeen added by the clerk of court after the document was filed (e.g. filing stamps noting the timeof submission) were removed from the texts, as were pages such as certificates of mailing,
whose content was court-mandated, pro-forma, or otherwise not intended to further the overall
legal argument being made. Document sections which were not primarily authored by the
person filing the document, including newspaper articles attached as exhibits or mortgages withminimal handwritten comments in the margins, were similarly removed to avoid the inclusionof material not originally intended to be part of the LCF or PCF genres. Where multiple
identical or near-identical copies of a text appeared to have been filed, only the copy with thebest image quality was retained to enhance the overall legibility of the corpora. Among all texts
received, only three (all intended for the LCF corpus) texts exceeded 40 pages in length, andeach of those did so by at least another ten pages; because of their clear outlier status, thesewere removed from the analysis as not appropriately representative of their genre as a whole.
At the end of this process, there were a total of 138 LCF texts and 614 PCF texts available forinclusion in the two corpora. However, because that collection of PCF texts was approximately
twice the size of the LCF texts by wordcount, it was decided to balance the sizes of the two
corpora in a further effort to increase their comparability. A random selection of 250 texts
generated in Microsoft Excel was found to bring the wordcounts of the LCF and PCF corpora
much closer together and the page counts to near parity; the 250 texts selected in this way arewhat form the final PCF corpus. A full breakdown of the texts which comprise the LCF corpus
by subject matter, number of pages, wordcount, title, and general theme is included as
Appendix 3.1, and an equivalent list for the PCF corpus is included as Appendix 3.2. Each text66

3. Methodology
included in the LCF and PCF corpora has also been made electronically available alongside
this submission of this thesis.
As discussed above in Section 3.2.1, texts in the LCF and PCF corpora make use of two
distinct semiotic systems: writing and graphics. To prepare for the analysis of both systems,
once the documents comprising the two corpora had been collected, two distinct processes
began:
1. The documents in both corpora were prepared to enable the analysis of their written
content. Adobe Acrobat was used to scan each document with its optical character
recognition (“OCR”) function, allowing for the written content of those .pdfs to be
extracted to .txt files which would be analyzable in corpus linguistic software. While
Adobe has long boasted about the “near 100% accuracy” of its OCR capabilities, thisis only true under ideal conditions (Borstein 2016); a scan of less-than-perfect quality
would often interfere with the process, and any handwriting in a text generally wentcompletely unrecognized. This resulted in the need for a substantial number ofcorrections to the OCR-derived .txt files. AntFileConverter (Anthony 2017) was used
to generate those .txt files rather than the .pdf to .txt function in Adobe Acrobat because
it preserved the line breaks found in the original texts, allowing for an easier review of
the resultant files (see Section 3.4 for more discussion of the specific software choicesin this thesis). The .txt files generated from the 138 LCF texts and the 250 PCF texts
were then manually corrected by checking their content against that of the original .pdfs
and entering any relevant changes. Given the essentially fixed nature of the captions
found on the first pages of legitimate courtroom filings, it was decided to treat them as
images rather than as sections of text, meaning that the written contents of the captionsin the LCF corpus were also removed from the .txt files at this point. Pseudolegal
courtroom filings were found to be much less consistent in terms of both their use of a
caption and the form that a caption would take where one was present, so the captionlike portions of the PCF corpus were left in the relevant .txt files.
2. The texts in both corpora were prepared to enable the analysis of their image-based
content. For corpora comprised of “collections of spatially distributed visual and textualdata” (Malamatidou 2020, p.90) such as the LCF and PCF corpora, the contents of asingle page form the natural starting point of analysis (Hiippala 2016, pp.10–14). Adobe
Acrobat was therefore used to convert each individual page of the texts into a .jpg file.
These .jpg files were then annotated as outlined below in Section 3.3.4.

67

Following the completion of these two processes, the total sizes of the LCF and PCF corpora
were as follows:

Table 3.1 Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus size & content
summary

Corpus

Words

Texts

Pages

Cases

Parties

LCF

302,857

138

1169

24

38

PCF

359,428

250

1167

42

52

As seen in Table 3.1, for both the LCF and PCF corpora, there are more parties (i.e. participantsin a lawsuit) represented than there are distinct legal cases included. This is because, based on
the texts received from the informant, both Plaintiff8 and Defense filings from some of thesame cases were included in the LCF corpus, and because of cases in the PCF corpus in whichmore than one Sovereign Citizen litigant was involved. The number of authors whose work isrepresented in the corpora is likely higher than the number of parties, but this is ultimately
impossible to determine; though only one lawyer can ultimately sign and submit a courtroom
filing there are often multiple people involved in the creation of such documents, including
paralegals and other lawyers in the same firm. Similarly, the use of template documents in thecreation of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings discussed in Chapter 1 means that
the Sovereign Citizen guru who originally wrote a given template could be considered at least
a partial author of those documents.
A plurality of the cases included in the legitimate courtroom filing corpus and the vast
majority of those in the pseudolegal courtroom filing corpus are mortgage foreclosure cases(other notable subjects in the LCF corpus include arbitration disputes and class action
litigation). All texts in the LCF corpus can be assigned to one of three subcategories ofcourtroom filing:
1. Complaints and answers (33/138 texts): Plaintiffs’ filings which initiate a lawsuit anddefendants’ replies to those complaints (Garner 2019).
2. Motions and responses (85/138 texts): One party’s request for the court to make aspecific ruling or order and the other party’s filing in opposition to that request (Garner2019).
8

In the American legal context, a plaintiff is the party who originally files a civil suit (Garner 2019). The term
has fallen out of use in other legal systems, however; this party would be referred to as a “claimant” in Englandand Wales or as a “pursuer” in Scotland (Grainger and Fealy 1999, p.76; Incorporated Council of Law Reportingfor England and Wales 2022)

68

3. Methodology
3. Affidavits (20/138 texts): Sworn statements of facts relevant to a given proceeding(Garner 2019).
Given their highly heterogenous nature and lack of grounding in actual law, a similarclassification of PCF texts was not possible.
There are several limitations to the LCF and PCF corpora which are worth
acknowledging. First, though they may be large compared to many specialist corpora, the sizeof the LCF and PCF corpora is still relatively limited, even compared to some other legal
corpora. The “Briefs” subcorpus of the larger “American Law Corpus” used in GoźdźRoszkowski (2011), for example, is made up of documents filed before the US supreme court
and is about twice the size of the LCF corpus by wordcount. Though, with that said, the “Briefs”
subcorpus is purely text-based and contains only half the total number of documents found in
the LCF corpus (Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011, p.27), both factors which would limit its utility fora study such as this.
Second, the .pdf files received from the informant were almost all in black and white,meaning that it was not possible to consider the potential use of color in the LCF and PCF
corpora in this thesis. While that is unlikely to have affected the LCF corpus, it is unfortunate
given that others (e.g. Anti-Defamation League 2016) have previously noted the propensity ofSovereign Citizens to use multiple colors of ink in their documents. Finally, because the .pdf
files were provided without any sort of metadata or other form of background information
about the cases in which they were originally filed, it was not possible to examine trends in
LCF or PCF texts along demographic lines such as age, gender, or level of education of thetexts’ authors. An analysis of such metadata is often used to further contextualize the analysis
of other corpus studies (Burnard 2005; Anthony 2018, p.218), but given the research questions
which this thesis seeks to answer, it is unlikely to have been particularly relevant here (see thediscussion in Section 3.5.2 for more on how differences in size are accounted for whencomparing multiple corpora).
A different sort of criticism may also be leveled against the LCF corpus in particular:
namely, that legitimate courtroom filings are not proper exemplars of legal English. Hiltunen
describes “the law as embraced in legal statutes” as “representing [legal language] at its mostprototypical” (2012, p.40); given the lack of linguistic attention that legitimate courtroom
filings have received up to this point, one may reasonably wonder if a lack of prototypicality(defined for the purposes of this thesis in Section 3.5.7, though Hiltunen is not using it in any
clear technical sense) is partially to blame. While this thesis is not equipped to evaluate thelegal prototypicality of statutes as compared to legitimate courtroom filings, it seems fair to at69

least grant that statutes may well represent legal English at its most terminologically dense.
Legitimate courtroom filings, however, have a distinct advantage over other types of legal text
which appears to have gone heretofore unrecognized: the trial-level legitimate courtroom
filings examined in this thesis appear to be the most common kind of legal document producedby the American court system by a wide margin.
To use Hiltunen’s assertion as a point of comparison, the Illinois General Assembly
passed 637 bills in 2019, 628 of which were signed by the governor and became law (Illinois
Policy 2019). In that same year, 2,319,027 trial-level cases were filed in the state of Illinois(Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts 2019, p.17), each of which would have required
the creation of one or more of the sorts of legitimate courtroom filings examined here. The vast
majority of these trial-level cases are not appealed, either, meaning that studies which focus
only on appellate level cases similarly fail to capture this particular context of the use of legal
English: in 2019, only 5,785 appeals were filed in the state of Illinois, meaning that they were
outnumbered by trial level cases at a rate of more than 400-to-1 (Administrative Office of theIllinois Courts 2019, p.166). While this thesis is not intended to be anything akin to a definitive
statement about the overall nature of legal English, it is hoped that, given the commonality oflegitimate courtroom filings, it will at least form a helpful starting point for subsequent research
into this area.

3.3.3 COCA-W: The Combined Written Subcorpora of the Corpus of Contemporary
American English
Any attempt to answer this thesis’ first research question (How does the use of the register oflegal English compare in legitimate courtroom filings and Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal
courtroom filings?) requires at least a rough idea of the comparative frequency of those featuresin the LCF corpus and in more general English. To compensate for the lack of prior researchin this area (see the discussion in Chapter 2), this thesis makes reference to the combined
written sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (“COCA”) (Davies2009) as a “benchmark” corpus (i.e. one used to identify words which are particularly common
in the LCF corpus, akin to the use of a reference corpus in keyword analysis; see the discussion
below in Section 3.5.3) (Koester 2010, p.77). Because it is a “monitor” corpus, additional
language data has been regularly added to COCA in roughly equal proportions across all of its
subcorpora (Davies 2010, p.453). The full COCA corpus contains over 1 billion words as of
2019; the combined written sub-corpora (“COCA-W”) consist of 746,200,688 words taken

70

3. Methodology
from six of the eight COCA sub-corpora: blogs (125,496,215 words), fiction (119,505,272
words), magazine (127,352,014 words), newspaper (122,959,393 words), academic(120,988,348 words), and web-general (129,899,426 words). COCA has previously been used
to examine subjects such as the use of idioms in contemporary American English (Rafatbakhsh
and Ahmadi 2019); its contents have also been compared against those of other corpora instudies such as D’Arcy (2017), which tracked the evolution of the word “like” in English overtime. Given its size, scope, and the inclusion of texts written as recently as 2019 (coincidentally,
the last year in which texts were collected for the LCF and PCF corpora), the contents of
COCA-W are an excellent representation of contemporary written American English and are
therefore a good fit for the analysis of the use of legal English in the LCF corpus performed in
Chapter 4.
A full exploration of the differences between legal English and standard English,
however, is beyond the scope of the current study, and COCA-W is only used here forfrequency comparison purposes (see Section 3.5.2). With that in mind, and to best takeadvantage of COCA-W’s status as a corpus which is representative of contemporary written
American English, unless otherwise noted, search results were not filtered or sampled beyond
ensuring that they returned results including the desired word or part of speech. Even so, there
are several limitations to the use of COCA-W that should be acknowledged. Though it is aminor issue for the purposes of this thesis, unlike with the LCF and PCF corpora, it is notpossible to view the full text surrounding searched terms; the user is limited by the COCA web
interface to approximately one paragraph of their surrounding context (Davies 2009, pp.167–
168) (though it is also possible to find out some information about the source of a given text,
this was not of use to this study). Of more relevance to the analysis in Chapter 4, which explores
the frequency of negation and pronoun use in the LCF corpus and COCA-W, COCA’s
grammatical tagging is inconsistent across its various sub-corpora, with the more recently
added sections seemingly in need of additional markup. Though the LCF and PCF corpora are
not themselves grammatically tagged, there are specific consensus features of legal English
examined in Chapter 4 which relate to particular parts of speech (e.g. reduced pronoun usage
relative to standard English, or increased negation). This problem was addressed by searchingfor the relevant words in COCA-W and the LCF and PCF corpora directly and aggregating theresults in Microsoft Excel; see the discussion in Chapter 4 for a fuller explanation.

713.3.4 Multimodal Annotation
To enable the corpus analysis of the graphic features in the LCF and PCF corpora, eachindividual page of their component texts was manually annotated according to a markup
scheme adapted from Bateman’s (2008) Genre and Multimodality (“GeM”) model. The GeM
model, which was designed “to articulate an account of document parts that is sufficiently welldefined to support reproducible analyses” (Bateman 2008, p.107), is not only the bestdeveloped framework for the multimodal analysis of static texts (Hiippala 2016), but also
appears to be the only such framework; neither this author nor Malamatidou (2020, p.92) wereable to identify any other pre-existing method which “support[s] thorough quantitative
analyses” of static texts. GeM looks at a text as a “multi-layered semiotic artefact” (Bateman
2008, p.108), with each layer building upon the last to establish the discursive relationships
between every element on a page. The “base layer,” for example, is used to assign every distinct
feature a unique XML ID (Bateman 2008, pp.19, 110–114). These IDs are then related to one
another in the “layout” layer (Bateman 2008, pp.115–116) according to “[their] nature,appearance[,] position… and their hierarchical relationships”) (2008, p.19), after which thoseelements of the layout layer are connected according to their rhetorical structural qualities, andthose rhetorical structural qualities are connected at the overall genre level (Bateman 2008,
pp.19–20). Full GeM annotation is notable for the incredible amount of human input it requires(Waller 2017, pp.175–176); Hiippala (2017, p.277), for example, reports that it took roughly
three years to complete the full GeM annotation of a corpus consisting of 58 double pages of
tourist brochures.9 Given the time and personnel constraints inherent to the PhD process, aswell as the specific aims of this thesis, it was decided to both simplify the GeM annotation
scheme and adapt it to more specifically report the features which have previously been noted
as being characteristic of PCF texts.
Inspired by the layering approach of GeM markup, texts in the LCF and PCF corpora
were annotated at two levels: the first noted the typical layout and design choices of each text
as a whole, while the second noted the ways in which deviations occurred from those norms at
the individual page level. Annotations were made in UAM Image Tool (O’Donnell 2011), a
piece of software designed to facilitate the markup of images with user-defined schema. The
following Figures show the annotation schema designed for this thesis. Figure 3.2 shows thefeatures noted in the “typical” layer:

9

The fully GeM-annotated tourist brochures mentioned in Hiippala (2017) are available for viewing online as partof Hiippala (2015).

72

3. Methodology

Figure 3.2 Labeling options for the “Typical” layer of multimodal annotation as shown in UAM Image Tool

The “typical” layer notes the predominant method of interlinear spacing, text alignment, andfont family used in each text.
Figure 3.3 shows the features noted in the “features” layer:

73

Figure 3.3 Labelling options for the “Features” layer of multimodal annotation as shown in UAM Image Tool

74

3. Methodology
In the “features” layer, ways in which individual pages differed from the design choices of the“typical” layer were classified as either “graphics” or “text emphasis,” with “none” being used
to indicate that there were no changes from the “typical” layer on a given page.10 The meaningsof specific labels of both the “typical” and “layout” layers are discussed where relevant in theanalysis in Chapter 5.
In the case of annotations which are being made at the whole-image level, such as thoseof the “typical” layer, the user simply loads the desired image in UAM Image Tool and notes
the relevant classifications. For annotations regarding specific segments of a given image, suchas those of the “features” layer, after loading the image, the user clicks and drags a box aroundthe feature they wish to label and then classifies it according to the relevant scheme. Figure 3.4
shows a page with completed “features” layer annotations:10

A change in the terminology used over the course of writing this thesis means that features which are discussed
as “illustrations” in Chapter 5 were labeled as “drawings” in the “Features” layer annotation.

75

Figure 3.4 A screenshot of a completed “Features” layer annotation of a page from a pseudolegal courtroom
filing in UAM Image Tool

76

3. Methodology
For both “typical” and “features” annotations, each layer is stored as a distinct .xml file; thesefiles are included as part of the supporting documentation submitted alongside this thesis. The
portion of the .xml file relating to the seal in the top right-hand corner of Figure 3.4 appears as
follows:<segment id='2' start='1269,55' end='1566,286' features='features;graphic;seal'state='active'/>
The “id” of 2 indicates that it was the second feature labeled in this image. “Start” and “end”
list XY coordinates for the bottom left and top right corners, respectively, of the box that wasused to define the area of the feature. “Features” lists the specific classification assigned; inthis case, the feature was classed first as “graphic” and then more specifically as a “seal.” The“state” being “active” relates to a setting in UAM Image Tool itself rather than having any
meaning in the markup scheme.
While other CAMDA studies have used database programs such as Microsoft Access fortheir image annotation (e.g. Caple 2018), UAM Image Tool was chosen for this thesis because,
as well as being purpose built for this sort of annotation (unlike Access) and easy to use, the.xml files generated as part of the markup process were simple to import into other programs
such as Microsoft Excel. This was essential for the generation of the heatmaps discussed in
Section 3.5.6 (that process is reviewed in more depth below). Because the “typical” layer
represents the predominant graphic choices made across an entire text, only the first page ofeach text in the LCF and PCF corpora were annotated with a “typical” layer. Every page inboth corpora, however, was annotated with its own “features” layer.

3.4 Significance Testing and Software
As was discussed in Section 3.2.3, corpus linguistic methods are used to generate results whichare “empirical” (Gries and Paquot 2020, p.647), “neutral… and generalizab[le]” (Marchi and
Taylor 2018, p.4). This is accomplished via the use of descriptive statistics (e.g. the raw andnormalized frequencies of a given word in a corpus) and significance testing (McEnery andHardie 2012, pp.48–53). Generally, when a significance test says that there is at least a 95%
chance that a particular result is not a coincidence (i.e. has a p-value lower than 0.05), that
result is considered significant, meaning that it can be relied upon in the analysis (Brezina 2018,p.276). The exact threshold for significance often varies by field, however, and in line with77

standard practice in contemporary corpus linguistics, this thesis will instead employ a lower pvalue threshold of 0.01 (Gabrielatos 2018, p.239; Wallis 2021, p.35). Any significance test
indicating a less than 99% chance that a given result is not coincidental will therefore not be
considered reliable, though such a result may still be indicative of an area deserving of future
study (McEnery and Hardie 2012, p.51).
Depending on the specifics of the data examined, different statistical tests will beappropriate for different questions. The chi-square test for independence (represented as “χ2”in the tables in this thesis) is ideally suited for the comparison of the frequency of a given wordor feature across two corpora (Kilgarriff 2001, pp.99–100; Wallis 2021, pp.32–35) and istherefore frequently employed throughout the following chapters. Though the chi-square test
is unreliable with a small dataset and presupposes a normal distribution (i.e. that most of thevalues analyzed will fall relatively close to an average value and would produce a bell curvewhen graphed) (McEnery and Hardie 2012, pp.51–52; Brezina 2018, pp.265–266), except
where otherwise noted, these issues are not present in COCA-W or the LCF or PCF corpora.
The test works by calculating a chi-square value based upon a comparison of the observed
frequencies of a given word or feature in the relevant contexts and the frequencies that would
be expected if there were no relationship between those contexts and the frequencies of thatword or feature. That chi-square value is then compared to a “critical value” determined by the
number of different contexts examined and the relevant p-value threshold. Where the chisquare value is greater than the critical value, the relationship between the word or feature andthe contexts examined can be considered statistically significant (see Wallis (2021, pp.32–35)
for a more detailed explanation of the chi-square test for independence).
As an example, the word “judgment”, appears 358 times in the legitimate courtroom
filing corpus and 603 times in the pseudolegal courtroom filing corpus. By using the remainderof the words in each corpus (i.e. all words which are not occurrences of “judgment”; 302,499
words in the case of the LCF corpus and 358,825 words in the PCF corpus) it is possible toperform a chi-square test to examine if the word judgment appears at a statistically significantly
different rate in the two corpora. Once performed, the test returns a chi-square value of 27.52
which exceeds the relevant critical value for this study (6.63) and means the difference in thefrequency of “judgment” between the LCF and PCF corpora can be attributed to more thanrandom chance. Throughout the tables in this study, a bolded and shaded value in a “χ2” column
indicates that, with a p-value < 0.01, a statistically significant difference was found in thefrequency of the relevant word or feature in the two corpora being compared. A dash in a “χ2”78

3. Methodology
column indicates that there was not a high enough overall frequency of a given feature to test
for significance.
Specially designed software packages (generally referred to as “corpus tools”) arefrequently used to aid in the examination and analysis of linguistic corpora. There is not at thistime any single piece of software which is able to perform the full range of markup and analysis
called for in this thesis and, as Mautner (2016, p.171) notes (and was mentioned earlier), there
is a “deplorable” lack of standardization between modern corpus tools. This issue can bepresent at a very fundamental level: WMatrix (Rayson 2009) and AntConc (Anthony 2019),
for example, were found to produce different total word counts when used to measure the LCF
and PCF corpora, and neither piece of software can perform the full range of functions that theother can (AntConc lacks WMatrix’s semantic tagging capabilities, for example, and WMatrix
lacks some of AntConc’s data visualization tools). It was therefore necessary to make use of anumber of different corpus tools, supplementing them where necessary with programs such as
Microsoft Excel or RStudio (RStudio Team 2020).11 Ultimately, to reduce the potential forinter-software interference, the decision was made to rely on what might be called the“AntSuite” of products, a series of freeware corpus tools developed by Laurence Anthony(Anthony 2022). The primary corpus tool employed in this thesis was therefore AntConc(Anthony 2019), though ProtAnt (Anthony and Baker 2015; Anthony and Baker 2017) was
also used to determine the prototypicality of LCF and PCF texts (described below in Section
3.5.7), and, as was mentioned in Section 3.3.2, AntFileConverter (Anthony 2017) was used toenable the analysis of the written components of the LCF and PCF corpora. There is not
currently any “Ant” software designed for the annotation of images, hence the reliance on the
UAM Image Tool (O’Donnell 2011) discussed in the last section. The following sections will
describe in more depth when and for what purpose these programs were used; all relevant
datasets, code, and program files were provided electronically alongside the submission of thisthesis.

3.5 Methods of Analysis
The following subsections lay out in detail the process of analysis in this thesis. Section 3.5.1
outlines the order of the specific analyses performed in Chapters 4 and 5. The remaining

RStudio (RStudio Team 2020) is “a more user-friendly way of accessing the R console and managing R codes,
datasets, and plots” than the standard R programming environment (Paquot and Larsson 2020, p.376); it includes
a number of quality of life improvements including a more easily navigable graphical user interface and anenhanced debugger.
11

79

subsections then turn to an examination of the specific methodological techniques employed.
Section 3.5.2 discusses how frequency analysis will be used to compare the contents of the
LCF and PCF corpora and the related concept of KWIC lines. Sections 3.5.3 and 3.5.4 review
how keyword and lockword analyses will examine the legal technical terms which most clearly
distinguish the two corpora and those which appear at the most similar rates in both. Next,
Section 3.5.5 explains the concept of lexical bundle analysis, which will be used to supplement
the analysis of legal technical terminology. Section 3.5.6 then describes the process used togenerate the heatmaps showing the spatial distribution of the graphic features in the LCF and
PCF corpora and Section 3.5.7 lays out how the prototype LCF and PCF texts selected for close
readings in both analysis chapters were identified.

3.5.1 Overall Approach
As a CAMDA study, this thesis employs corpus linguistic methods to identify the most relevant
features of the LCF and PCF corpora which it then subjects to a closer qualitative analysis(Bednarek and Caple 2014, p.151). The analyses in Chapters 4 and 5 examine different semiotic
systems (written and graphic, respectively) but otherwise proceed along similar lines: eachbegins with a broad quantitively-based examination of different aspects of the discourse of the
LCF and PCF genres before moving to a more targeted analysis of a particularly important
aspect and then concluding with a close reading of a text from each corpus. This approach isoutlined in Figure 3.5:80

3. Methodology

Chapter 4:
Written Contents

Chapter 5:
Graphic Contents

Consensus
Features of Legal
EnglishImages and TextualEmphasis• Frequency Analysis• Frequency Analysis

Legal Technical
Terminology

SpatialDistribution of
Features• Keyword Analysis• Lockword Analysis• Lexical Bundle Analysis• Heatmap Analysis

Close Reading

Close Reading• Prototype Analysis• Prototype Analysis

Figure 3.5 Structure of the analyses in Chapters 4 and 5

The specific methods of analysis mentioned in the above figure are explained in the following
subsections.

3.5.2 Frequency Analysis and KWIC Lines
Frequency analysis is one of the most common corpus methods employed when analyzing a
corpus or comparing multiple corpora (Hunston 2002, pp.67–68; Orpin 2005, p.39; Partington
and Marchi 2015, p.217). Particularly when supplemented with statistical tests, establishing asignificant difference (or lack thereof) in the frequency of a given feature (e.g. of a particularword or part of speech) between corpora enables a more targeted and relevant qualitative
examination in subsequent steps of the analysis. The analyses of the written content of81

COCA-W and the LCF and PCF corpora in Chapter 4 and of the graphic content of the LCF
and PCF corpora in Chapter 5 regularly use frequency comparisons to identify those features
most suitable for more in-depth analysis. As discussed above in Section 3.4, the frequencies ofwords and features in the LCF and PCF corpora have been compared for statistically significant
differences in frequency via chi-square tests performed in RStudio using a p-value thresholdof 0.01.
To allow for a more straightforward comparison of features across the LCF and PCF
corpora, both the “raw” and “normalized” frequencies of the features examined are given. A
word’s raw frequency is the number of times it appears in a corpus in absolute terms (to returnto an earlier example, “judgment” appears 358 times in the LCF corpus and 603 times in the
PCF corpus) while its “normalized” frequency is the number of times a word can be expected
to appear out of some predetermined range of words. Normalized frequency is calculated bydetermining the ratio of a word’s raw frequency to the total number of words in the corpus andmultiplying it by the desired range (McEnery and Hardie 2012, pp.49–51; Jaworska andKinloch 2018, pp.114–115). This calculation allows for the effective comparison of frequency
across corpora of different sizes (e.g. “judgment” appears 118 times per 100,000 words in the
LCF corpus and 168 times per 100,000 words in the PCF corpus, meaning that the differencein its rate of use between the two corpora is not as stark as an examination of only the raw
figures may make it seem). One of the most common variables used for that range in corpus
linguistics studies is appearances per million words (McEnery and Hardie 2012, p.50); as iscommon with smaller datasets, to avoid using a range larger than the number of words in theeither the LCF or PCF corpora (which would push this calculation outside of the realm of
descriptive statistics), word-based frequency counts in Chapter 4 have been normalized topresent their expected occurrences per 100,000 words. Relatedly, feature-based frequency
counts in Chapter 5 have been normalized to present their expected occurrences per 100 pages.
It is not sufficient, however, to simply identify a particularly salient feature in the LCF
or PCF corpora; features so identified must also be examined in context (i.e. in relation to theother features which appear near them). While some LCF and PCF texts will be given a close
reading in their entirety (see Section 3.5.7), the rest will be presented alongside a selection of
their accompanying context. In Chapter 5, this will be accomplished via the presentation ofimage including an example of the relevant feature. In Chapter 4, this will be accomplished via
the presentation of Key Word In Context (“KWIC”) lines. The KWIC line is a visualization
technique so important to this kind of analysis that is has been called “the heart of corpus
linguistic work” (Marchi and Taylor 2018, p.11). The literal meaning of KWIC can be82

3. Methodology
somewhat misleading: this sort of search is not necessarily related to the concept of keywords(discussed in the following subsection), and these searches are not limited to single words. All
modern corpus tools, including AntConc (Anthony 2019), allow for the presentation of phrases(e.g. “by the way”) and segments of words (e.g. the suffix -ity) as well (Crawford and Csomay
2016, pp.47–49). KWIC lines display the relevant search term in the center of the line as well
as a fixed amount of words or characters which both precede and follow the search term in the
text in which it is found (Anthony 2018, p.209) As a general rule, the KWIC lines presented in
Chapter 4 have been expanded to include the surrounding sentence boundaries except where
truncation was necessary for reasons of space, in which case they were shortened at clausal
boundaries. The following table presents a series of KWIC lines showing the use of the word“not” in the LCF corpus:
Table 3.2 KWIC Lines showing the use of “not” in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus, n=2225

Line
1
2
3
4
5

Nthe parties shall
Defendant hasan Illinois
Westlake does
applicants must, among otherthings, affirm that they will

N
not
not
notnotnotN+disclose the Agreement's terms.
disclosed any discernable procedure
for-profit corporation
have an in-patient opioid treatment facility
impose a more restrictive charity care policy at the
subject hospital for two years

The search term in a KWIC line is also sometimes referred to as the “node word.” The column
containing “not” in Table 3.2 is therefore labeled “N” for “node,” and the preceding andsubsequent context given are labeled “N-” and “N+”, respectively. In a table containing
multiple KWIC lines such as the above, the lines are numbered for ease of reference. The above
KWIC lines are presented in alphabetical order based on the word to the right of the node word,
though other methods of sorting are possible (e.g. by sorting alphabetically based on the word
to the left of the node word instead). The use of “not” and other negators in the LCF and PCF
corpora is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.
The process of selecting which KWIC lines to present in a study is a critical one andmust be approached systematically. Studies which work with particularly large corpora may
choose to present a randomly selected subset of KWIC lines for a given search term (Tribble
2010, p.176). Where possible, however, the preference in CADS and CAMDA studies is a full
review of all relevant search results and the presentation of a curated list of KWIC lines (Baker
2010, pp.21–22). Hunston (2002, p.52) suggests the reasonable threshold for such a manual83review is approximately 100 lines, while Tribble (2010, p.176) feels 300 lines remains
workable. Almost all features examined in Chapter 4 have raw frequencies in the low hundreds.
KWIC lines presented throughout that chapter have therefore been selected following a fullmanual review of the relevant lines; such a thorough review also serves to enhance the accuracyof the overall analysis.

3.5.3 Keyword Analysis
As discussed in Chapter 2, the use of technical terminology is often listed as one of the most,
if not the most, distinctive features of legal English. The analysis in Chapter 4 therefore
explores the use of legal technical terminology in the LCF and PCF corpora via a keyword
analysis. A keyword analysis aims to identify words which appear distinctly frequently in aparticular corpus (the “target” corpus) as compared to their frequency in a second corpus (the“reference” corpus), with the idea that the words identified in this way (i.e. the “keywords”)12
are those which are particularly important to the language context represented by that firsttarget corpus (Bowker and Pearson 2002, pp.114–115). While, until relatively recently, thekeywords of a corpus had most frequently been determined by testing the frequency of every
word in a corpus for significance and comparing the result to the significance of the frequencyof the same word in a reference corpus (see, e.g., the definition in McEnery and Hardie 2012,
p.51; see also Anthony and Baker 2015, p.277; Gabrielatos 2018, pp.228–229), it is now
common to also use an effect-size metric to calculate keyness (Gabrielatos 2018, pp.230–231).
In the context of keyword analysis, statistical significance indicates the likelihood that adifference in a word’s frequency between two corpora is the result of a sampling error while
effect-size measures the magnitude of the difference in frequency observed (Gabrielatos 2018,
pp.230, 234–236).
The keyword lists for both the LCF and PCF corpora were generated in AntConc(Anthony 2019), with the PCF corpus serving as the reference corpus for the LCF corpus andvice versa; comparing corpora in this way has been described as an effective method withwhich to identify the most “salient [and] distinctive” aspects of two corpora as they relate to
one another (Jaworska and Kinloch 2018, p.115). Words which are found to be statisticallysignificantly more likely to occur in the target corpus than the reference corpus are referred to“Key item” has been suggested as a preferable term to “keyword”, with the rationale being that the unit ofanalysis could just as easily instead be a number of linguistic forms, such as a lemma, n-gram, or a particular partof speech (Gabrielatos 2018, pp.225–230). This thesis, however, will use “keyword” to emphasize its use in theanalysis of the written components of the LCF and PCF corpora.
1284

3. Methodology
as “positive” keywords, while words which are significantly less likely to occur in the target
corpus relative to the reference corpus are referred to as “negative” key words. Because
keywords were identified by comparing the LCF and PCF corpora to one another, the positive
keywords in one corpus are necessarily the negative keywords in the other corpus. Significancewas determined via a log-likelihood test (see Wallis 2021, pp.147–148 for a discussion of the
log-likelihood test and how it compares to the chi-square test) with a p-value threshold of 0.01.
Words for which a significant difference in frequency was found were then ranked according
to their %DIFF score, an effect-size metric determined by the proportion of the difference
between the normalized frequencies of a given key item in the target and reference corpora(Gabrielatos 2018, p.236).
Given this thesis’ specific interest in the use of legal English in the LCF and PCF
corpora (see Research Question 1), the overall keyword lists were then narrowed down to justthose keywords which could be considered legal terms (as discussed in Chapter 2, for the
purposes of this thesis, legal terms are those words which have a corresponding entry in Black’s
Law Dictionary (Garner 2019)). In an effort to avoid instances in which those words were notconsistently being used in their designated legal senses, all instances of legal keywords in both
corpora were then manually reviewed to remove those words which were either used
incidentally (e.g. as part of the name of a party involved in a given case) or where they only
appeared in one case in the relevant corpus (see Egbert and Biber (2019) for a discussion of
the particular importance of this last step). This resulted in a list of 1278 LCF keywords, 530
of which were ultimately classed as legal keywords, and 1276 PCF keywords, 732 of whichwere legal keywords. The full lists of LCF and PCF keywords, including indications of whether
they were considered legal, are included as Appendix 3.3 and Appendix 3.4, respectively.
As is often the case in corpus linguistic studies, there is neither sufficient space nor time
to discuss each of the hundreds of keywords identified in this way. Many studies address thisissue by focusing on only a portion of the top ranked items for examination (Gabrielatos 2018,
p.238; Pojanapunya and Watson Todd 2018, pp.135–142), but an arbitrarily chosen cutoff pointruns the risk of inadvertently excluding items which are ranked only marginally lower than the
included items, thereby weakening the value of the overall analysis. Following the suggestionin Gabrielatos (2018, pp.241–243), the number of keywords to be examined in the following
sections of this chapter have been determined via a hierarchical cluster analysis (“HCA”) oflegal keywords according to their effect size score. Cluster analysis has its origins in the naturalsciences but has recently found increasing use in social science contexts (Everitt 2011; Moisl
2020, pp.401–402). HCA, which is the subtype of cluster analysis most commonly found in85

linguistics (e.g. Levshina 2015, p.309) groups individual items on a list into “clusters”
according to the closeness of their scores in the relevant ranking metric (Moisl 2020, pp.412–
423), which in this case was %DIFF. Each cluster forms a non-arbitrary group which must beeither included or excluded from examination as a whole (Levshina 2015, pp.309–311;
Gabrielatos 2018, p.242). Though cluster sizes are not necessarily uniform, by predetermining
the number of clusters to be generated it is possible to exert a degree of control over the final
number of items to be examined while still ensuring a non-arbitrary cutoff point (Gabrielatos
2018, p.242). For the analyses in Chapter 4, the number of clusters in each was set such that
there would be an average of twenty items per cluster. Individual clusters were selected for
examination beginning with the highest-ranked cluster and proceeding until there were at least
twenty individual items included; particularly because this was the minimum number of items
to be selected, this was deemed to be a threshold which would be sufficiently inclusive without
creating an impractical number of results to review. The HCA was performed in RStudio(RStudio Team 2020).

3.5.4 Lockword Analysis
As a complement to the keyword analysis described above, Chapter 4 also employs a lockword
analysis to identify legal technical terms which are used at consistent rates across the LCF and
PCF corpora. Lockword analysis was first proposed in Baker (2011), where it was explicitly
described as a counterpart to keyword analysis: where keywords are identified by a higher
frequency in one corpus than another, lockwords are words which are “so consistent in theirfrequencies [across two sets of texts] that... they appear to be ‘locked’ in place” (Baker 2011,p.73). Though in that study Baker was interested in changes in word usage over time rather
than a synchronic corpus comparison, the concept has been found to be a broadly usefulcompanion to keyword analysis as it “increas[es] the researcher’s general awareness of patternsof both similarity and difference in two or more sets of corpora” (Taylor 2018, p.27). Following
the procedure in Baker (2011, pp.70–73), lockwords have been identified in this study byranking words which occurred at least 100 times across the LCF and PCF corpora according totheir coefficient of variance (CV) scores, a calculation based upon the relationship between thefrequency of a given word or feature between two corpora and the mean relative frequency of
all words or features between those two corpora (Brezina 2018, pp.50–51). The bottom thirdof words when ranked by CV score are deemed sufficiently stable in their usage across thecorpora to be considered lockwords. Because there is no way to directly calculate CV scores863. Methodology
in AntConc (Anthony 2019), word frequency lists generated in that program were imported
into Microsoft Excel and the calculations were performed there. 280 lockwords were identified
in this way, 162 of which are legal terms. Of these, the top 13 were selected for analysis via ahierarchical cluster analysis in RStudio searching for at least 10 such terms (see the discussion
in previous subsection for a fuller discussion of cluster analysis). The full list of LCF and PCF
lockwords is included as Appendix 3.5.
Though lockword analysis has been noted to be an effective method of exploring intercorpus similarity (Taylor 2013; Pérez 2018), there has been “surprisingly little uptake” (Taylor
2018, p.27) of the method, perhaps due to the clear preference of many corpus linguistic studies
to focus on difference instead (Taylor 2018, p.20). The only journal article identified which
has actually explicitly employed a lockword analysis is Durán-Muñoz (2019), and even there
the resulting discussion of the method is minimal. Though it is relatively untested in this sense,
it is encouraging to note that many of the words in the top third of the CV score rankings arealso keywords, as a high CV score correctly identifying words which are distinctive between
the two corpora supports the idea that a low CV score would identify words which are used atmore consistent rates between those same corpora. Assuming that to be the case, a lockword
analysis therefore properly identifies instances in which LCF and PCF texts are using specificlegal technical terms at similar rates and will accordingly be useful in addressing this thesis’third research question (i.e. What does the relationship between legitimate courtroom filingsand pseudolegal courtroom filings reveal about the operation of “parasitic” genres?) by
providing a metric by which to evaluate the more potentially successful parasitic efforts of the
PCF genre.

3.5.5 Lexical Bundle Analysis
Legal English is known to make frequent use of multiword phrases (Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011,p.110; Breeze 2013), and many instances of technical legal terminology are phrases comprisedof more than one word (Mattila 2012a, p.141). The keyword and lockword analyses detailed in
Chapter 4 are limited to the examination of single words, however, so they are supplemented
with a lexical bundle analysis. Lexical bundles13 are recurrent series of three or more words,
regardless of any particular structural characteristics (Biber et al. 1999, p.990), and their

Other terms, such as “clusters,” “phrasicon,” “n-grams,” and “recurrent word combinations” may also
sometimes be used to refer to this concept without any apparent or practical difference in meaning (Chen and
Baker 2010, p.30). For the sake of consistency, this thesis will use “lexical bundles” to the exclusion of thoseother terms.
1387presence is often a key marker of certain registers (Hyland 2008, p.5). Though their use has notbeen examined in the legitimate courtroom filing genre, prior studies of other legal genres havenoted that lexical bundles generally serve to highlight relevant information by priming (i.e.
subconsciously bringing to mind via consistent past association; see Hoey (2005, pp.7–8)) a
reader to expect certain kinds of details via phrases such as “with respect to the” or “in the caseof” (Breeze 2013, p.251).
Though technically defined as three or more word sequences, research examining
lexical bundles tends to focus on bundles of four or more words (e.g. Cortes 2004, p.401; Biber
and Barbieri 2007, pp.267–268; Chen and Baker 2010, p.32; Ädel and Erman 2012, p.84); thisis for practical reasons, as four or more word bundles are generally more phrasal in nature (i.e.
parts of noun or prepositional phrases) (Cortes 2004, p.400) and less common than three wordbundles. In both spoken conversation and academic prose, for example, Biber et al. (1999,
p.993) found approximately 10 times more three-word bundles than four-word bundles, andabout 10 times more four-word bundles than five-word bundles. Chapter 4 will examinesequences of four or more words which appear in at least 20% of the texts in either corpus. The
20% dispersion requirement helps to avoid those bundles which are the result of theidiosyncrasies of a small number of authors (Biber et al. 1999, pp.992–993), with the 20%threshold being chosen as a result of the clear influence of a single particular Sovereign Citizen“guru” (see Rooke (2012, p.19) and the discussion in Chapter 1 for more on the terminology
used to refer to members of the Sovereign Citizen movement). Consistent with prior work on
lexical bundles (e.g. Chen and Baker 2010, p.33; Ädel and Erman 2012, p.82), and in line withthe ways in which legal technical terms were filtered in the keyword analysis, results whichwere overly context-dependent (so-called “content bundles,” such as party names which
included words that might otherwise be instances of legal technical terminology but wereclearly used in non-technical senses) have been excluded following a comprehensive manual
review of the initial search results. Longer lexical bundles necessarily contain multiple shorter
bundles within themselves (Biber et al. 1999, p.993) (the five-word sequence “laws of theUnited States”, for example, which frequently occurs in the PCF corpus, is made up of the fourword sequences “laws of the United” as well as “of the United States”); instances of suchoverlap in the data presented in Chapter 4 have been removed (meaning that any reported
instances of “of the United States” would occur outside of the phrase “laws of the UnitedStates”). An examination of the relative similarity and legal technical terminology containedin lexical bundles in the LCF and PCF corpora will contribute to answering the first research883. Methodology
question, regarding the use of legal English in the two corpora, and the third research question,
regarding genre parasitism.

3.5.6 Heatmap Analysis
Outside of a simple frequency comparison, it is not possible to compare the use of images andtextual emphasis in the LCF and PCF corpora in the same way that it is to compare their use ofwriting; there are no clear KWIC lines or lexical bundles to point to, for example. Additionally,
there are elements at play in the LCF and PCF corpora’s use of images that have no direct
analogue in their written content, such as the size or position of a given feature on the page.
The analysis in Chapter 5 attempts to address this through the use of heatmaps which explore
the typical distribution of multimodal features on the page. Heatmaps, which are particularlycommon in genomics research (Rajaram and Oono 2010; Raschka 2013) but whose use ispotentially of much more general application, are graphs which use color to represent therelative magnitude of a phenomenon in two dimensions. Using the locational data generated aspart of the multimodal markup process outlined above in Section 3.3.3, a series of heatmaps
were generated in RStudio (RStudio Team 2020) showing the positioning of each class offeature in the two corpora. The following image, for example, shows the spatial distribution offooters in the LCF and PCF corpora:

Figure 3.6 Heatmaps showing the distribution of footers in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpora89

The darker portions in Figure 3.6 represent areas of higher concentration and are considered“hot spots.” As can be seen above, footers are concentrated at the bottom of the page (as would
be expected) and are generally center aligned; the hotspot in the bottom right of the PCF portionof the heatmap, however, shows that they are also found in a secondary position in that corpus.
The significance of this, and of a number of other feature-based heatmaps, is discussed in
Chapter 5. Heatmap analysis contributes towards answering this thesis’ second researchquestion, regarding the multimodal content of the two corpora, as well as its third, regarding
the parasitic efforts of the PCF corpus.
There are some significant limitations to this approach, however: particularly forfeatures with a low number of occurrences, each individual occurrence generates relatively
more “heat,” and seemingly strong concentrations of low-frequency features therefore must be
evaluated carefully. Also, because of the ways in which UAM Image Tool’s positioning offeatures had to be converted for use in RStudio (RStudio Team 2020), heatmaps were generatedusing only the center point of each labeled feature, meaning that differences in size or irregularshapes are not accounted for, and that hotspots for features which occupied larger amounts ofvertical or horizontal space (e.g. longer stretches of text which were entirely italicized)
necessarily drifted towards the center of the page, as in Figure 3.7:

Figure 3.7 Heatmap of italics in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus with a hotspot which has misleadingly
concentrated in the center of the page90

3. Methodology
While this made heatmaps for most methods of textual emphasis unusable, the smaller size ofthe majority of graphic features used in the two corpora (e.g. thumbprints in the PCF corpus)
meant that meaningful comparisons could still be made with these heatmaps. Given the limited
number of many graphic and textual emphasis features in the LCF and PCF corpora, it was also
possible to manually review their positioning before deciding to include a given heatmap aspart of the analysis. Particularly because this sort of analysis does not seem to have been
performed before on LCF texts, PCF texts, or any related legal genres, it is hoped that will at
least provide a fruitful starting point for future research.

3.5.7 Prototype Analysis
CAMDA studies conclude with “a detailed, close-reading analysis of selected texts [from thecorpora examined]” (Bednarek and Caple 2014, p.151) to both synthesize and fully
contextualize the findings of the quantitative portion of the study. There is no establishednumber of texts to select, however, nor is there a definitive way to select them, as thesedecisions have to be made according to the nature of the corpora involved in the study. As isoften true of mixed methods projects (Anthony and Baker 2015, pp.273–274), a full qualitative
examination of the entirety of the LCF and PCF corpora, while theoretically desirable, isuntenable for practical reasons. It is therefore helpful to have a method of principled selection
for texts from the larger corpora for that close reading; this thesis uses the concept of“prototypicality” as outlined in Anthony and Baker (2015).
Under this approach, the degree to which a text resembles the other texts in a given corpus
by some relevant metric is its degree of prototypicality, with the text that is most like the others
being considered the most prototypical (Taylor 2018, pp.27–28). Chapters 4 and 5 eachconclude with the examination of a prototypical text from both the LCF and PCF corpora.
ProtAnt (Anthony and Baker 2017) was used to identify these prototypes based upon their useof legal keywords in Chapter 4 and of the contents of their “features” markup (see Section
3.3.4) in Chapter 5. Prototypicality calculations in ProtAnt are based on keyword calculations,meaning that the more distinct keywords or multimodal features a given text contains and themore instances of those keywords or features that are present, the more prototypical that text
is deemed to be (Anthony and Baker 2015, p.278). Given that this approach privileges texts
which contain more of the relevant feature, rather than the average amount, it should be stressedthat “prototypical” texts are not necessarily the most “typical” texts; instead, they are thosewith the highest concentration of distinctive features. While the close readings of these91

prototypical texts will focus on the topics discussed in the Chapter in which they appear, they
will, where relevant, consider the full range of semiotic content present; by bringing together
the findings in the earlier portions of the analysis chapters and considering the texts examined
holistically, these prototype analyses are therefore expected to be relevant to all three of theresearch questions.

3.6 Ethical Considerations
Although this study does not involve human participants directly, a number of ethical factors
were considered in its design and execution. Though there may well be potential scholarly
value in contact with members of the Sovereign Citizen movement, for example, no effort has
been made as part of this thesis to communicate with any current or former Sovereign Citizens.
As was mentioned in Chapter 1, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation classifies
the Sovereign Citizen movement’s most extreme members as domestic terrorists and theSouthern Poverty Law Center reports that a number of interactions between Sovereign Citizens
and government representatives have ended in violence and occasionally death (FBICounterterrorism Analysis Section 2011; Southern Poverty Law Center 2015). Sovereign
Citizens have also been known to target individuals critical of their movement with frivolous
lawsuits and liens filed against their property in a process referred to as “paper terrorism”(Southern Poverty Law Center 2017). For these reasons, such contact was deemed inadvisable
and no efforts were made to add an ethnographic component to this study.
As mentioned above in Section 3.3.2, all documents included in the LCF and PCF
corpora were filed in chancery court in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois. These
documents are therefore part of the public record.14 The contents of COCA-W (Davies 2009)
are available online both to the public and via Cardiff University’s academic license and theiruse has been properly acknowledged throughout this thesis. It was determined via a series ofconsultations with the relevant Cardiff University research ethics officer that, as there were no

14

Unless they fall under a very narrow set of exceptions (e.g. certain texts produced in proceedings involving
minors), all documents filed in both state and federal courts in the United States form part of the public recordand are accessible in full by anyone. In Illinois, the relevant portion of the Clerk of Courts Act states that:All records [kept by a clerk of court] shall be deemed public records, and shall at all times be open to
inspection without fee or reward, and all persons shall have free access for inspection and examination
to such records… and also to all papers on file in the different clerks’ offices and shall have the right totake memoranda and abstracts thereto (705 ILCS 105/16(6); Illinois General Assembly 2022b)
The equivalent federal regulations can be found at Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5.2 (Legal Information Institute2022b) and Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 49.1 (Legal Information Institute 2022c).

92

3. Methodology
issues arising from the methods of this thesis, it was unnecessary to file an application forethical approval for this study. Out of an abundance of caution and respect for those involvedin the cases sampled in the LCF and PCF corpora, however, instances of personal information
contained in portions excerpted in the main text of this thesis have been either redacted oranonymized except where such processes would have prevented the full consideration of themultimodal content of LCF and PCF texts. Given the relevance of Sovereign Citizen techniques
for the formatting of names to the research questions of this study, such formatting, where
present, has been preserved in the anonymized excerpts.

3.7 Conclusion
This chapter has outlined the methodological approach of this study. It has explained thecomposition of the LCF and PCF corpora and the ways in which the combination of corpus
linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis (i.e. CAMDA) will be used to answer the threeresearch questions. It has also reviewed the ethical factors considered in the design andexecution of this study. Next, Chapter 4 makes use of the corpus linguistic and discourse
analytical methods described above to examine the use of legal English in the LCF and PCF
corpora, after which Chapter 5 uses those same methods to examine their use of graphic
features.

934. Legal English in Legitimate and Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filings
4.1 Introduction
In Chapter 2, it was proposed that Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings (“PCFs”)
represent a parasitic genre which preys upon a host genre of legitimate courtroom filings(“LCFs”). It appears that the authors of PCFs hope that by incorporating aspects of the form of
LCFs into their own pseudolegal writings they will also be able to imbue them with theauthority of the legitimate legal system. These efforts do not stop with mere imitation, however;
because, as others have noted (e.g. Wessinger 2000; Netolitzky 2018b), Sovereign Citizens
view themselves as locked in a kind of magical combat with the legal system and its
representatives, they will therefore attempt to enhance the power of their documents via theheightening of what they view as the most authoritatively salient features of LCFs. The inherent
tension in PCFs which results from their simultaneous attempts to both imitate and exaggerate
the features of LCFs is likely the root of their distinctive discursive qualities. This chapter
explores that tension by comparing the use of legal English in the written contents of the LCF
and PCF corpora. In doing so, it considers the ways in which texts in the LCF and PCF corpora
attempt to establish their status as authorized acts (legitimate or otherwise) as well as therelationship between legal English and general English. This chapter addresses this thesis’ firstresearch question (How does the use of the register of legal English compare in legitimate
courtroom filings and pseudolegal courtroom filings?) as well as its third (What does therelationship between legitimate courtroom filings and pseudolegal courtroom filings reveal
about the operation of “parasitic” genres?).
The structure of this chapter is as follows: Section 4.2 compares the presence and useof a selection of features said to be characteristic of legal English in the LCF and PCF corpora
with reference to combined written subcorpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American
English (“COCA-W”) (Davies 2009) to establish the frequency of those same features ingeneral English. Section 4.3 examines the use of technical legal terminology in the LCF and
PCF corpora by comparing their lockwords, keywords, and most common lexical bundles.
Finally, Section 4.4 performs a close reading of a prototypical text from each of the LCF and
PCF corpora, with a particular focus on the features examined in the prior sections.

94

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
4.2 Legal English in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Corpora
This section compares the use of certain features said to be characteristic of legal English in
the LCF and PCF corpora. As part of the process, it will also consider the accuracy of theconsensus description of legal English discussed in Chapter 2. Section 4.2.1 briefly reviews
that consensus description with a particular emphasis on the features evaluated in this chapter.
Sections 4.2.2, 4.2.3, 4.2.4, and 4.2.5 then discuss the use of negation, pronouns, passive
constructions, and nominalizations, respectively.

4.2.1 Consensus Features of Legal English Examined
As discussed in Chapter 2, what research has been done on the register of legal English has notbeen consistent in terms of either the legal contexts examined or the methodologies employed.
To the extent that there is a “consensus” description of the common features of legal English,
it is largely incidental, having been arrived at via the amalgamation of findings from a variety
of studies without regard for whether those findings were truly generalizable. The suggestionthat negation is more common in legal English than in “standard” English, for example, seems
to have originated with the inclusion of negation on a list of potentially confusing features ofCalifornia jury instructions in Charrow and Charrow (1979) and been assigned progressively
more weight over time (see, e.g., Fanego et al. (2017) or Zozula (2019)). The elements of this“consensus” are largely the features discussed in Mellinkoff (2004 [1963]) which, thoughunquestionably important to the study of language and law, was not a linguistically based work.
Despite this lack of empirical grounding, the elements of the consensus description of legal
English appear never to have been quantitatively evaluated. As a result, there are no more
specific numbers to guide the analysis of legal English in the LCF and PCF corpora than ageneral suggestion that a given feature is likely to occur either more or less frequently in legal
English than in “standard” English (relatedly, the definition of “standard” English for the
purposes of the consensus description of legal English is similarly vague).
This thesis is neither intended nor equipped to establish a complete picture of theregister of legal English. Nevertheless, a meaningful quantitative comparison of the use of legal
English in the LCF and PCF corpora requires a clearer sense of the degree to which legal
English is itself distinct from general English than currently exists in the literature. Before
comparing the presence of any “consensus” features of legal English in the LCF and PCF
corpora, then, the following subsections will first aim to determine the presence of thosefeatures in the LCF corpus relative to their presence in COCA-W. The following consensus

95features of legal English relative to “standard” English have been selected for examination inthis chapter based upon both their consistent presence in the literature and their suitability forquantitative analysis:•

Frequent negation (Danet 1985, p.283; Tiersma 2006, p.45);•

Infrequent use of pronouns, particularly personal pronouns , both within and acrosssentences (Solan 1993, pp.121–122; Tiersma 2006, pp.46–47; Gotti 2012, pp.54–56;
Hiltunen 2012, p.47);•

Frequent impersonal and passive constructions (Charrow and Charrow 1979,
pp.1325–1328; Danet 1985, p.283; Tiersma 2006, p.45);•

Frequent use of nominalizations (Charrow and Charrow 1979, pp.1321–1322;
Tiersma 2006, p.45; Mattila 2012b, p.22); and•Frequent use of legal technical terminology (Maley 1994, p.22; Tiersma 2006, p.44;
Tiersma 2008, p.14; Mattila 2012b; Kurzon 2013; Ruusila and Lindroos 2016).

As discussed in Chapter 3, COCA-W is used only to establish a point of comparison for thefrequency of these features in the LCF corpus and general English. A more thoroughexamination of the differences in the frequency and use of these and other “consensus” featuresof legal English in legal texts and general English (however defined) is left for future study.
The use of legal technical terminology in the LCF and PCF corpora, which has been describedas perhaps the most significant way in which legal English differs from more general English(Tiersma 2008, p.15; Azuelos-Atias 2011, p.43), is discussed in particular depth below in
Section 4.3.

4.2.2 Negation
According to the consensus description of legal English, negation is expected to occur more
frequently in the register of legal English than it does in standard English (Danet 1985, p.283;
Tiersma 2006, p.45). Negation in English is most commonly indicated by the use of the explicit
negators “not”, its contracted form “n’t”, and “no” (Biber et al. 1999, pp.158–159). Other
varieties of negation include implicit negation, as seen in sentences like “Defendant ismistaken” or “This precedent is inapplicable” (see Kaup and Dudschig (2020) for more on the
differences between explicit and implicit negation), and multiple negation, as in the phrase“without which the injury would not have occurred” (Charrow and Charrow 1979, p.1325).
Though some sources make claims about the use of these other forms of negation in legal
English (e.g. that multiple negation, rather than negation overall, is what truly distinguishes
96

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
legal English from “standard” English (Tiersma 2006, pp.45–46)), these more specific claims
have gone similarly unexamined in the existing literature on legal English. As explicit negation
is both generally more common and more readily identifiable via corpus linguistic methods
than these other forms, this subsection will focus on the frequency of explicit negation in
COCA-W and the LCF and PCF corpora.
All three corpora were searched for the overall frequency of “not”, “no”, and “n’t”,
after which the results from the LCF and PCF corpora were reviewed to remove instances of“no” being used as an abbreviation for “number.”1 Though all three terms are classed as
negators in COCA’s pre-applied grammatical tags, inconsistencies in the application of thosetags across the COCA-W subcorpora meant that individual searches for those terms without
the tags were found to be more reliable. The relationship between the frequencies of explicit
negators in COCA-W and the LCF corpus as well as the LCF and PCF corpora are given here
in Table 4.1 and Table 4.2, respectively:

Table 4.1 Frequency of explicit negation in COCA-W and the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus with chisquare tests for independence. Results normalized to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000 words.

Negator
not
n't
no
Total
Minus n't

COCA-W
freq.
33089092904032
1358541
75714824667450

COCA-W
norm.
443
389
182
1015
626

LCF
freq.
2225
15
783
3023
3008

LCF
norm.
735
5
259
998
993

χ2
580.821152.396.9940.80526657.79

Table 4.2 Frequency of explicit negation in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora with chisquare tests for independence. Results normalized to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000 words.

Negator
not
n't
no
Total
Minus n't

LCF freq.
2225
15
783
3023
3008

LCF norm.
735
5
259
998
993

PCF
freq.
2467
74
1165
3706
3632

PCF
norm.
686
21
324
1031
1010

χ2
5.382928.75223.8871.73880.47758

For reasons of size, a similarly comprehensive review of the use of “no” in COCA-W was not possible. To
evaluate the degree to which it was used as an explicit negator in COCA-W, 100 KWIC lines from each of the 6component sub-corpora were examined. Of those 600 lines, only one occurrence of “no” was observed where it
was not an explicit negator; this was deemed a sufficiently infrequent occurrence such that no adjustments to the
COCA-W search results were made.
1

97

As mentioned in Chapter 3, a bolded and shaded value in a table’s χ2 column indicates that achi-square test found a statistically significant difference in the frequency of a given word orfeature as a share of all such words or features present between the two corpora being
examined. The above tables therefore indicate that the LCF corpus uses “not” and “no” at asignificantly higher rate than COCA-W. Because of the LCF corpus’ significantly lower useof “n’t”, however, there is not a statistically significant difference in the overall rate of explicit
negation between the LCF corpus and COCA-W. Similarly, though the PCF corpus uses “not”
and “n’t” at significantly higher rates than the LCF corpus, there is no significant difference inthe overall rate of negation between the LCF and PCF corpora.
This similarity in the overall rate of explicit negation between COCA-W and the LCF
corpus seems on its face to run contrary to the “consensus” description of legal English. Thisis likely because it reflects a different focus than the research on which the consensus opinion
on legal negation is based: prior studies which examined negation in legal contexts, such asCharrow and Charrow (1979), were not intended to make generalizable statements about legal
English but were instead focused on the examination of what negation was present in the legal
texts they examined. Given the noted formality of legal English and its related aversion tocontractions (Danet 1980, pp.471–473; Tiersma 2006, p.46; Mattila 2012b, p.32), it follows
naturally that “n’t” would appear less frequently in the LCF corpus than in COCA-W. As seenin the “Minus n’t” line in Table 4.1, removing “n’t” from consideration and focusing only on
the more formal explicit negators shows that the LCF corpus does in fact use “not” and “no”
at a significantly higher rate than COCA-W (the “Minus n’t” line in Table 4.2, however, showsthat removing “n’t” from consideration still does not result in a significantly different rate ofnegation in the LCF and PCF corpora). Even if the comparative frequency of negation in
COCA-W and the LCF corpus can essentially be reconciled with the “consensus” description
in this case, however, it shows the potential problem in relying upon the “consensus”
description in the first place: without a clearer and more systematic approach to the analysis of
the register of legal English, it is difficult to know whether or to what extent the consensus
claims can be relied upon.
The overall higher use of “not” and “no” in both the LCF and PCF corpora relative to
COCA-W is likely due to the status of their component texts as members of persuasive legal
genres (legitimate or otherwise) (Tiersma 1999, pp.139–141). In an adversarial courtroom
context, such persuasive genres seek not just to prove a particular point but to counter thearguments of the opposing party and therefore can reasonably be expected to make frequent
use of negators. A review of all occurrences of “not” across the LCF and PCF corpora indicates984. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
that their uses of the word do not notably differ. The KWIC lines in Table 4.3 and Table 4.4
show how it functions in the two corpora:
Table 4.3 Selected KWIC lines showing the use of “not” in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus, n=2225

Line1

NThe Agreement contains aconfidentiality clause providingthat the parties shall

N
not

2

Indeed, Defendant has

not

3

The Association is an Illinois

not-

4

The hospital does

not5

applicants must, among otherthings, affirm that they will

notN+
disclose the Agreement's terms.
disclosed any discernable procedure it
uses to determine when to withhold
animals from their owners.
for-profit corporation in good standing
have an in-patient opioid treatment
facility.
impose a more restrictive charity carepolicy at the subject hospital for two
years

Table 4.4 Selected KWIC lines showing the use of “not” in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus, n=2467

Line

N-

N

N+
exist or if the existing remedy has been
subverted or blocked, then one may
create a remedy for themselves

6

If a remedy doesnot7

Copies of the “Note” from thePlaintiff are attached as Exhibit“G” as proof the Plaintiff does

nothave the "Note" and has no jurisdiction
to enforce it.

8

I hereby Declare & Affirm that
I did not in the past, donot

now or in the future intend to
purposefully or otherwise avail myself
or be held in economic and/or
involuntary servitude, peonage, slavery,
benefits, privileges, titles of nobility,
Trusteeship and/or opportunities
offered.

9This entire process is being
conducted to ensure

notonly validation but enforcement too.

10

The Plaintiff isnotthe proper party plaintiff and cannot
sue or state a claim against thedefendant

PCF texts’ use of “not” at a similar rate and in a similar manner as LCF texts shows in miniature
how a parasitic genre is intended to function: by accurately copying a feature of LCF texts (inthis case, using “not” at a statistically similar rate), it becomes that much more difficult todistinguish a PCF text from an LCF text. Putting to the side questions of whether the statements
in Table 4.4 are legally correct (something this thesis is not interested in considering), “not” in99

the LCF and PCF corpora tends to occur in similar-seeming statements of law (Lines 3 and 10,
for example, both relate to the legal status of a party) or fact (Lines 2 and 7 both address whether
a give piece of information has been provided). In isolation, it is difficult to tell whether any
given use of “not” has come from the LCF or PCF corpus. The more features of LCF texts
which PCF texts parasitically copy in this way, the more likely a lay reader is to assume that a
PCF text is in fact a legitimate courtroom filing.
As Heffer (2005, pp.10–11) points out, attempts by non-lawyers to make use of legal
English often betray their authors’ non-expert status by focusing on features which are either
relatively rare or not actually characteristic of that register. PCF texts’ use of “n’t” and “no”
both show how Sovereign Citizens can get it “wrong” in this sense. Given that LCF texts use
those terms at significantly lower and higher rates, respectively, than does COCA-W, theauthors of the PCF texts appear to be making two distinct errors in their efforts to mimic LCF
texts here: in the case of “n’t”, they do not go far enough in restricting its use relative to“standard” English, and in the case of “no” they go too far, using it more than would be
expected of a legitimate legal text. In both cases, however, the effect is the same: Sovereign
Citizen texts using “n’t” and “no” at these rates are more readily distinguished from LCF texts
and therefore less likely to be parasitically successful (i.e. mistaken for legitimate courtroom
filings).
With that said, there is not a statistically significant difference in overall rate of negation
between the two corpora, and the “improper” use of “n’t” and “no” in PCF texts relative to
LCF texts may not on their own be enough to be tip off a lay reader that a PCF text is not truly
an authorized act. Even though, as shown in Table 4.2, PCF texts use “n’t” at a normalized rate
more than four times that of LCF texts, it is still relatively rare in absolute terms across the two
corpora.2 The significantly higher frequency of “n’t” in PCF texts may indicate a greater degreeof informality than found in LCF texts; however, given these relatively low appearances acrossboth corpora, it is difficult to draw any further conclusions.
“No” appears at a significantly higher rate in the PCF corpus than it does in the LCF
corpus, where it is already used significantly more than in COCA-W. Unlike with “not”,
however, the PCF texts’ use of “no” is more readily distinguishable from its use in the LCF
corpus, with the most obvious factor setting apart the PCF use of “no” being capitalization(capitalization in the two corpora is dealt with in more depth in the following chapter; theThe use of “n’t” is even rarer in the LCF corpus than those numbers may make it seem: 60% of its occurrencesin the LCF texts (9/15) are part of citations to news articles or instances of reported speech, meaning that only 6
actually reflect an attorney’s personal lexical choice.
2100

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
discussion here is limited to the use of “NO”). In the LCF corpus, the uppercase “NO” only
appears twice (i.e. 0.2% of the time, 2/783), both times as part of section headings which arethemselves generally distinguished from the body text by being written entirely in capitalletters:
Table 4.5 KWIC lines showing capitalized “NO” in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus, n=2

Line

N-

N

11

MS. MCLAUGHLIN HASNO12COUNT I SHOULD BE DISMISSEDPURSUANT TO 2-619 BECAUSE KARL
HAD

NO

N+
KNOWLEDGE RELEVANT TO THISCASELEGAL BASIS TO DEMAND SUCH
AN ACCOUNTING

In the PCF corpus, however, “NO” is written in uppercase approximately 9% of the time
(109/1165):
Table 4.6 Selected KWIC lines showing capitalized “NO” in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus, n=109

Line
13

NStrand, Cyrus Rainer is “NOT” a resident
or ward of “ANY” government andN

N+“NO” court is the Guardian of Strand, Cyrus Rainer

14

There was no substantive positive evidence
presented andNO15~k-3) For the SECURITY-TYPE of the

‘NO-

16

4=PRONOUN=NO-NO-

NO,

17

~5:MARITAL-STATUS: :Single ~6:(DEATH-NO-

firsthand competent material fact witness was
sworn under oath to verify any evidence inthis matter.
CORRESONDENCE-BANKCONFIDENTIALITY'.
BOLD=PREFIX=NO-CONTRACT-WORD
CAUSE) ~7 For the FORECLOSURE-DATE
by the BANK’S FRAUDULENT-PARSESYNTAX-GRAMMAR:

Almost half of the time that it occurs in pseudolegal courtroom filings (52/109), the uppercase“NO” is used for emphasis in body text, as in Lines 13 and 14. In many cases, as in line 14, if
not for the capitalization, these uses of “no” might be otherwise indistinguishable from its use
in legal English. Emphatic capitalization such as this has been said to register as “shouting” toreaders (McCulloch 2019), raising the possibility that other features of Sovereign Citizen texts
similarly evoke properties of spoken English. As with legal English, spoken English has been
noted to use more negators than general written English (Biber 1988, p.245; Biber et al. 1999,
p.159; Tiersma 2006, p.46), so it is possible, though not provable in the current study, thatsome degree of negation in PCF texts can be attributed to this as well.

101

The remaining 52% (57/109) of the occurrences of “NO” in the PCF corpus, includinglines 15 through 17 above, are from texts which make use of “quantum grammar”, a style ofwriting attributable to a particularly distinctive school of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal
thought. Also known as “truth language”, or “Millerese” after its creator David Wynn Miller(Hay 2020), quantum grammar texts systematically employ an array of features not found inother varieties of English, including difficult-to-parse acronyms, non-standard punctuation, andnear-total use of upper case, as can be seen in Figure 4.1:

Figure 4.1 Excerpt from a quantum grammar pseudolegal courtroom filing

Such texts purport to test the legal validity of documents via what is a essentially a grammarbased numerological system in which the presence of certain words can invalidate a document
outright (hence “PRONOUN=NO-NO-NO” in line 16; quantum grammar texts are discussed
in more depth in the following chapter) (Anti-Defamation League 2012; Anti-Defamation
League 2016). It would unquestionably be a mistake to take the stated explanation for any
lexical or grammatical choices contained in a PCF text at face value; despite what line 16 may
say, the use of pronouns, for example, does not automatically invalidate a legal document andis therefore not a good reason to proscribe their use (even if, as is discussed in the following
subsection, legitimate legal texts do in fact tend to avoid the use of pronouns relative to standard
English). Distinguishing features such as this, and any explanation offered for them within a
PCF text, are better understood as part of their “magical” nature: the author of the PCF text
excerpted in Figure 4.1 can be understood to be attempting to show why this pseudolegal
courtroom filing is more authoritative (i.e. magically powerful) than a legitimate courtroom
filing by laying out this supposedly objective rule to establish legal validity. Regardless of its
purpose, that an explanation is offered at all for such a distinctive departure from the registerof legal English indicates that some Sovereign Citizen authors are consciously making these102

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
sorts of stylistic choices. More importantly, the conscious decision making process reinforces
the suggestion made in Chapter 2 that in some cases Sovereign Citizen texts are not failing toimitate legal English, but instead actively attempting to “heighten” it for their own magic
purposes.
This is not to say that all instances in which the register of PCF texts differs from thatof LCF texts are attempts at such magical linguistic one-upmanship, or that they show a clear
relationship between PCF texts and spoken English; fewer than 1 in 10 occurrences of “no” in
the PCF corpus are capitalized, after all, and the remainder (as was the case with “not”) aremuch more difficult to distinguish from the use of “no” in the LCF corpus. Particularly as there
is no statistically significant difference in the overall rate of negation between the two corpora(see Table 4.2), it seems that at least in this case there is a limit to how far individual Sovereign
Citizen authors are willing to stray from the register of legal English. Nevertheless, these two
distinct uses of the capitalized “NO” make clear that Sovereign Citizens are not always content
to simply imitate the register of legal English but are at times eager to differentiate their texts
to better serve their own imitative magical purposes. In some cases, such aberrations from whatis expected of the legal English register may simply be a good indicator that the author of the
PCF text in which it appears is not a fully competent user of the legitimate courtroom filinggenre. In others, however, they can show an active choice on the part of a text’s author to lessen
its overall chances of being mistaken by a reader for a legitimate courtroom filing in the pursuitof magical supremacy.

4.2.3 Pronoun Use
According to the consensus description of legal English, as compared to standard English, legal
English makes less frequent use of pronouns, particularly personal pronouns, both within andacross sentences (Solan 1993, pp.121–122; Tiersma 2006, pp.46–47; Gotti 2012, pp.54–56;
Hiltunen 2012, p.47). Tiersma (2006, p.46) frames it as follows: legal English often features“the repetition of nouns where in ordinary writing the second and later occurrences of the noun
would be replaced by a pronoun”, giving the example of “Buyer promises that Buyer will
pay...”. Notably, the presence of a “buyer” in his example indicates Tiersma likely had
contractual language in mind, rather than the sorts of persuasive legitimate courtroom filings
contained in the LCF and PCF corpora, again reinforcing the degree to which the claims of the“consensus” description of legal English may have been generalized beyond the specific genresfor which they originally had support. This section examines whether this assumption about103the use of pronouns in legal English applies to the types of texts in the LCF and PCF corpora
and the different ways in which the two corpora use pronouns.
The two most frequently used sets of pronouns in English are referred to either by theircase (nominative or accusative) (Biber et al. 1999, p.328) or by their function in a sentence(subject or object) (Hernández 2011, p.60); this thesis will employ the latter more functionalclassifications.3 Throughout the tables in this section, “m”, “f”, and “n” are used to indicate thegrammatical gender of the third person pronoun, which stand for masculine, feminine, andneuter, respectively. Where a distinction exists, “s” and “o” are used to indicate whether a given
line contains a subject or an object pronoun.
To obtain the frequencies of these pronouns in COCA-W and the LCF and PCF corpora,each word was searched for individually in COCA-W and the LCF and PCF corpora. Everyoccurrence of “I” in the LCF and PCF corpora was reviewed to remove instances in which it
was not used as a pronoun (e.g. when it was used as a roman numeral or as part of an acronym).4
Table 4.7 and Table 4.8 give the frequency of these subject and object pronouns across thethree corpora. Because the second person pronoun remains the same regardless of function or
number of referents, all occurrences of “you” are given in the same line.

3

For reasons of space, other sets of English pronouns, such as demonstrative and possessive pronouns, will not
be examined in this section.
4“I” occurs more than 500,000 times in five of the six COCA-W subcorpora, meaning that due to limitations withthe online interface, it was not possible to review any of the related KWIC lines. In the “academic” subcorpus(where it occurs 268,413 times), a review of 100 lines found 15 instances in which it was not used as a first-person
pronoun. While this means that the actual occurrence of “I” in COCA-W is lower than the 7,500,200 occurrences
noted in Table 4.7, the difference in magnitude between its use in COCA-W and the LCF corpus is so large thatit can still safely be assumed to occur significantly more frequently in COCA-W.

104

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
Table 4.7 Frequency of subject and object pronouns in COCA-W and the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus
with chi-square tests for independence. Results normalized to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000 words.

Person &Function

Singular

PluralPronoun
1s
1o
2
3ms
3mo
3fs
3fo
3n
1s
1o
2
3s
3o

I
me
you
he
him
she
her
it
we
us
you
they
them
Total

COCA-W
freq.
7500200
1302748478604645812841124205
2350484
2273176
68605442714167677759COCA-W LCF
LCF
norm.
freq. norm.
1005
183
60
175
25
8
641
73
24
614
465
154
151
99
33
315
223
74
305
370
122
919
1028
339
364
63
21
91
1
0
[Included in "you" total above]
3039794407
415
137
1230228165128
4238440635
5152
3073
1015

χ2
2715.3479.8
1809.81051.3279.37561.06331.341117.5981.79272.33544.82275.8
10606

Table 4.8 Frequency of subject and object pronouns in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpora with chi-square tests for independence. Results normalized to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000
words.

Person &Function

Singular

Plural

1s
1o
2
3ms
3mo
3fs
3fo
3n
1s
1o
2
3s
3o

Pronoun
I
me
you
he
him
she
her
it
we
us
you
they
them
Total

LCF
freq.
183
25
73
465
99
223
370
1028
63
1
415
128
3073

LCF
PCF
PCF
norm.
freq.
norm.
60
1003
279
8
381
106
24
408
114
154
427
119
33
111
31
74
250
70
122
416
116
339
1534
427
21
227
63
0
44
12
[Included in "you" total above]
137
660
184
42
221
61
1015
5682
1581

χ2
438.28254.74179.82
14.4890.11699
0.327840.5203932.322
66.4
32.59321.735
11.169403.47

Consistent with the “consensus” description of legal English, the LCF corpus contains
significantly fewer subject and object pronouns than COCA-W, both in every individual caseand in the aggregate. As compared to the LCF corpus, the PCF corpus makes significantly more
frequent use of seven of the twelve individual pronouns examined, as well as of subject andobject pronouns overall. With the exception of “she” and “her”, all subject pronouns are more105

common than their related object pronouns in both the LCF and the PCF corpus. Between thetwo corpora, there is no statistically significant difference in the frequency of “him”, “she”, or“her”, though the PCF corpus uses “he” at a significantly lower rate than the LCF corpus.
The area of greatest similarity between LCF and PCF texts is their use of singular third
person pronouns. This is likely because the use of those pronouns is largely determined by thegenders of the parties involved in the relevant cases, leaving little space for Sovereign Citizen
authors to innovate. “He” is notable as both the only gendered third-person pronoun to have astatistically significant difference in frequency between the two corpora, and as the only
pronoun to occur significantly more frequently in the LCF corpus than in the PCF corpus.
While this may simply be due to a higher percentage of male litigants in the LCF corpus thanin the PCF corpus, that would be somewhat surprising, given that prior studies have found
Sovereign Citizens to be overwhelmingly male: approximately 85% of Sovereign Citizens
identified in Smith (2016, p.35) were male, and more recently, Muddle (2019, p.78) estimatedthat the membership of the US “alt-right”, which often overlaps with that of the Sovereign
Citizen movement, is approximately two-thirds male. Relatedly, “her” occurs more frequently
than “she” in both the LCF and PCF corpora; this lack of female subject pronouns may indicate
a relatively low number of female litigants across both corpora. Unfortunately, the metadata
necessary to establish the gender breakdown of the litigants involved in the cases represented
in the LCF and PCF corpora is not available. Demographics aside, the data regarding the useof “I” in Table 4.8 offers a different potential explanation for relative lack of male subject
pronouns in the LCF corpus as compared to the LCF corpus: PCF texts are less likely to use
third person singular pronouns because their (likely) male authors are referring to themselvesin the first person.
The use of first-person pronouns in the LCF corpus is highly restricted in terms of both
frequency and the contexts in which they occur. All occurrences of “I”, “me”, “we” and “us”
combined make up for less than 9% of total pronoun use in the LCF corpus, and every use canbe categorized as either part of a sworn statement (generally an affidavit) or as part of reported
speech. Table 4.9 illustrates these two uses of “I”:

106

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
Table 4.9 Selected KWIC lines showing the use of “I” in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus, n=183

Line
18
19
20
21

NN
N+
A true and accurate copy of the payment
reviewed when making this affidavit isI
history and any document
attached.
was not in possession of a proxy for Unit
On September 6, 2017 I
1582, as SNC did not receive the proxy.
Q: You don’t have anything in writing
don't. My parents have told me since myfrom your mom authorizing you to do I daughter was born that they were going tothat? A:pay her college expenses.
follow people into into their homes; i don’t“i'm colin and i'm lost (again); i
have a collar; i coulda been catnapped”

Over eighty percent (149/183) of the use of “I” in the LCF corpus is akin to Lines 18 and 19,
where it is used to establish for evidentiary purposes their author’s personal experience onmatters relevant to the litigation of which they are a part (e.g. “I was not in possession…”).
The remaining instances of “I” are from direct quotations, some of which, like Line 20, aretaken from court transcripts, and others of which are excerpts from other documents relevant
to a given case including prior judicial opinions, or, in the case of Line 21, a “lost cat” poster
written from the perspective of that lost cat. Of the occurrences of “me” in the LCF corpus,
76% (19/25) fall into the sworn statement category and six are from reported speech, while alluses of both “we” and “us” are instances of reported speech. Though first-person pronoun use
in the LCF corpus is across the board significantly less common than it is in COCA-W, it
clearly plays a small but important role in a text’s efforts to establish the facts of a given case.
The use of first-person pronouns in the PCF corpus, by way of contrast, is both much
more frequent and much less consistent than it is in the LCF corpus. Not only are all firstperson pronouns significantly more common in PCF texts than in LCF texts, but, at 29% to
9%, they also collectively make up more than three times the proportional share of overallpronoun use. Unlike the two discrete uses of “I” in the LCF corpus discussed above, uses of“I” in PCF texts often defy easy categorization. For example, just over 7% (74/1003) of theoccurrences of “I” in the PCF corpus, appear to be instances of reported speech. In some cases,
as in Line 22 in Table 4.10 below, these uses of “I” are accompanied by explicit references toa court transcript. In others, however, as in Line 23, they appear without an attributed source,and seem instead to be an attempt to lend force to the author’s own words:

107

Table 4.10 Selected KWIC lines showing the use of “I” in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus, n=1003

Line
22

23
24
25
26

N-

N

N+
certainly anticipated that, because I did
Pursuant to Page 4, Lines 18-20, Judge“I have a chance to briefly look at your
Agosti stated,
response.”“I accept your charges for value andaccept the charges for value andconsideration in return for post-settlement “Iconsideration.
closure of account 4595732588.
mailed a true and correct copy of the
I Ilana Kohler certify that August 7, 2018 I
above and foregoing motion.
I, Maurice Sanjay Koolen state for theam a Natural Living Flesh and Blood
I
record that
Being.
Many years ago I left an order for Judge(I have forgotten his last name) to sign.
DennisIn instances like Line 23, it is difficult to determine if the desired effect was for it to be read asreporting something which was literally said, as an instance of paraphrase, or if the quotation
marks here are used to give the impression that the author is “currently” saying it. Similarly,Line 24 seems to function in the same way as the sworn statements using “I” in the LCF corpus(see Line 19 above), while Line 25 borrows that form to make a clear reference to the Sovereign
Citizen pseudolegal strawman theory (i.e. that the author is “a Natural Living Flesh and Blood
Being”; see the discussion in Chapter 1). Still other uses of “I”, such as Line 26 (“Many years
ago I left an order for Judge Dennis (I have forgotten his last name) to sign”), are distinctly
conversational in tone and would seem completely out of place in the LCF corpus. Ultimately,
and for similar reasons, it is difficult to meaningfully classify the many uses of first-person
pronouns in the PCF corpus by their context. There are, however, certain grammatical patterns
in the PCF corpus’ use of first-person subject pronouns which merit closer examination.
A manual review of all occurrences of first-person pronouns across the two corpora
shows that in both LCF and PCF texts, the n+ position was often occupied by an appositive(e.g. “I Ilana Kohler” in Line 24 or “I, Maurice Sanjay Koolen” in line 25), a form of the verb
“to be”, or an explicit performative verb (e.g. “I appoint myself sole beneficiary” in Line 38
below). As shown in Table 4.11, though these constructions are all more common in an
absolute sense in the PCF corpus than in the LCF corpus, only the differences between thefrequency of “I” plus an explicit performative and the aggregate total reach the level ofstatistical significance (p < 0.01). The general trends for these constructions largely hold truefor “we” as well, though no difference reaches the level of statistical significance, and the
proportion of “we” plus an explicit performative is slightly higher in the LCF corpus than in108

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
the PCF corpus. As a result, and because first-person singular subject pronouns are morecommon in both the LCF and PCF corpora than their plural equivalents (see Table 4.8) theremainder of this portion of the analysis will be limited to the “I” constructions.
Table 4.11 Percentage of “I” and “we” followed by select constructions in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpora with chi-square tests for independence

I+

Appositive
Am/'m
Performative
Total%

LCF%
10
12
4
26

PCF%
20
19
18
57

χ2
3.17651.37438.631318.536

we +Appositive
Are/'rePerformative
Total%

LCF%
0
13
23
36

PCF%
7
17
20
44

χ2
0.352940.11851.5746The largely similar rates of occurrence of “I” as a pronoun across the two corpora appear toshow yet another instance of effective Sovereign Citizen mimicry of legitimate legal texts,
though the contexts in which these constructions appear can vary significantly. Where “I” isfollowed by an appositive in the LCF corpus, the appositive takes one of two forms: 56% of
the time, it is a personal name (e.g. “I, John Smith,”), and 44% of the time it is part of thephrase “I, the undersigned,” which is typical of sworn statements such as affidavits. The use of“I” plus an appositive in the PCF corpus, however, does not follow this pattern. Instead, “I” isdirectly followed by a personal name 77% of the time, the phrase “the undersigned” only 2%of the time, and something else 21% of the time (the nature of this “something else” category
varies but it generally has clear ties to some element of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theory).
Some instances, such as the 3 occurrences of “the below signed” in the PCF corpus, appear toreflect the author’s lack of competence with LCF genre and the register of legal English: though
the phrase is clearly close to “the undersigned”, and likely shows an awareness on the part of
the text’s author that something to that effect should be present, “the below signed” neverappears in the LCF corpus. Table 4.12 gives several examples of other uses of the “I” plus
appositive construction in the PCF corpus:

109

Table 4.12 Selected KWIC lines showing “I” followed by an appositive in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpus, n=199

Line

N-

N

27

with God as my witness,I,28

as a matter of law.

I

29

ACCEPTANCE OF WARRANTY
DEED

I,

30

in the Court of Record declare thatI,

31

it has not been proved that Affiant isliable for any corporation's debts.

I,

32

MOTION FOR SUMMARYJUDGMENT

I,

N+:brigid-olivia, a true woman of God,
acknowledge only blessings given byGod;:lorena-cornelia: furlan, Sui Juris, byspecial visitation [special appearance],
Ronan Blackwood the living MAN, inthe capacity of Ronan Blackwood amrecorded as the grantee on the warranty
deed.
a living, breathing, undead woman amfiling this Affidavit to rebut or dispel
false “presumptions.”
the Affiant, the living woman, havenever, with full knowledge, intent orawareness:
Nicol Lucassen, (Affiant), being ofsound mind, over the age of 21 andcompetent to state the matters set forth
herein,As can be seen in the above lines, appositives in the PCF corpus often occur in the context ofestablishing some fundamental “truth” about the author of the texts in which they appear (e.g.
that they are “a true woman of God” in Line 27 or “the living MAN” in Line 29), rather thanqualities that would be more traditionally relevant to a legal proceeding. Even in cases where
the claimed status is of legal origin, such as the author’s being “sui juris” (a legal Latin phrase
meaning “of one’s own right”) in Line 28, or their being an “Affiant” in Lines 31 and 32, theterms used seem to have taken special pseudolegal significance for Sovereign Citizen litigants(Section 4.3.2 discusses the use of the word “Affiant” in PCF texts in more depth). A numberof these appositives also show characteristically Sovereign Citizen methods of identity
construction, including the atypical punctuation surrounding the names in Lines 27 and 28, andthe use of the phrases such as “a living, breathing, undead woman” in Line 30. Additionally,that use of “undead” in Line 30 hints at another seemingly notable instance of negation in the
PCF corpus, insomuch as it would be more consistent with other Sovereign Citizen uses ofappositives to read “undead” in this context as a double negative becoming a positive rather
than the author claiming to be a zombie (particularly since it is preceded by the adjectives“living” and “breathing”). “I” is followed by multiple descriptors in approximately 20% of theappositives in the PCF corpus (e.g. “the Affiant, the living woman”); this does not occur at allin the LCF corpus.

110

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
To the extent that Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theories make any sort of cognizable
legal argument, it is one that is jurisdictional in nature (i.e. they argue that the legal system has
no authority over them). Along with Line 25 above, Table 4.13 highlights some of the ways inwhich this sort of argument manifests via the use of “I” and a conjugation of “to be” in the PCF
corpus:Table 4.13 Selected KWIC lines showing “I” followed by a conjugation of “to be” in the Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpus, n=193

Line
33
34
35
36

Namina tinker, as defendant,
makes affirmation thatunlawful actions Null and Void.
Pursuant to 15 US Statute at
Large, I declare that
I am NOT as

N
I am
I am
I am
I
AM

N+
am a man of the feminine gender,
private beneficiary to the public trust
morally opposed to your jurisdiction
not a 14th Amendment citizen of the
U.S. corporation
NOT a Corporation.

Line 34 makes the jurisdictional argument explicitly (“I am morally opposed to yourjurisdiction”) while Lines 35 and 36 do so through reference to particular pseudolegal theories
to that effect (specifically, 14th Amendment citizenship and the US as a corporation; see
Chapter 1 for discussion of these and other such theories). Other uses of “I am” in the PCF
corpus, such as Line 33, are comparable to its use of appositives, where it claims somefundamental status of particular pseudolegal importance (while it cannot be verified, given the
Sovereign Citizen movement’s general socially and politically conservative tendencies, thephrase “a man of the feminine gender” in Line 34 seems more likely to be a semantic innovationakin to Line 30’s use of “undead” rather than a purposeful separation of the concepts of sex
and gender).
In the LCF corpus, by way of contrast, 19% of the occurrences of “I” followed by aform of “to be”, including all occurrences of “I’m”, are instances of reported speech. The
remainder are explanations of employment or personal experience (e.g. “I am a certified public
accountant…”) which are used to bolster the credibility of the sworn statements in which they
are found. In the PCF corpus, all fifteen occurrences of “I’m” are instances of reported speech,
but there is no reported “I am.” Though there are no negated “I” plus “to be” statements in the
LCF corpus, the structure is negated 21% of the time in the PCF corpus, including in Lines 35
and 36 (“I am not a 14th Amendment Citizen” and “I AM NOT a Corporation”). “I AM” isnever capitalized in the LCF corpus, but is on five occurrences, such as in Line 36, in the PCF
corpus.
111

As was discussed in Chapter 2, the use of explicit performatives is likely the single
clearest invocation of authority in legal texts, and the ways in which they are used differs
greatly between the LCF and PCF corpora. As an example, “I” is followed by an explicit
performative verb eight times in the LCF corpus. Seven times, that verb is “certify” and isincluded as part of a formulaic conclusion to a sworn statement (“I certify that the statements
set forth in this instrument are true and correct…”). The eighth occurrence, “I hereby direct”,
is a quotation from a different legal document whose meaning is at issue in that proceeding. In
contrast, Table 4.14 shows some of the ways in which “I” is typically followed by an explicit
performative verb in the PCF corpus:
Table 4.14 Selected KWIC lines showing “I” followed by an explicit performative in the Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpus, n=181

Line

N-

N

37

explicitly under reserve andwithout prejudice,I

38

As GRANTOR,I

39

I AM NOT corporate propertyof the State or United States ofAmerica nor am I a thing.

I

40

Nationstar Mortgage LLC,
hereinafter "Respondent".

I41

in accordance with the powers
granted in this document,IN+
hereby and herein claim liberties
provided or required via treaties aswell as common law jurisdiction.
appoint myself Sole Beneficiary of
all Trusts
REBUT that the Court has
jurisdiction as the Judge and bar
attorneys are foreign agents.
conditionally accept the complaint &all counts of Respondent’s OFFER
upon proof of claim that:
hereby represent, warrant and agree
that:

Almost a quarter of the time (42/181) the “I” plus explicit performative construction in the PCF
corpus involves the word “hereby”. As in Line 38, this use of “hereby”, particularly when
paired with “herein”, seems to increase the formal character of the text. Similar to the ways inwhich the “I” constructions discussed above were used to claim legally nonsensical authority
for Sovereign Citizen litigants, these explicit performative verbs are used infelicitously toattempt to perform actions that are legally nonsensical (it does not matter whether one“accepts” the complaint against them in a court case, as in Line 40) or are inappropriately
borrowed from other areas of law (the language in Line 38, for example, seems to relate to thecreation of a trust, a common element of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theory that would not112

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
be relevant to the sorts of cases present in the PCF corpus). It seems that all that “I” can do in
an LCF text is “certify”; in a PCF text, however, “I” can do whatever “I” want.
Pronouns in PCF texts do not just define individual Sovereign Citizen authors and theirsupposed powers, however: they also frequently address judges and opposing parties. In the
LCF corpus, “you” occurs relatively infrequently, with only 24 occurrences per 100,000 words.
Table 4.15 shows the ways in which it is used:
Table 4.15 Selected lines showing “You” in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus, n=73

Line

N-

N

42

@Rager67 commented, "Umm

you

43

Q. Is that what

you

44

Definitions A.

"You"

45

In answering these Requests,

YouN+know you have 75% of PAYING customers
outside still?
thought at the time that you heard about themillion-dollar offer?
or "City" refers to Defendant, City of
Chicago, a municipal organization, and all
individuals and entities over whom You haveor may exercise control, including but notlimited tomust make a diligent search of Your records
and of other papers and materials in yourpossession or available to You or Your
representatives.

In the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus, 54% of the time (40/73) “you” occurs, including
in Lines 42 and 43, it is as part of reported speech. The rest of the time, as in Lines 44 and 45,
it occurs in contexts in which “You” (specifically in these cases with the capital “Y”) has been
defined as a technical term within the texts in which it appears (see the discussion of technicalterminology in legal English in Chapter 2). In the PCF corpus, by way of contrast, “you” occurs
almost five times as often as it does in the LCF corpus (114 times per 100,000 words) and in amuch wider array of contexts. Some of the most notable ways are shown below in Table 4.16:

113

Table 4.16 Selected KWIC lines showing “You” in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus, n=408

Line

N

N+

you

didn't have a copy".

47

NAnd the attorney said they were putting it in
the mail, and we never got a copy, and on
the 20th,
Judge Waters was recorded as saying, "But

you

48

If your answer is "NO,"

you

49

you
You

51

3) how long have
Slavery and involuntary servitude havebeen outlawed worldwide since 1926.
I exist in the land of the living

52

As such, Claimant is asking that

YOU

53

IF TRUSTOR’S ACTIONS AREADHERED TO, THERE WILL NOT BE A
FORECLOSURE SALE ON THE
SUBJECT PROPERTY. HOWEVER, IF

YOU

still refuse to pay the fine.
are hereby noticed that you are toprovide the facts and law that
supports your answer.
been in your position;
will find no slave here. Don’t Tread
On Me!
only have jurisdiction over the dead.
stipulate whether YOU are theholder in due course for Claimants’promissory note
FAIL TO ACKNOWLEDGE
TRUSTOR’S REORGANIZTION
OF THE TRUSTS AND
DEMANDSAND YOU PROCEED
WITH THE FORECLOSURE
SALE, YOU WILL BE
PROCEEDING WITHOUTLAWFUL AUTHORITY

46

50

you

Of these occurrences, 9% (38/408) are instances of reported speech, as in Line 47, and 20%(81/408) are in the form of discovery requests, as in Line 48 (discovery is a standard part ofthe pre-trial process; compare Line 48 to Line 45 from the LCF corpus, above). The remaining
instances of “you” in the PCF corpus are more difficult to classify, though notably, 36 of them
have a capitalized “YOU”, while “YOU” is never capitalized in the LCF corpus. As with thecapitalized “NO” discussed in the prior subsection, emphatic capitalization as seen in Lines 52
and 53 again evokes spoken, rather than written, language; see Section 5.4.2 for further
discussion of capitalization in the LCF and PFC corpora.
Broadly speaking, the use of first-person pronouns can be said to indicate the author’s
personal involvement in a text, the use of second person pronouns indicates a high degree of
involvement with the addressee (Biber 1988, p.225; Wang et al. 2021, p.3), and frequent use
of personal pronouns in general, but particularly “I”, is more closely associated with spoken
language than written language (Akinnaso 1982, pp.99–104; Biber et al. 1999, p.333). PCF
texts use significantly more first- and second-person pronouns than LCF texts (see Table 4.8)
and therefore seem to be much more concerned with the identity of their authors and of the114

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
representatives of the legal system than their legitimate courtroom filing counterparts. Leaving
aside for the moment questions about their larger pseudolegal nature, there is a degree to which
this higher degree of ego involvement in PCF texts, at the very least, is understandable: while
the texts in the LCF corpus were all written by attorneys on behalf of their clients, the texts in
the PCF corpus all belong to pro se litigants (i.e. the individual Sovereign Citizen litigants are
representing themselves instead of being represented by an attorney). Even in cases where the
PCF text in question may have been created from a preexisting template, then, because theperson filing it is an actual party to the litigation in question, there would understandably be acertain degree of personal investment in that text, and therefore a greater potential for the useof first-person pronouns.
What makes this significantly higher rate of pronoun use in PCF texts particularly
notable is that in so many of the other ways examined in this chapter, Sovereign Citizens seemto have a strong sense of what is expected of a legitimate legal text and choose to hew close tothat. The fact that PCF texts depart so obviously and so frequently from the practice of LCF
texts in their use of first and second person pronouns, then, suggests that it is particularly
important to their authors that they do so, to the extent that they jeopardize their texts’ chancesof parasitic success (though lack of genre competence is always also a potential factor). The
difference in the rates and manners of pronoun use between LCF and PCF corpora further
suggests the impact of the magical nature of these documents: where LCF texts are attempting
to set out facts of the case, the “me” versus “you” framing evident from the pronoun use of
PCF texts makes clear that they are perceived to be part of an intensely personal confrontation
between the Sovereign Citizen litigant and the legal system (though the uses of “you” in thissense seem to generally conflate the roles of the opposing party and the judge). Particularly
when considered along aside the continued similarities between the texts of the PCF corpus
and spoken English more generally, pronoun use in the PCF corpus seems to reveal that PCF
texts are personally important to their authors, and that they seem to feel “unheard” by thelegitimate legal system.

4.2.4 Passive Constructions
Per its “consensus” description, Legal English makes more frequent use of impersonal andpassive constructions than “standard” English (Danet 1985, p.283; Tiersma 2006, p.45). In
English, such constructions (which will be referred to throughout this section as “passives” or“passive constructions”) most commonly consist of some form of the verb “to be” and a past

115

participle (Peters 2004, p.411; Wanner 2009, p.13). “To be” is not necessary, however: passives
may use a form of “to get” instead (e.g. “Much of the savings get passed along to consumers”(Wanner 2009, p.100)) or, in embedded clauses, go without an auxiliary verb entirely (e.g.
instances of whiz deletion, such as “a letter written by my great grand-father” (Wanner 2009,p.110)). These alternative constructions are less common than “to be” passives, however, and“get” passives are considered markedly less formal than “to be” passives (Wanner 2009, pp.85–
87), making them much less likely to appear in legal texts (there are, in fact, no instances of“get” passives in the LCF corpus, and only four in the PCF corpus). Because of this chapter’s
specific focus on the use of legal English in the LCF and PCF corpora, this subsection will
therefore focus on the use of “to be” passives.
COCA-W, the LCF corpus, and the PCF corpus were searched for each conjugatedform of the verb “to be” (i.e. “be”, “am”, “is”, “are”, “was”, “were”, “been”, and “being”)
followed by a word ending in “*d”, “*t” and “*n”, which are the most common indications ofEnglish past participles (Biber et al. 1999, pp.392–395). Following a review of the initial
results, instances of a form of “to be” followed by a negator, contraction, or article (e.g. “not”,“at”, “on”, “in”, or “an”) were subtracted from the totals of all three corpora. Results for eachsearch category were then normalized to determine their frequency per 100,000 words. Table
4.17 and Table 4.18 display the results of this process on the following pages:

116

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
Table 4.17 Frequency of various passive constructions in COCA-W and the Legitimate Courtroom Filing
corpus with chi-square tests for independence

Passive
Construction
*d
be +
*t
*n
*d
am +
*t
*n
*d
is +
*t
*n
*d
are +
*t
*n
*d
was +
*t
*n
*d
were +*t*n*dbeen +*t*n*dbeing +
*t
*n
Total

COCAW freq.
714307180633
93657
32642
13322
5062
465951
81401612154553111728395910641544192948016581250446156515110670511
44133776521
57551
21719143636
24161
6640803

COCAW norm.
96
24
13
4
2
1
62
109
16
71
38
14
59
64
109
62
20
9
59
10
8
29
6
3
890

117

LCF
freq.
1076
86
59
8
2
1
605
214
45
266
83
23
524
95
33
197
31
7
225
14
7
69
13
2
3685

LCF
norm.
355
28
19
3
1
0
200
71
15
88
27
8
173
31
11
65
10
2
74
5
2
23
4
1
1217

χ2
2127.62.025511.0371.70131.5624911.7840.6790.2974
11.571
8.747
8.9758659.8950.703266.450.44862
14.50815.583
11.4968.8261
10.7653.94571.00065.4429366.13

Table 4.18 Frequency of various passive constructions in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpora with chi-square tests for independence

Passive
Construction
*d
be +
*t
*n
*d
am +
*t
*n
*d
is +
*t
*n
*d
are +
*t
*n
*d
was +
*t
*n
*d
were +*t*n*dbeen +*t*n*dbeing +
*t
*n
Total

LCF
freq.
1076
86
59
8
2
1
605
214
45
266
83
23
524
95
33
197
31
7
225
14
7
69
13
2
3685

LCF
norm.
355
28
19
3
1
0
200
71
15
88
27
8
173
31
11
65
10
2
74
5
2
23
4
1
1217

PCF
freq.
1183
114
96
17
11
8
846
272
93
319
59
45
589
57
52
119
13
8
480
20
26
118
22
6
4573

PCF
norm.
329
32
27
5
3
2
235
76
26
89
16
13
164
16
14
33
4
2
134
6
7
33
6
2
1272

χ2
3.22970.495443.36751.38593.6781
9.37170.49759.05280.0071068.7564
3.41920.7661416.5611.367
34.4919.8661
6.47E-23
53.7120.130147.03565.527
0.72256
4.0745For eight of the 24 passive constructions, there was no significant difference in their frequency
between COCA-W and the LCF corpus. Six constructions occurred significantly more
frequently in the LCF corpus while nine occurred significantly more frequently in COCA-W.
One construction (“am” plus “*n”) did not occur frequently enough across the two corpora totest for significance. All passive constructions which were significantly more common in
COCA-W than the LCF corpus ended in “*t” or “*n”, while all passive constructions endingin “*d” for which there was a significant difference were more common in the LCF corpus.
Passive constructions were overall significantly more common in the LCF corpus than in
COCA-W, which aligns with the “consensus” description of legal English. The use of thesepassive constructions is much more closely aligned between the LCF and PCF corpora: fourconstructions occur significantly more frequently in the LCF corpus than the PCF corpus while
the reverse is true for another four constructions. Two passive constructions (“am + *n” and118

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
“being + *n”) did not occur frequently enough to test for significance. There was not asignificant difference in the frequency of the remaining fourteen passive constructions between
the two corpora, nor was there a significant difference in the overall frequency of passive
constructions between the LCF and PCF corpus. At least in an overall sense, however, theconsensus opinion that passive constructions are more common in legal English than in general
English seems to be correct.
In the LCF corpus, these “to be” passive constructions generally appear intended tocreate an impression of distance and objectivity; two such examples are given below in Table
4.19:

Table 4.19 Selected KWIC lines showing passive constructions in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus(n=3685)

Line
54

55

N-

N

N+

A true and correct copy

is attached

Among other things, thisconclusion

is supported

hereto as Exhibit 1.
by the fact that the Dismissal Charges andSpecifications signed by Defendant Jordan
explicitly adopt the 2015 Warning Letter as abasis for Defendants’ institution of termination
proceedings against Dr. Simonson.

In many cases, as in Line 54, these “to be” passives are used in sentences which are easily
externally verified (i.e. “a true and correct copy” was either attached or it was not), though they
are also commonly found in more argumentative contexts, such as in Line 55. In either case,these uses of “to be” passives rhetorically place the statement outside of the control, and thus
the responsibility, of the text’s author. An examination of similar constructions in the PCF
corpus shows that “to be” passives are used there in an almost performative sense; in otherwords, they are often used to present statements about the legal system that the Sovereign
Citizens seem to wish were true:

Table 4.20 Selected KWIC lines showing passive constructions in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus(n=4573)

Line
56

57

N-

Plaintiff Wells Fargo
Bank, N.A.
One who attends CourtN

N+

is required

to respond as an Appellee.

is accepting

accepting the position of a Defendant, giving
jurisdiction to the Court and is presumed to be
Corporate property or a thing119

Sovereign Citizens often use passive constructions to outline what they view as the
responsibilities of the opposing party, as in Line 56, or to raise the fundamentally jurisdictional
concerns inherent to Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theories, as seen in Line 57.
Line 57 in particular appears to show the genre parasitism of pseudolegal courtroom
filings in action; it is true that, when being sued, appearing in court generally has the effect ofconsenting to participate in that lawsuit. There is no legal presumption, however, that anyone
doing so is also “Corporate property or a thing”, nor is it entirely clear what that would mean
if it were true. By positioning it alongside a legitimate legal statement, though, and phrasing itin the same way an LCF text would phrase a true statement of law, the author of the PCF text
increases the chances that a reader will mistake it for something with actual legal authority.
Given that first-person pronouns are significantly more common in the PCF corpus thanthe LCF corpus (see Table 4.8), it is noteworthy that there is no significant difference in thefrequency of “am” passives between the LCF and PCF corpora. This indicates that, whenwriting about themselves, Sovereign Citizens clearly and strongly prefer to use the active voice.
It also further emphasizes the degree to which the pseudolegal narratives of Sovereign Citizen
texts are centered around the status and power of their authors; by avoiding the passive voice,
it is made clear that Sovereign Citizens are the ones acting, rather than the ones being acted
upon.
When one of the passive constructions in Table 4.17 or Table 4.18 is followed by theword “by”, it is referred to as a “long passive”; when it is not it is known as a “short passive”(Biber et al. 1999, p.935; Wanner 2009, p.11). Long passives are generally less common thanshort passives, but have been found to occur particularly frequently in formal academic writing(Biber et al. 1999, p.938). Prior studies have not specifically noted the presence of the long
passive in legal English, but if it is more common in formal writing generally than in othervarieties of English, it seems likely that it would be more common in legal English as well.
Table 4.21 and Table 4.22 compare the frequency of the occurrences of the long passive acrossthe three corpora which occurred frequently enough to test for statistical significance.

1204. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
Table 4.21 Frequency of notable “long passive” constructions in COCA-W and the Legitimate Courtroom
Filing corpus with chi-square tests for independenceLong
Passivebe *d byis *d byare *d by
was *d by
were*d bybeen *d bybeing *d by
Total

COCA-W
freq.
93863
82191
46494
105319
42604
52584
27933
450988COCA-W
norm.
13
11
6
14
6
7
4
61

LCF
freq.
109
85
15
70
34
37
12
362

LCF
norm.
36
28
5
23
11
12
4
119

χ2
129.9878.3320.601716.73715.18210.7590.0023173.87

Table 4.22 Frequency of notable “long passive” constructions in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom
Filing corpora with chi-square tests for independenceLong
Passivebe *d byis *d byare *d by
was *d by
were*d bybeen *d bybeing *d by
Total

LCF freq.

LCF norm.

109
85
15
70
34
37
12
362

36
28
5
23
11
12
4
119

PCF
freq.
118
62
29
93
10
56
13
381

PCF
norm.
33
17
8
26
3
16
4
107

χ2
0.39148.185
1.95550.403316.3941.09550.00072.5618Across all three corpora, only the long passive constructions involving “*d” (with the exceptionof “am *d by”) occurred frequently enough to be testable for significance. Five of these sevenconstructions occurred significantly more frequently in the LCF corpus than in COCA-W, withthe other remaining two not occurring at a significantly different rate. The LCF corpus uses
significantly more instances of the long passive overall than does COCA-W, which again aligns
with what the consensus description of legal English would expect as well as with the moregeneral suggestion that legal English is a markedly formal register. The PCF corpus appears toaccurately imitate the LCF corpus in this category as well; two of the seven constructions occur
more frequently in the LCF corpus than the PCF corpus, with the other five occurring at similar
rates and with no significant difference in the overall frequency of use of the long passive
between the two corpora.
As with the short “be” passives discussed above, the long passive in the LCF corpus ismost frequently used to express legal rules, often stemming from either legislation or contracts
relevant to the proceedings, as seen in the following examples:121

Table 4.23 Selected KWIC lines showing long passives in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus (n=362)

Line

N-

N

N+

In addition to specifying the procedures for the releaseof properly impounded vehicles, §11-208.7 makes clear be assessed by a Court of Law.
that punishment, in the form of penalties, may only.
JSC.
All proceeds of sale shallbe held by58
59

A similar use of the long passive also occurs in the PCF corpus, as in Line 60 below:

Table 4.24 Selected KWIC lines showing long passives in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus (n=381)

Line
60

61

N-

N

A Lien or a Claim, under Commercial
Law, can onlyThat said members responsible for‘Tresspassing upon the laws’ and who
have closed their eyes to these crimes
likened to War CrimesN+be satisfied by

one of the following
actions:

be replaced byqualified Republicans andindependents not affiliatedto this regime.

But the long passive is also used in more striking passages such as Line 61’s demand that thosecourt employees the relevant Sovereign Citizen author has judged to have committed “WarCrimes” be replaced by “qualified Republicans.” While it perhaps goes without saying,accusing the court of being comprised of war criminals is not a normal part of litigation, andthe phrase “war crimes” does not appear in the LCF corpus (this is to say nothing of the blatant
political bias shown against Democrats and in favor of Republicans in that excerpt). Onceagain, the more obviously pseudolegal claims of a PCF text are accompanied by a construction
associated with legal English in the seeming hope that it will imbue those claims with legitimate
legal authority.
Both “be” passives and long passives occur at statistically similar rates in the LCF and
PCF corpora, and in those corpora at approximately twice the rate that they do in COCA-W.
PCF texts use these constructions and their associations with more objective, verifiablestatements in the LCF corpus in an attempt to parasitically bolster the credibility of their more
obviously pseudolegal claims. At the same time, while using the passive voice at a statisticallysimilar rate as texts in the LCF corpus, texts in the PCF corpus avoid it in the first-person
context, which appears to indicate a desire to present their authors as active forces in their own
legal narratives. At least in terms of their use of the passive voice, then, Sovereign Citizens
seem to be choosing to copy the frequency of a feature in the LCF corpus while at the sametime avoiding it in certain contexts which would run contrary to their larger purposes.
122

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs

4.2.5 Nominalizations
The “consensus” description of legal English holds that, relative to “standard” English, legal
English makes more frequent use of nominalizations (Tiersma 2006, p.45; Mattila 2012b,
p.22). Nominalizations are nouns that are derived from verbs or adjectives of the same language(e.g. “civilization” from “civilize” or “kindness” from “kind”) (Biber et al. 1998, p.59). Though
the morphological processes by which nominalizations are formed are not completely regular,
the most common suffixes which indicate English language nominalizations are “*tion”,“*sion”, “*ness”, “*ment”, and “*ity” (Biber et al. 1998, p.63). The presence of one of these
suffixes does not guarantee that a given word is a nominalization, however (“nation” and“mansion”, for example, are not) (Biber et al. 1998, p.59); ultimately, it is necessary to review
a word’s etymology to determine its status.
To compare the use of nominalizations in COCA-W and the LCF and PCF corpora,each of the three corpora was searched for the total occurrences of words ending with thecommon nominalization suffixes given above. The etymology of each word with a raw
frequency greater than or equal to 1005 in either the LCF or PCF corpora was checked in the
online Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press 2021); where a word was notclearly derived from an English verb or adjective, its total occurrences were subtracted fromall three corpora. The aggregate results of these searches, including their normalized
frequencies per 100,000 words, are given below in Table 4.25 and Table 4.26:

Table 4.25 Frequency of common nominalization suffixes in COCA-W and the Legitimate Courtroom Filing
corpus with chi-square tests for independence. Results normalized to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000
words.

Nominalization
*tion
*sion
*ness
*ment
*ity
Total

COCAW freq.
5808201
1220632
79451925561162403696
12783164

COCA-W LCF
norm.
freq.
778 6428
164
811
106
157
343 2713
322
949
1713 11058

5

LCF
norm.
2122
268
52
896
313
3651

χ2
7074.8200.5984.4672711
0.698996749.6This 100-occurrence threshold was chosen based on a review of the full list of nominalizations present in the
LCF and PCF corpora. It was deemed sufficient to capture the most commonly used nominalizations while
limiting the number examined to a workable level.

123

Table 4.26 Frequency of common nominalization suffixes in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpora with chi-square tests for independence. Results normalized to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000
words.

Nominalization
*tion
*sion
*ness
*ment
*ity
Total

LCF
freq.
6428
811
157
2713
949
11058

LCF
norm.
2122
268
52
896
313
3651

PCF
freq.
6230
1093
416
3654
1189
12582

PCF
norm.
1733
304
116
1017
331
3501

χ2
132.567.433776.9
25.07
1.502410.796Overall, the LCF corpus uses significantly more nominalizations than COCA-W, which isconsistent with the “consensus” description of legal English. The PCF corpus uses significantly
fewer nominalizations than the LCF corpus (it is important to note here that the difference is“significant” in the statistical sense; whether an average reader would on their own notice a
difference in frequency in 3651 nominalizations per 100,000 words in the LCF corpus versus
3501 nominalizations per 100,000 words in the PCF corpus is less clear). The findings for theindividual endings are somewhat less consistent, with the LCF corpus using significantly morenominalizations ending in “*tion”, “*sion”, and “*ment” than COCA-W, but significantly
fewer nominalizations ending in “*ness”. The PCF corpus uses significantly morenominalizations ending in “*sion”, “*ness”, and “*ment” than the LCF corpus, but significantly
fewer ending in “*tion”. There is not a statistically significant difference in the frequency of
nominalizations ending in “*ity” between the LCF corpus and COCA-W or between the PCF
and LCF corpora. Biber et al. (1998, p.63) found “*ment” nominalizations to make up morethan one and a half times the proportional share of overall nominalization use in speech ascompared to academic writing, meaning that the PCF corpus’ use of “*ment” nominalizations
at a significantly higher rate than the LCF corpus is yet another way in which texts in the PCF
corpus trend towards spoken English relative to their LCF counterparts.
Table 4.27 lists the most common nominalizations used in the LCF and PCF corpora
grouped by suffix, as well as the chi-square value for any nominalizations shared between thetwo corpora:124

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
Table 4.27 Nominalizations which occur at least 100 times in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpora. Results normalized to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000 words

*tion
LCF
Word
Freq. Norm.
action627
207
association
399
132
declaration
131
43
information
235
78
motion633
209
violation
225
74

PCF
Word
Freq. Norm.
action465
129
association
107
30
declaration
122
34
information
191
53
motion672
187
violation
195
54

application
arbitration

360
280

119
92

constitution
obligation

384
179

107
50

litigation
exemption
subscription
addition

192
152
113
102

63
50
37
34

collection
considerationtransaction

118
107
103

33
30
29

χ2
59.743222.553.492414.9133.9507
10.101

*sion
LCF
Word
Freq. Norm.
possession
132
44
decisionsuspension
provision

164
118
113

PCF
Word
Freq. Norm.
possession
214
60

54
division
39
37
*ness

200

56

LCF
PCF
Freq. Norm.
Word
Freq. Norm.
179
59
business
170
47
*ment
LCF
PCF
Word
Freq. Norm.
Word
Freq. Norm.
agreement
601
198
agreement
292
81
judgment
358
118
judgment
603
168
payment
104
34
payment
208
58
statement
114
38
statement
147
41
Word
business

settlement
impoundment
argument

410
197
147

135
65
49

instrument
assignment
department
government

393
210
203
194

109
58
56
54

*ity
Word

LCF
Freq. Norm.

PCF
Word
Freq. Norm.
security
286
80
liability
152
42

125

χ2
7.7095χ2
4.1287

χ2
166.8
27.52
18.83
0.36373

In both the LCF and PCF corpora, 24 nominalizations occur at least 100 times, and 12 areshared between the two corpora. The comparative frequency of those shared nominalizations
is largely in alignment with the trends shown in Table 4.26: four of the six nominalizations
ending in *tion appear significantly more frequently in the LCF corpus than the PCF corpus,
the one shared *sion nominalization appears more frequently in the PCF corpus, and two of thethree shared *ment nominalizations appear more frequently in the PCF corpus. Of the fiveremaining shared nominalizations, there is not a statistically significant difference in thefrequency of four. The only nominalization to be significantly more frequent in the corpus
which uses its relevant suffix significantly less overall is “agreement”, which appears more
frequently in the LCF corpus than the PCF corpus; given the generally combative stance of
PCF texts towards the legal system as a whole, this is thematically unsurprising.
A look at the nominalizations unique to each corpus in Table 4.27 reveals much about
the sorts of topics they are most concerned with. The unique nominalizations of the LCF
corpus, for example, are generally concerned with specific points of fact or law as seen via thediscussion of subjects including arbitration (Line 62), litigation (Line 63), and matters of civil
procedure (Line 64):
Table 4.28 Selected KWIC lines showing nominalizations in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus

Line
62
63

64

N-

N

N+

The case was resolved into an arbitration before ADR Systems of America.
reacted aggressively to the attempt to
The Plaintiffs in the underlying litigation
remove the matter to federal court.
that a defendant may file a
They have also cited no authority
argument counterclaim without having filed anthat would support ananswer.

Nominalizations unique to the PCF corpus, by way of contrast, often deal with much moregeneral (if questionably relevant) matters of law via references to subjects such as the US
constitution (Line 65) or the government’s jurisdiction (Line 66):126

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
Table 4.29 Selected KWIC lines showing nominalizations in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus

Line

N-

N

N+

65

The United States Constitution

66

Williams’ paradigm ofjurisdiction
exclusive tribal

67

Essence of a conspiracy is an agreement

is the Supreme Law of the Land per theSupremacy Clause of Article VI.
is a leading example of the special rules thatthe apex court has recognized during themodern era in order to protect tribal
government in Indian country.
to commit an unlawful act.

Even where two corpora both make use of the same nominalization, this trend appears to hold:“agreement” is invariably used in the LCF corpus to refer to a specific contractual agreement(generally the one at issue in the relevant case, as in “the complaint did not attach the actual
agreement”), and while that use of agreement also occurs in the PCF corpus, it is often instead
used in a more broad, conceptual sense, as in Line 67.
Of course, PCF texts are definitionally not attempting to engage with the legal systemin the normal way, and it may therefore not be particularly surprising that they differ in theirfocus. As evidenced by their relatively more frequent use of first and second person pronouns,
PCF texts are more likely to frame things in personal terms than their LCF counterparts.
Combined with their penchant for emphatic capitalization seen in the earlier sections on both
negation and pronoun use, PCF texts appear to reflect the strongly held feelings of their authors.
What emerges from this examination of the nominalizations unique to the PCF corpus isevidence that, in contrast to the clear focus on immediately relevant vocabulary in the unique
nominalizations in the LCF corpus, the texts of the PCF corpus are interested in much moregeneral legal topics. Perhaps this is because Sovereign Citizen litigants rarely have the law ontheir side; the majority of cases represented in the PCF corpus are from mortgage foreclosure
proceedings in which, if the Sovereign Citizen litigants involved did not pay their mortgages,
there is not much that they can do, legally speaking. This does not mean, however, that PCF
texts are necessarily full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Instead, it serves as further
proof that they are operating on a different level than LCF texts: rather than responding to thelawsuit before them, as would be expected in a normal legal proceeding, Sovereign Citizen
litigants are positioning themselves as a challenge to the whole of the legal system itself. Any
charges leveled against them do not matter if the whole system underpinning those charges is,in their estimation, irredeemably corrupt. Corrupt or not, however, it is undeniable that thelegal system and its representatives hold real power: fines can be levied, property can be seized,
127

and people imprisoned if individuals defy it. As in the earlier discussion on the use of thepassive voice in the LCF and PCF corpora, this is where the parasitic nature of the texts in the
PCF corpus comes into play. Their parasitic imitation is an attempt by Sovereign Citizen
litigants to access the power of the legal system by copying its forms and “words of power”,
or, in more layman’s terms, its “magic words”. Section 4.2 has looked at a number of the more
subtle ways in which PCF texts attempt to copy and coopt the “magic words” of legal English.
Section 4.3 turns to a more explicit area of parasitic imitation: their use of legal technicalterminology.

4.3 Legal Technical Terminology
The consensus description of legal English holds that it makes frequent use of legal technicalterminology (Maley 1994, p.22; Tiersma 2006, p.44; Tiersma 2008, p.14; Mattila 2012b;
Kurzon 2013; Ruusila and Lindroos 2016), a claim which is at once self-evident (where would
legal technical terminology be most frequent if not in documents using legal English?) while
also being particularly tricky to evaluate, given that (as was discussed in Chapter 2) there is nota consistent definition of either standard English or legal technical terminology in the literature.
Even if there were such a consistent definition of the overarching category of legal technicalterminology, the meaning of legal technical terms can vary greatly by jurisdiction and often
exists alongside a much more common general English meaning. “Instrument”, for example,
is often used in general English to refer to a device which creates music, such as a trumpet or
piano, but in legal contexts would be much more likely to refer to a document (Tiersma 2008,p.16). This limits the potential utility of a general English reference corpus such as COCA-W
for comparing the frequency of the use of given legal technical term, as every occurrence of agiven word would ideally have to be examined to determine whether it was being used in a
general or technical sense before a useful comparison of the frequency of such terminology
across corpora could be made. Therefore, the analysis in this section will be limited only to an
examination of the legal technical terminology present in the LCF and PCF corpora.
As discussed in Chapter 2, for the purposes of this thesis, words have been deemed to
be instances of technical legal terminology where they have been assigned a definition in themost recent edition of Black’s Law Dictionary (Garner 2019). The following sections take for
granted that the use of legal technical terminology is more common in legal English than ingeneral English. Section 4.3.1 will discuss the legal technical terms most frequently shared
between the two corpora via a lockword analysis while Section 4.3.2 will examine the legal

1284. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
technical terms which most clearly distinguish one corpus from the other via a keyword
analysis. Section 4.3.3 looks at the presence of legal technical terminology in the most common
lexical bundles in the two corpora. In Sections 4.3.1 and 4.3.2, specific technical terms havebeen chosen for examination via hierarchical cluster analysis (Gabrielatos 2018, pp.242–243)
while the lexical bundles in Section 4.3.3 were selected according to their frequency in the two
corpora (see the discussion in Chapter 3 for more on these methods of selection).

4.3.1 Shared Technical Terminology
This subsection focuses on the legal technical terms which occur at a consistent rate in both the
LCF and PCF corpora. These terms have been identified via a lockword analysis, where
lockwords are words whose rate of occurrence is so similar across multiple corpora that they
appear to be “locked in place” (Baker 2011, p.73). Lockword analysis is a particularly useful
tool for examining parasitic generic relationships such as that between the legitimate andpseudolegal courtroom filing genres because it identifies some of the ways in which texts inthe parasitic genre most effectively imitate their host genre. The complete list of lockwords inthe LCF and PCF corpora is included as Appendix 3.5. A hierarchical cluster analysis (seeSection 3.5.3) determined that the top thirty-two lockwords were the most relevant for thisanalysis. Those lockwords, their normalized frequencies per 100,000 words, and theircoefficient of variance (“CV”) scores are given below in Table 4.30:

129

Table 4.30 Top legal lockwords in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora ranked bycoefficient of variance score. Finance-related lockwords are shaded in green and procedure-related lockwords
are shaded in blue.

Rank

Word

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32

injurypurposes
payments
faith
grantedanswerpublicpursuant
subject
commonuse
grantappearanceorderproperly
mortgageereasons
pendingreferencestreetfair
principal
inc
below
will
may
authority
hereinsale
equitable
proceedingtransaction

LCF
Freq.
49
56
57
70
103
328
394
431
256
120
93
92
85
500
81
76
70
69
66
125
64
117
304
49
415
461
241
215
238
90
90
82

LCF
Norm.
16
18
19
23
34
108
130
142
85
40
31
30
28
165
27
25
23
23
22
41
21
39
100
16
137
152
80
71
79
30
30
27

PCF Freq.

PCF Norm.

CV

56
63
67
84
124
383
460
520
297
148
116
112
103
615
94
95
80
79
75
154
72
146
342
62
463
582
271
273
266
102
101
103

16
18
19
23
34
107
128
145
83
41
32
31
29
171
26
26
22
22
21
43
20
41
95
17
129
162
75
76
74
28
28
29

0
0
0.09231159
0.465619551
0.554593554
0.836812759
1.149767124
1.240538213
1.251516427
1.321694918
1.782622137
1.911099409
2.465993894
2.655800117
2.668327476
2.702318909
3.166149767
3.189955404
3.595458209
3.646969072
3.689252771
3.781319685
3.822198817
4.541469372
4.714045208
5.009475834
5.030799234
5.189774541
5.189774541
5.237828009
5.391430003
5.439282932

When the lockwords in the above table are grouped semantically they indicate that LCF andPCF texts share two fundamental areas of concern: one financial (those words shaded in green
in the above table), the other procedural (those words shaded in blue). Five of the above
lockwords are words that are, in legal settings, inherently related to money: “injury,”“payments,” “mortgagee,” “sale,” and “transaction.” Another ten lockwords are clearly related
1304. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
to issues of legal procedure: “granted,” “answer,” “grant,” “appearance,” “order,” “properly”,“pending,” “authority,” “equitable,” and “proceeding.”
A look at the finance-related lockwords in the LCF corpus reveals yet more examplesof the straightforward tone and presentation of the issues discussed in its texts discussed above.
With the exception of a relatively small number of instances like the use of the word “certainly”
in Line 68 below, authorial editorializing in the use of these financial lockwords generally is
kept to a minimum:

Table 4.31 Selected KWIC lines showing finance-related lockwords in the Legitmate Courtroom Filing corpus

Line
68
69

N-

A treble damages provision does not in itself
create standing, and it certainly does not
somehow ‘triple’ the alleged
the cause of action arises out of aNN+

injuryfor purposes of standing.

transaction

occurring in Cook County.

Though the use of those same lockwords in the PCF corpus may occasionally evidence a lackof genre competence via awkward or non-standard phrasing (as in Line 70), it generally aligns
with their use in the LCF corpus:

Table 4.32 Selected KWIC lines showing finance-related lockwords in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus

Line

N-

N

70

Petitioner has no adequate remedy
at law and will suffer irreparable

injury71

N+in being disposed of property for a void andunenforceable mortgage that was foreclosed.
American Fidelity allegedly loaned Federal
Reserve Notes which is a violation of theAccording to the above-mentioned transaction Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (Title 12 U.S.
Code Section 411) and the United States
Constitution.
Given that both the LCF and PCF corpora are comprised solely of civil, rather than criminal,cases, this financial focus makes sense; except in very specific circumstances, the outcome ofa civil lawsuit is generally going to be monetary damages and the litigants represented in both
corpora would understandably rather be on the receiving end of any such award.
Where the two corpora more notably differ, however, is in their use of the procedural
lockwords listed above. Generally speaking, LCF texts continue to use a relatively staid,
objective tone with these words, as in Line 72. However, that tone can shift notably when131

discussing alleged procedural errors by an opposing party (Line 73) or prior actions taken by
the court (Line 74):

Table 4.33 Selected KWIC lines showing procedural lockwords in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus

Line

N-

N

72

Where situations requiring
determinations exist, however, theCourt hasauthority

73

Defendants have not cited any

authority74

The order of July, 2017, that
allegedly granted a substitution ofcounsel was allegedly based on atransfer ofauthorityN+to establish subclasses with each subclassbeing treated as a Class under 735 ILCS 5/2802(b).”for the proposition that unrelated
counterclaims may be filed in summary
proceedings under the Arbitration Act
from counsel who were never legally,
properly before this Court for the Plaintiff,
thus there was nothing to transfer from them.

The language used in relationship to the defendant in Line 73 is markedly dismissive in tone
(they “have not cited any authority” and their counterclaim is “unrelated”) and the descriptionof the court’s prior decisions, even though apparently contrary to what the author would havewanted, is hedged multiple times in Line 74 by the use of “allegedly” and reframed so as to be
the opposing party’s responsibility, as they were “never legally, properly before this Court” inthe first place. In terms of procedural language, it appears that texts in the LCF corpus tend toframe things desired by their authors in more seemingly objective ways, things desired by an
opposing party dismissively, and things done by the court deferentially.
While those shifts in tone in the LCF corpus are not necessarily surprising on their own,
they do stand in marked contrast to the tone of the procedural language used in the PCF corpus,
which is much more emotional and certainly not deferential to the court. Texts in the PCF
corpus will explicitly deny that either the judge or the opposing party have any power (Line75) while simultaneously claiming ultimate authority for themselves for a variety ofpseudolegal reasons (Line 76). The only possible reason someone would fail to recognize theauthority of the Sovereign Citizen litigant, according to the texts of the PCF corpus, seems tobe active malice, as in Line 77:132

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
Table 4.34 Selected KWIC lines showing procedural lockwords in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus

Line

N-

N

N+

authority

to sale the Trust Estate without the consent of
the beneficiary

75

CITIMORTGAGE, INC.,
CODLIS & ASSOCIATES, PC
nor does Karen E. Ward have76

Firmly standing on Jus Sanguinis,
DeJure, Matriarchial, Lineage andAuthority

to the Land and Soil of Almexem, Al Moroc
secured and assented to by The Constitution
for the United States of America

77

The judge in this case knows that
he intentionally and knowingly did
not give me the proper days I
requested to defend my caseproperlywhich the judge has put me at a clear
disadvantage.

Even when the two corpora share areas of thematic concern, as they do with matters financial
and procedural, they can approach those concerns in very different manners. While both LCF
and PCF texts appear similarly concerned with money, when it comes to the use of procedural
lockwords, LCF texts make their buy-in to the overall legal process and their deference to thecourt clear, while PCF texts use these words as an opportunity to express their opposition to
the entire legal system. The following section continues to explore the use of legal technicalterminology in the LCF and PCF corpora via a look at that terminology which mostdistinguishes the two corpora.

4.3.2 Distinctive Legal Technical Terminology“Keywords” are words which are statistically significantly more likely to occur in a target
corpus than in a reference corpus (Gabrielatos 2018, p.225). Where the prior section examinedlegal technical terms which were common to both the LCF and PCF corpora, this section will
examine the terms which most distinguish each corpus from the other (i.e. their legal
keywords). Following the procedure outlined in Chapter 3, keyword lists were generated for
the LCF and PCF corpora using the latter as the reference corpus for the former and vice versa.
The full lists of LCF and PCF keywords generated in this way are included as Appendix 3.3
and Appendix 3.4, respectively.
There are 482 legal keywords in the PCF corpus as compared to 340 legal keywords inthe LCF corpus. With normalized frequencies of 18,373 and 14,179 occurrences per 100,000
words, respectively, the PCF legal keywords make up a statistically significantly (χ2= 2102.8,
p < 2.2e-16) larger portion of their corpus than LCF legal keywords. Because of the way inwhich these keyword lists were generated, a keyword in one corpus is definitionally a word133

which appears significantly less frequently in the other corpus. This means that more than 18%of the content of the PCF corpus (content which is, based on the criteria for identifying
keywords used here, presumptively legal technical terminology) either does not appear or
appears only rarely in the LCF corpus; these legal technical terms therefore likely relate toareas of particular importance to Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theory. Two separate
hierarchical cluster analyses identified the top 21 keywords from each corpus as the most
relevant for analysis. The top LCF legal keywords are presented in Table 4.35:

Table 4.35 Top positive legal keywords of the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus ranked by effect size. Results
normalized to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000 words. Finance-related keywords are shaded in green,procedure-related keywords are shaded in blue, and case-specific keywords are shaded in yellow.

Rank

Keyword

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21

refundcondominium
subclasscharityvoterentaldiscontinuation
traffic
municipalities
defer
invoices
castpatients
proximateputative
accommodations
patient
discontinuanceexpertnumerosity
prohibits

LCF
Freq.
112
89
85
66
249
56
52
45
42
38
38
37
36
31
30
29
29
28
28
26
25

LCF
Norm.
37
29
28
22
82
18
17
15
14
13
13
12
12
10
10
10
10
9
9
9
8

PCF
Freq.
0
0
0
0
2
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0

PCF
Norm.
0
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0

LL

%DIFF

175.29139.29133.03103.29368.89
87.64
81.38
70.42
65.73
59.47
59.47
57.9
56.34
48.51
46.95
45.38
45.38
43.82
43.82
40.69
39.12

26484.1212
21024.882
20075.4491
15565.6429
14675.5495
13192.0606
12242.6277
10581.1201
9869.0455
8919.6126
8919.6126
8682.2543
8444.8961
7258.105
7020.7468
6783.3885
6783.3885
6546.0303
6546.0303
6071.3139
5833.9556

The legal keywords of the LCF corpus reveal a great deal about the subject matters of the cases
from which its component texts have been obtained. The eleven keywords in Table 4.35
highlighted in yellow clearly stem from specific factors at play in the relevant litigation, either
in terms of the way a given case can be structured (“subclass” and “numerosity” both springfrom class action lawsuits) or in terms of the identities of the parties in a suit or the facts at
134

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
issue (“condominium”, “charity”, “vote”, “rental”, “traffic”, municipalities”, “cast”, “patients,”
and “patient” all relate to different facets of specific cases). Consistent with the use of legal
lockwords discussed in the previous section, these keywords are generally used as neutrally as
possible, as in the follow excerpts:

Table 4.36 KWIC lines showing case-specific legal keywords in the Legitmate Courtroom Filing corpus

Line

N-

N

78

However, as further explained below
in Section III, the Impoundment
Ordinance is not a

traffic

79

Because definitive evidence of numerosityN+regulation governing the movement ofvehicles.
can only come from the records ofDefendant and its agents, it is proper to rely
upon the allegations of the Complaint incertifying the Class and Subclass.

The remainder of the LCF legal technical keywords can be broadly classified into either
financial (highlighted in green above) or procedural categories (highlighted in blue) in line withthose discussed in the above section on lockwords.
The top PCF legal keywords are shown in Table 4.37:

135

Table 4.37 Top positive legal keywords of the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus ranked by effect size.
Results normalized to reflect expected occurrences per 100,000 words. Finance-related keywords are shaded ingreen, legal Latin keywords are shaded in yellow, and keywords which are not appropriate to the legal context
of the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus are shaded in orange.

Rank

Keyword

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21

affiants
UCC
GinnieUSC
REMIC
UScreditor
congress
republic
admiralty
juris
securitization
treasonreserved
personasecuritized
propriasuimaritime
Freddie
Mac

PCF
Freq.
205
181
179
179
158
284
114
112
110
107
98
88
86
78
75
71
69
66
64
63
63

PCF
Norm.
50
44
79
32
31
31
30
27
24
24
22
21
20
19
18
18
18
18
16
16
16

LCF
Freq.
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0

LCF
Norm.
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0

LL

%DIFF

250.64221.29218.84218.84193.17335.52139.37136.92134.48130.81
119.8
107.58105.13
95.35
91.68
86.79
84.35
80.68
78.24
77.01
77.01

34446.9385
30402.4188
30065.3755
30065.3755
26526.4209
23830.0745
19111.4682
18774.4249
18437.3816
17931.8167
16415.1218
14729.9053
14392.862
13044.6888
12539.1238
11865.0372
11527.9939
11022.429
10685.3857
10516.864
10516.864

The vast majority of the cases sampled in the PCF corpus are mortgage foreclosure cases andthe legal technical keywords highlighted in green in Table 4.37 clearly stem from thatbackground (“Ginnie”, “REMIC”, “creditor”, “securitization”, “securitized”, “Freddie”, and“Mac”).6 Though the use of those terms is, generally speaking, not in line with how they might
be employed in a legitimate legal text, they are at least occurring in an appropriate mortgagerelated semantic context. Of more interest to this thesis are the legal technical keywords
highlighted in orange which are completely out of place: “UCC”, “USC”, “US”, “Congress”,“Republic”, “Admiralty”, “treason”, and “maritime”.7 Of all these words, only one (“US”)
appears in the LCF corpus, and even then, only once. These out of place legal technical“Ginnie Mae” and “Freddie Mac” refer to private companies sponsored by the US federal government which
securitize residential mortgages (Fleming 2014). “REMIC” stands for “Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit”
and is one of the methods by which Ginnie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae (another similar company) bundle
collections of mortgages for real estate investors (Freddie Mac 2019).
7
The role of the UCC and Admiralty/Maritime law in Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theory was discussed in
Chapter 1. “USC” refers to the United States Code, the official codification of federal statutory law (Garner 2019).
6136

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
keywords generally relate to federal law or specialized legal contexts that have no place in astate level chancery court; treason, for example, would be a federal crime. This group of
keywords often appears in close proximity to one another, as in the following examples (given
the concentration of keywords in this and the following “excerpt” tables, lines will be presented
with the relevant keywords bolded rather than in KWIC format):Table 4.38 Groupings of legal keywords in main body text from the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus

Line
80

81

Excerpt

Pursuant to Title 28 USC 1333 and US Const. Article 3, §2, the Savings to Suitors clauseapplies to this case at bar whereby the State Court is operating under concurrent
jurisdiction under Federal Common law -i.e. Admiralty/Maritime jurisdiction.
But in this country, for more than a century, these causes have been heard and decided by
Courts of Vice Admiralty. Congress, therefore, must have considered that the words of
the Constitution were used, not in the sense which they had in the laws of England, as
expounded by Lord Coke, and by the common law Courts on writs of prohibition, but inthe sense which they bore in the jurisprudence of our own country.

The five legal keywords highlighted in yellow (“sui”, “juris”, “propria”, and “persona” and“reserved”) are also frequently found together, as in the following signature blocks fromSovereign Citizen texts:

Table 4.39 Groupings of legal keywords in signature blocks from the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus

Line
82

83

Excerpt

Julian Krupin,
In Propria Persona, Sui Juris
UCC 1-103, UCC 1-308, UCC 3-501.”
Carlous Vidal,
True Defendant with correct spelling of Defendant’s name.
All Rights Reserved
Propria Persona

Going by the actual legal meanings of these terms, their use in the PCF corpus is generally
nonsensical; admiralty law, for example, is not relevant in a state level trial court proceedingregarding non-payment of a mortgage. Given the frequency of use of these terms, it is clearthat they have acquired a symbolic significance for Sovereign Citizen litigants. Each federal
court has jurisdiction over an area containing multiple individual states in their entirety (UnitedStates Courts 2022); perhaps for this reason, or because federal courts are generally perceived137to handle more serious matters than state courts (an idea that is largely, if not entirely, accurate(Chemerinsky 1988)), these legal technical terms are evidence of Sovereign Citizen litigants
attempting to tap into a “higher power.” If the goal of PCF texts from a magical perspective isto mystically overpower their legitimate legal opponents, then it makes a certain kind of sensethat invoking words tied to a more powerful aspect of the legal system would allow them to doso.
The apparent fascination in PCF texts with the concept of being an “affiant” was noted
above in Section 4.2.3, and it is made clear again here with the term’s appearance as the top
legal keyword in Table 4.37. As mentioned above, an “affiant” is a person who is swearing to
the truth of an affidavit, and, where the term appears in the PCF corpus it is invariably inreference to the author of the Sovereign Citizen text in question. By framing themselves as“affiants”, Sovereign Citizen litigants not only parasitically attribute a legitimate legal status
to themselves but also emphasize the truth that they feel underlies their pseudolegal arguments.
This status is so important in PCF texts, in fact, that it seems to override their marked preference
for self-reference via the use of first-person pronouns, as seen here:1384. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
Table 4.40 Selected uses of “Affiant” in place of a first person pronoun in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing
corpus

Line

84

85

86

Excerpt

Affiant declares there is no justification for any federal employee, federal officer orelected official of the U.S.C. to continue to make claims for a debt against the legal
fiction or nom de guerre version of Affiant’s Christian name to identify Affiant, a
undead, living woman, as a corporation, constructive trust, or any other artificial entity
which would be contrary to this sword Affidavit.
Fact: That according to the documentation your affiant placed in the Affidavit of Non
Abandonment, Notice of Recission of Contracts (with elements of Banking andMortgage Fraud defined therein) QUANTUM SERVICING CORPORATION and(Pretender Lender) EQUIFIRST CORPORATION., et al; US BANK NATIONALASSOCIATION as Trustee for Three Charles Street REMIC Trust 2009-1, et al allegedon the first paragraph of the “Note” (which states that your affiant had already received
a “Loan” at the time of signing the Promissory Note) when in fact your affiant had only
received a “Promise” to receive a “Loan.”Affiant does declare and affirm that Affiant has scribed and read the foregoing facts,
and in accordance with the best of Affiant’s firsthand knowledge and conviction, suchare true, correct, complete, and not misleading, the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth.

Interestingly, as seen in Line 85’s reference to “your affiant,” this avoidance of the first person
does not do away with the tendency of PCF texts to refer to the court in the second person.
Throughout this chapter, the pseudolegal courtroom filings examined have been
concerned with the social status of their authors and their treatment by the legal system. Thisis particularly true in terms of the legal system’s lack of recognition of their authority and, tothe extent that the authors of PCF texts feel those texts are sworn statements, their honesty.
Assuming that Sovereign Citizens truly feel this way, the more outré features of their texts
begin to make much more sense: the similarity they seem to bear to spoken English (though
this requires a fuller evaluation in a future study), the anger that regularly comes across, andtheir “shouting” via emphatic capitalization can all be understood as a result of Sovereign
Citizen litigants feeling not just unheard, but rejected at a very personal level by the legal
system.

4.3.3 Lexical Bundles in Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings
Some instances of legal technical terminology will not be captured by a keyword or lockword
analysis because the relevant terminology is described by a multi-word sequence (e.g. legal
Latin phrases such as “res ipsa loquitor” or references to specific legal entities like the Seventh
139

Circuit Court of Appeals). This section aims to fill in those potential gaps in the earlier analysis
by examining the most common multi-word sequences in each corpus. As discussed in Chapter
3, this analysis will follow a lexical bundle approach and focus on sequences of four or more
words with a dispersion rate of at least 20%. Consistent with prior work on lexical bundles (e.g.
Chen and Baker 2010, p.33; Ädel and Erman 2012, p.82), results which were overly contextdependent (so-called “content bundles”) have been excluded, and all occurrences of eachbundle were manually reviewed to remove instances of overlap between lexical bundles ofdifferent lengths.
Eight lexical bundles of four or more words occur in at least 20% of the texts in the
LCF corpus, with one lexical bundle consisting of six words and the rest of four. As for the
PCF corpus, six lexical bundles of four or more words occur in at least 20% of the relevant
texts. The longest of these PCF bundles consists of twelve words, with the remainder consistingof six or fewer. These most common lexical bundles, as well as their raw frequencies and range
throughout the LCF and PCF corpora, are given here in Table 4.41 and Table 4.42 (“Range”
indicates the number of discrete texts in which a given lexical bundle occurs):

Table 4.41 Lexical Bundles of four or more words appearing in at least 20% of texts in the Legitimate
Courtroom Filing corpus

Length6

4

Lexical Bundle
the illinois code of civil procedure
code of civil procedure
a copy of theattached hereto as exhibit
as a result ofby and through its
by and through theirother and further relief

140

Frequency
37
30
99
121
76
31
35
38

Range
30
30
43
42
36
30
29
28

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
Table 4.42 Lexical bundles of four or more words appearing in at least 20% of texts in the Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpus

Length126
5
4

Lexical Bundle
in the circuit court of cook county illinois county department chancery divisonof the united states of america
laws of the united statesof the united states
under penalty of perjury
the laws of the

Total Range
71
64
77
57
72
51
160
62
68
55
65
50

Three of the lexical bundles in Table 4.41 involve legal doublets, a feature of legal English nototherwise observed in this Chapter: two bundles include the phrase “by and through” and one
includes “other and further.” These doublets generally occur in the more formally structured
portions of the main body of LCF texts, as in Lines 87 and 88, which are the first and lastsentences, respectively, of the texts in which they appear:

Table 4.43 Selected KWIC lines showing legal doublets in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus

Line

N-

N

N+

87

Plaintiff, People for the Ethical Treatmentof Animals, Inc. (“PETA”),

by and throughits attorneys, respectfully
submits this Response in
Opposition to Defendant’s
735 ILCS 5/2-619(a)(9)Motion to Dismiss

88

WHEREFORE, Plaintiffs respectfully
request this Court continue the trial for two
weeks to allow the completion of Discovery
and trial preparation, and for suchother and further

relief as this court deems
just.

Perhaps surprisingly given the seeming ubiquity of these paired phrases in the popularimagining of legal language (see, e.g., the advertising example in Heffer (2005, pp.10–11))
there are no similar paired phrases found in the PCF bundles in Table 4.42. Consistent withprior research on lexical bundles, the LCF bundles are generally non-phrasal, with the
exception of “other and further relief,” “code of civil procedure,” and “the Illinois code of civil
procedure.” While those latter two bundles do not overlap, every instance of the bundle “codeof civil procedure” in the LCF corpus is, based on a review of the relevant KWIC lines, clearlyreferring to the Illinois code (generally via citation), as seen in the following Lines:

141

Table 4.44 Selected KWIC lines showing “Code of Civil Procedure” referring to the Illinois Code of Civil
Procedure in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus

Line

N-

N

N+

89

However, “Section 2608 of theCode of Civil Procedure

90

Section 2-801(1) of theCode of Civil Procedure,

abolishes the defense of recoupment andrequires recoupment to be considered acounterclaim.” Cox v. Doctor’s
Associates, 245 Ill.App.3d 186, 199 (5thDist. 1993)
the so called “numerosity requirement,”
necessitates that the Class be “sonumerous that joinder of all members is
impracticable.” 735 ILCS 5/2-801(1).

That the provenance of authority upon which LCF texts are drawing is thought to be so obvious
it largely goes unstated; this is yet another example of the sorts of fundamental assumptions
that underlie the LCF corpus that are not shared by the PCF corpus (as evidenced by its frequent
invocations of federal and admiralty law, for example).
The twelve-word bundle in Table 4.42 is a phrase required by the court in which thesetexts were filed. It forms part of the “caption,” a feature discussed in depth in the following
chapter and so will be left to the side here (for the reasons discussed in Chapter 3, this phrase
was not considered when looking at the texts of the LCF corpus but should be understood tobe present in essentially all of them). Three of the six bundles most common to the PCF corpus
involve the words “United States” which is, jurisdictionally speaking, not relevant. In contrast
to the LCF bundles, only one PCF bundle is non-phrasal: “The laws of the.” While a few of
those refer to the laws of the state of Illinois (and two refer to the laws of the states of Michigan
and California, respectively) the vast majority of the occurrences of that bundle are clearlyreferring to federal, rather than state law, making this yet another instance of PCF texts
attempting to engage with higher legal powers than the state court system in which these texts
were filed.

4.4 Prototype Analysis
Prototypicality analysis aims to identify the texts which best represent in themselves thequalities of the corpora to which they belong. This section examines the most prototypical textof both the LCF and the PCF corpus according to their use of legal technical terminology.
Prototypicality was determined using ProtAnt (Anthony and Baker 2017), which ranks theindividual texts in a corpus according to the number of keywords each contains (Anthony and142

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
Baker 2015, p.278) (see the discussion in Chapter 3 for more). Because this chapter is focusedon distinguishing the specifically legal aspects of the LCF and PCF corpora, the legal keywordsof each were used to rank their individual texts. As discussed in Section 4.3.2, keywords for
the LCF corpus were determined by using the PCF corpus as the reference corpus and viceversa. Though the prototype documents examined below were selected based upon the legal
keywords they contain, the analysis considers the range of “consensus” features of legal
English discussed throughout this chapter.

4.4.1 Legitimate Courtroom Filing Legal English Prototype
The prototype LCF text comes from a lawsuit filed against the City of Chicago alleging that
the City had been illegally assessing fees against impounded cars. According to its opening
sentence, the text aims to persuade the court “to stay discovery pending resolution of the
Defendant’s Section 2-619.1 Motion to Dismiss”. The prototype text spans five pages and isdivided into three main sections: the caption, the main body, and the signature block. Becauseof the focus of this chapter, only the contents of the main body will be discussed in this section;
captions and signature blocks in the LCF and PCF corpora are discussed in depth in thefollowing chapter. The entirety of the LCF prototype text is included as Appendix 4.1 and its
second page, containing only main body text, follows as Figure 4.2:

143

Figure 4.2 Second page from the legitimate courtroom filing legal English prototype144

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
The discussion in this chapter has noted three primary tones in the texts of the LCF
corpus: seeming detachment towards the author’s desired outcome, dismissiveness towards the
opposing party, and deference towards the court. All three are present in Figure 4.2:

Table 4.45 Examples of tonal variation in the legitimate courtroom filing prototype text

Line
91
92
93

Excerpt

The City asks that discovery be stayed because the City filed a Section 2-619.1 Motion
to Dismiss the Complaint in its entirety on January 8, 2018.
The Motion to Dismiss asks the Court to enter judgment for the City because, eventaking the allegations in the Complaint as true, Plaintiffs’ claims fail as a matter of law.
Under Rule 201(c)(1), the Court may “make a protective order as justice requires,
denying, limiting, conditioning or regulating discovery…”

Line 91 straightforwardly presents the text’s desired outcome. Line 92 is harshly critical of the
opposing side, alleging that even if everything the Plaintiff says is true, they are legallyincorrect (“even taking the allegations … as true … [they] fail as a matter of law”). Line 93
then deferentially emphasizes the extent of the court’s discretion in the matter, saying that the
court “may” make the desired order, rather than that the court “should” or “must” do so. Though
LCF texts belong to a “persuasive” legal genre (Tiersma 1999, pp.139–141), they appear
structured to be as subtle in their persuasion as possible. This is in line with what Solan (1993,p.2) has previously noted about judicial writing: LCF texts are written in such a way as topresent their desired outcomes as inevitable.
References to appropriate sources of legal authority (i.e. state laws and relevantcaselaw) can be found throughout the prototype text and the presentation of information in the
document is clearly organized into numbered paragraphs. While a few words stand out as
markedly more formal than what might be expected of standard English (“wherefore,” forexample, appears on the prototype’s fourth page), the text is overall accessibly presented andin line with what the analysis elsewhere in this chapter has identified as the characteristics
typical of the texts in the LCF corpus (there are no first- or second-person pronouns present,
for example). Three of the top LCF legal keywords from Table 4.35 are present (“refund,”“municipalities,” and “putative”), as are eleven of the top legal lockwords listed in Table 4.30(“granted”, “pursuant”, “order”, “reasons”, “pending”, “street”, “inc”, “will”, “may”,“authority”, and “sale”). Especially when compared to the PCF prototype text discussed below(and the pseudolegal courtroom filings reviewed in the following chapter), this LCF prototype
is notable for its general lack of graphic elements or methods of visual emphasis: other than145

the two italicized words in Figure 4.2 (“Id.” and “see”, both as part of citations) there are no
deviations from the overall format of the body text, nor is there a header or footer of any kindpresent. Given all of the above, this LCF text appears to be an appropriate prototype for the
corpus, as well as a good point of comparison for the prototype PCF text discussed in thefollowing section.

4.4.2 Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Legal English Prototype
The prototype PCF text appears to come from a mortgage foreclosure case. Though it is only
one page long, this prototype manages to display an impressive array of distinctly Sovereign
Citizen features. As with the LCF prototype, the PCF prototype can be divided into the caption,
main body, and the signature block. Because of the focus of this chapter, the contents of themain body of the prototype text are of primary concern in this section. The entirety of the PCF
prototype text is included as Appendix 4.2 and below in anonymized form as Figure 4.3:

146

4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 4.3 Pseudolegal courtroom filing legal English prototype

The prototype PCF text refers to itself as a “Special Appearance,” a legitimate legal
term for a defendant’s attending court for the sole purpose of contesting that court’s jurisdiction
over them (Garner 2019). Though a special appearance is an actual legal concept, the author of147

this PCF text would have not have been able to make such an appearance, as courts in Illinois
have not used the term since the year 2000 (Illinois General Assembly 2022c).8 Nevertheless,there is an undeniable thematic resonance between a Sovereign Citizen attempting to make aspecial appearance and the previously noted generally jurisdictional nature of Sovereign
Citizen pseudolegal theory. The text’s positioning of its author as the “True Heir” to theproperty relevant to the case, as well as their only claim to authority being that they are“standing in propria persona suri juris” (emphasis and typo in the original), do not align withwhat would be expected of an LCF text. These statements are, however, in line with thepreviously identified importance that individual Sovereign Citizens appear to place on theirstatus as truth tellers and supposed supreme legal authority (relatedly, the text also describes
its author as an “Authorized Representative”, though of whom or what is unclear; it is unlikely
to be a reference to the term as used in Bourdieu (1991a)). Also of note is the consistent use ofbrackets around the author’s surname, which appears to be a variation on the “first-middle:last”
naming format, as well as the talismanic reference to the UCC below the signature line and thestated desire to “destroy the contract” on the relevant property. This last phrase at once indicatesthe open disdain that Sovereign Citizens often possess towards the legitimate legal system
while simultaneously betraying their lack of competence with the LCF genre and legal English
more generally; the word “destroy” never occurs in the LCF corpus.
Though the main body of the PCF prototype text in Figure 4.3 is only three sentences
long, it contains more emphasized text than is found in the full page of LCF body text in Figure
4.2. Not only is the author’s surname consistently visually set apart via the use of brackets, but(ignoring the typo) the phrase including the PCF legal keywords of “propria persona sui juris”
is both bolded and italicized. As has been suggested throughout this chapter, it seems that theclearest way to differentiate PCF texts from LCF texts is via the amount of emphasis present,
both visually and rhetorically. The following chapter will explore the visual emphasis present
in the LCF and PCF corpora in much greater depth.

4.5 Conclusion
This chapter has examined the presence and use of a series of written linguistic features thathave been said to characterize legal English in the LCF and PCF corpora. As discussed in
Chapter 2, not all genres which make use of a register will necessarily display the full range of

8

The same procedural maneuver is still possible, it simply takes place under the auspices of a standard
appearance; see 735 ILCS 5/2-301 and BAC Home Loans Servicing, LP v. Mitchell, 2014 IL 116311, ¶¶ 30-31.

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4. Legal English in LCFs and PCFs
its characteristic features; nor, where they are present, will they necessarily display them withthe same frequency. With that said, for the features examined in this chapter, the “consensus”
description has broadly held true: statistically speaking, when compared to COCA-W, passive
constructions, nominalizations, and negation (when removing the markedly informal “n’t”
from consideration) can be said to be significantly more frequent in the LCF corpus, andpronouns significantly less frequent. For their part, texts in the PCF corpus do a largely
effective job at imitating their legitimate legal counterparts: there is no statistically significant
difference between the two corpora in their frequency of negation (with or without consideringn’t), passive constructions, or nominalizations. There is, however, a difference in their use of
pronouns, with the PCF corpus using them, particularly first and second person pronouns,
significantly more frequently than the LCF corpus. For both sets of comparisons (i.e. the LCF
corpus as compared to COCA-W and the LCF corpus as compared to the PCF corpus) there
were individual categories within those larger ones that went against what the consensus
description of legal English expects, suggesting that while the consensus description may not
be wrong, broadly speaking, further study should be undertaken into the nature of legal English
before such generalizations can be reasonably relied upon (saying nothing of how the presence
and use of these features may vary in other legal and pseudolegal genres).
Across all observed features in this chapter, the language of the texts in the LCF corpus
was found to be relatively objective in tone and concerned with the facts and law most relevantto the case at hand. The authors of those texts were not narratively present, with the focus
instead on the plight of their clients and the remedies requested of the court. Despite their highlevel similarities, the texts comprising the PCF corpus were found to be markedly different inboth tone and content. Though this thesis is not equipped to evaluate this claim in any depth, anumber of features for which there was a significant difference in frequency between the LCF
and PCF corpora aligned the PCF corpus more with spoken than written English; this suggests
a potentially fruitful area for future study. Particularly when this seemingly spoken characteris considered alongside the frequent centering of the author of individual PCF texts (e.g. via
the more frequent use of first person pronouns) and their tendency to directly address both thejudge and the opposing party with second person pronouns, many Sovereign Citizen texts(though not the quantum grammar texts examined) seem almost conversational in tone. Even
where PCF texts use features of legal English at a rate consistent with the texts of the LCF
corpus, their focus in doing so is almost invariably on emphasizing the claimed power andauthority of their Sovereign Citizen authors and on demonstrating the perceived corruption andinadequacies of the legal system than it was with addressing any of the facts relevant to the149individual cases. Particularly given the tendency of PCF texts to invoke the US Constitution
and irrelevant federal laws instead of Illinois state laws, PCF texts do in fact seem to be treating
the aspects of the register of legal English as the sorts of magic “words of power” discussed in
Chapter 2.
This chapter has been primarily concerned with the literal words used in the LCF and
PCF corpora. Given the fame (or perhaps infamy) of PCF texts for their distinctive use of avariety of images and other graphic elements, the picture this thesis has so far presented of therelationship between these two genres is therefore incomplete. The following chapter examines
the use of images and textual emphasis in the LCF and PCF corpora and how they relate toboth the findings in this chapter and questions of language and law more generally.

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5. Multimodality in Legitimate and Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filings
5.1 Introduction
The previous chapter examined the use of legal English in the written contents of the legitimate
courtroom filing (“LCF”) and pseudolegal courtroom filing (“PCF”) corpora; this chapter turns
to their multimodal content via an examination of their use of textual emphasis and images.
Chapter 4 suggested that the areas in which LCF and PCF texts most notably differ can be
explained as some combination of a lack of genre competence on the part of the authors of PCF
texts and as a heightening of those features which Sovereign Citizens view as most emblematicof legal authority. Lay users of legal English often betray their lack of genre competence byfocusing on features which are popularly, though not actually (or only rarely), associated withthe relevant legal context (Heffer 2005, pp.10–11). The more dissimilar a given feature of a
PCF text is from those which would be expected to occur in an LCF text, then, the less likely
it seems to be that the feature reflects a lack of genre competence, and the more likely it is that
it is instead an example of magical heightening. The use of “the below signed” instead of “theundersigned” in PCF texts discussed in the previous chapter likely reflects a lack of genre
competence, for example, while the use of emphatic capitalization can be better understood as
an attempt to lend additional magical force to a text. Many of the most remarked upon featuresof PCF texts, such as the use of thumbprints and postage stamps (Southern Poverty Law Center
2010; Anti-Defamation League 2016), are both visual in nature and have no clear legal
analogues. The analysis in this chapter therefore engages extensively with the magical natureof PCF texts. By identifying these features in the multimodal contents of the two corpora, thischapter seeks to explore the ways in which features other than the literal words used contributeto the legal character of LCF texts and the ways in which PCF texts use those features for theirown parasitic purposes. This chapter addresses this study’s second research question (“How do
the multimodal contents of legitimate courtroom filings and pseudolegal courtroom filings
compare?”) as well as continuing the discussion of its third (“What does the relationshipbetween legitimate courtroom filings and pseudolegal courtroom filings reveal about theoperation of ‘parasitic’ genres?”).
The chapter opens with a review of the methodological considerations unique to thisportion of the analysis in Section 5.2. It then begins the analysis proper by discussing the overall
151

design choices which characterize LCF and PCF texts in Section 5.3. Section 5.4 looks at theways that texts in the two corpora emphasize written text and Section 5.5 turns to the use ofindividual graphic features such as stamps and seals. Section 5.6 concludes the chapter by
analyzing a text from each corpus chosen for the prototypicality of their multimodal contents.

5.2 Chapter-Specific Methodological Concerns
For the purposes of this chapter, the basic unit of analysis is the page, considered holistically(Ding 2000, p.34). All pages in both the LCF and PCF corpora are vertically oriented and“linear”, meaning that they are clearly intended to be read in a certain order (i.e. from top tobottom and from left to right without skipping any lines) (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, p.204).
Though it is not possible to verify without access to the original hard copies of the texts
examined (see Chapter 3), every page in the LCF corpus as well as the vast majority of pages
in the PCF corpus appear to be printed on US letter size paper (i.e. 8.5 inches by 11 inches).
The various features examined in this chapter have been broken down into two
overarching categories: instances of textual emphasis, such as the use of bolding, italics, andunderlining, and images, such as the inclusion of illustrations or photographs. Instances oftextual emphasis were identified based upon their deviation from the predominant design
choices of the text in which they appeared (see the discussion in Section 5.3). Features werecounted at the page level, meaning, for example, that a list which spans multiple pages iscounted separately on each individual page on which it appears. Textual emphasis features
which were used continuously across multiple lines of text on the same page were counted asa single feature. It was possible for a single feature to be labeled in multiple different ways
(e.g. as both bolded text and as an instance of variant spacing). Court filing stamps and otherfeatures which could only have been added after the authors of the LCF or PCF texts submitted
them to the court were not considered. As in Chapter 4, a bolded and shaded value in a table’s“χ2” column indicates that, with a p-value < 0.01, a chi-square test found a statisticallysignificant difference in the frequency of the relevant feature between the LCF and PCF
corpora, while a dash in a “χ2” column indicates that there was not a high enough overallfrequency to test for significance. Throughout this chapter, feature counts have beennormalized to reflect their expected occurrences per 100 pages.
Although Sovereign Citizens have been previously described as making use of different
colors of ink in their documents (Anti-Defamation League 2016), this was not possible toexamine because the majority of the texts in the LCF and PCF corpora were received as152

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
greyscale .pdf scans of the original physical documents. For similar reasons, it was also notpossible to determine the specific fonts or font sizes used in the LCF and PCF corpora; related
discussion is therefore limited to the font families used (i.e. serif, monotype, etc.) and instancesin which the font size used in a document changes within a single page. As discussed in Section
3.6, though the full contents of the LCF and PCF corpora are all part of the public record andtherefore freely obtainable by anyone, personal names and information have been anonymizedin the excerpts in this Chapter except where such anonymization would unavoidably interferewith the analysis (e.g. a handwritten signature in a PCF text overlapping with a postage stamp).

5.3 Overall Design of Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings
Before examining the ways in which written text is emphasized or images are used in the LCF
and PCF corpora, it is necessary to determine the overall design choices which most commonly
characterize texts in these two genres. These text-wide features form the foundation uponwhich every other element examined in this chapter rests, and therefore provide a natural
starting point from which to examine the parasitic generic efforts of pseudolegal courtroom
filings. Section 5.3.1 looks at the interlinear spacing, text alignment, and font family choices
which most strongly characterize LCF and PCF texts. Section 5.3.2 then examines the structureof the opening pages in the two corpora with a particular focus on legal captions.

5.3.1 Typical Spacing, Alignment, and Font Families
Even though all texts in the LCF and PCF corpora are linear and primarily text-based, there arestill a number of choices that must be made in their creation. At the whole-text level, thesechoices largely manifest in a document’s predominant use of interlinear spacing, textalignment, and font family. To compare these features across LCF and PCF texts, every text inthe two corpora was annotated according to its primary (i.e. most common relative to the restof the document) choice in each of the three categories. Features were noted at the whole textlevel rather than at the individual page level to avoid large block quotes or other speciallyemphasized portions of text on a single page affecting the results; these and other such emphatic
features are discussed later in this chapter.
The overall design choices made in the LCF and PCF corpora are given in Table 5.1,
with the most common choice in each category highlighted in green:

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Table 5.1 Predominant design choices in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora. Features
highlighted in green are the most frequent in their category.

Spacing
Single1.5
DoubleAlignment
Justified
Left
Font
FamilySerifSans-Serif
Monospace
Handwritten

LCF (138 Texts) PCF (250 Texts)
Total Percent Total Percent
28
20.3
145
58
10
7.2
33
13.2
100
72.5
72
28.8
Total Percent Total Percent
81
58.7
96
38.4
57
41.3
154
61.6

χ2
49.6632.622766.935
χ2
13.95713.957

Total
133
2
2
1

χ2
22.26417.373-

Percent Total
96.4
194
1.4
39
1.4
7
0.7
10

Percent
77.6
15.6
2.8
4

Based on the most prevalent choices in each category, the average LCF text is likely to be
written in a serif font that has been justified and double spaced, while the average PCF text is
likely to be written in a serif font that has been left-aligned and single spaced. As compared to
PCF texts, LCF texts are statistically significantly more likely to be double spaced, while PCF
texts are significantly more likely to be single spaced. The contents of LCF texts are
significantly more likely to be justified than PCF texts, whereas the contents of PCF texts are
significantly more likely to be left-aligned. Though LCF and PCF texts are both most likely
written in a serif font, a significantly higher proportion of PCF texts than LCF texts are written
in a sans-serif font. There are examples of texts being either primarily handwritten or written
in a monospace font in both corpora, but in neither case were there enough to test forsignificance.
Pages containing the predominant choices made in terms of spacing, text alignment,
and font family in the LCF and PCF corpora follow as Figure 5.1 and Figure 5.2, respectively:154

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.1 Page displaying the predominant methods of interlinear spacing, text alignment, and font choice of
the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus

155

Figure 5.2 Page displaying the predominant methods of interlinear spacing, text alignment, and font choice of
the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus

In terms of overall design, the above are distinguished by their differences in interlinear spacing
and in text alignment. In terms of interlinear spacing, the less space there is between the lines156

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
on a page, the more “cramped [and] overcrowded” it can feel (van Leeuwen 2006, p.148).
While that may not be desirable in most contexts, it can be seen as serving the magic purposesof the PCF corpus: the double spacing between lines on the typical LCF page essentially gives
the reader more “room to breathe” and consider what is being said (van Leeuwen 2006, p.148),
while the single spacing of the PCF page trends more towards the overwhelming, and can beread as an attempt to increase its concentration of legal authority. A similar trend can be seenin the predominant text alignment choices of the two corpora. The LCF corpus’ preference forjustified text, which is in line with the standard practice of professional typesetters, imbues its
texts with a smoother, more balanced quality, while the PCF corpus’ preference for leftalignment results in a sharper, more jagged character (Bringhurst 2019, pp.191–192). In bothcases, the typical LCF page is neatly and accessibly presenting its contents, whereas the PCF
page seems instead to be more akin to a poorly formatted set of terms and conditions (see Milne
and Culnan 2004, pp.23–24; Steinfeld 2016, p.993) which have been structured to intimidate areader into unthinkingly accepting its authority.
Much typographic literature and many prominent style guides (e.g. American
Psychological Association 2020) have long recommended the use of serif fonts such as Times
New Roman over sans serif fonts such as Helvetica with the belief that serif fonts are moreeasily readable. Though modern experimental data has shown little to no difference in theactual legibility of the two font varieties (Arditi and Cho 2005; Perea 2013), this remains awidely accepted design principle. The Bluebook, the primary style guide for American legal
citation, says that “choice of font may vary” in legal writing but does not include a sans serif
font among its examples, instead listing only Times New Roman and the monospace font
Courier (Harvard Law Review Association 2015, p.67). Though The Bluebook largely sets
the standard in American legal writing, its recommendations are non-binding; individual courts
have the authority to issue their own rules regarding required formatting for documents
submitted to them, and many have, though not necessarily comprehensively. The Circuit Courtof Cook County, for example, which is the court in which all texts in the LCF and PCF corpora
were filed, requires a minimum font size of 12 points for body text and 10 points for footnotes,
but makes no recommendations as to the use of specific fonts (Circuit Court of Cook County2014). In contrast to The Bluebook, the style guide for the United States Court of Appeals for
the Seventh Circuit (a federal court which includes in its jurisdiction the geographic area
covered at the state level by the Circuit Court of Cook County) specifically recommends
against, though does not outright forbid, the use of Times New Roman or of monospaced fonts

157

such as Courier, singling out the latter font family in particular as being a relic of an era
when legal briefs were still written on typewriters (Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals 2002,
p.4).1 The Seventh Circuit suggests instead that “[any font] with the word ‘book’ in its name islikely to be good for legal work”, justifying that recommendation by claiming that, as these
fonts are likely to have been designed for professional publishing, they would therefore also be
suitable for legal writing (Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals 2002, pp.4–5). The list of fonts
provided by the Seventh Circuit as examples of appropriate options are all serif fonts (Seventh
Circuit Court of Appeals 2002, pp.4–5).
Whether motivated by empirical data or not, both general principles of document designand style guides written for legal contexts display a clear preference for serif fonts over sansserif or monospace alternatives. As seen in Figure 5.1 and Figure 5.2, this preference isreflected in the design of both the typical LCF and PCF pages. At the same time, Table 5.1
indicates there is a statistically significant difference in the use of serif fonts between the textsof the LCF and PCF corpora, with that difference stemming almost entirely from the much
more frequent (and similarly statistically significant) use of sans serif fonts in PCF texts. As
with the typical spacing and alignment choices discussed above, and insomuch as there is any
truth to the common belief that sans serif fonts are more difficult for readers, here again the
PCF texts trend towards being less accessible than LCF texts.
While PCF texts are fundamentally magic texts (see Section 2.6.2), it is important not
to be too eager to read every instance in which they differ from LCF texts as the magicalheightening of LCF features. This is particularly true where there is a simpler and therefore,
per Occam’s razor, more likely explanation. Though the general tendency towards accessibility
in the overall design of LCF texts and the opposite trend in PCF texts is noteworthy to theextent that it helps highlight a difference in the priorities of the two corpora, the differences
observed so far in this section ultimately seem unlikely to have resulted from active decisions
by the authors of PCF texts. This is because every category in Table 5.1 in which PCF texts
use a given overall design feature significantly more than LCF texts (i.e. single spacing, leftalignment, and sans serif fonts) aligns with the current default document settings for both
Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Given the popularity of Microsoft Office and Google’s G
Suite in the United States (Vailshery 2022), it seems safe to assume that many, if not all, of the

The Illinois Supreme Court goes in an opposite direction and requires all judicial opinions to be written “with12-point, Times New Roman font, with a justified text alignment” (Supreme Court, State of Illinois and Reporterof Decisions, State of Illinois 2017, p.31). Though not directly binding on the sorts of courtroom filings examinedin this thesis, such a recommendation would be noted and taken very seriously by lawyers throughout the State.
1158

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
texts in the LCF and PCF corpora were prepared in one of these two programs and that theauthors of a substantial portion of those texts simply did not make any changes from the default
settings. It is ultimately not possible, however, to definitively determine the exact methods bywhich these texts were produced (though at very least the frequent use of textual emphasis andgraphic features in both the LCF and PCF corpora makes non-computer-based methods ofproduction such as via typewriter unlikely), or whether the choices which align with the default
software settings were actively chosen or simply not considered.
The remaining overall design choices made in the LCF and PCF corpora occur
relatively infrequently and, where it is possible to calculate, without any statistically significant
difference in their frequencies of use. They merit at least some additional thought, however,
because their appearance cannot be explained by pointing to either the standard generic practiceof LCF texts or to default software settings. As a result, of all the overall design and layout
choices in the LCF and PCF corpora, these are the ones which seem most likely to have been
consciously selected by the authors of the texts in which they appear. Texts which are primarily
written by hand or in a monospace font are so infrequent in both the LCF and PCF corpora thatthey are not useful for drawing any sort of broad conclusion about either genre. Texts which
use 1.5 spacing, however, are more common and merit further consideration.
It is difficult to identify an overarching reason for the use of 1.5 spacing in either of the
LCF or PCF corpora. The only common factor in the documents which predominantly use 1.5
spacing seems to be a trend towards shorter texts: 8 of the 10 LCF texts to use 1.5 spacing had
fewer pages than the average LCF text, as did 21 of the 33 PCF texts to use 1.5 spacing. Given
that 72.5% of LCF texts are double spaced, it is unsurprising that a smaller degree of interlinear
spacing would result in fewer pages overall; with everything else being equal, it follows
naturally that less space between lines would result in shorter page counts. The opposite is true,
however, of PCF texts: because 58% of the PCF corpus is single spaced, this leads to thesomewhat counterintuitive result that texts with greater-than-average amounts of space
between their lines tend to be shorter overall (i.e. the average length of a text which primarily
used 1.5 spacing was actually shorter than the average length of a text which primarily usedsingle spacing). Given that it does not appear to be a software default setting, the authors ofthese 1.5 spaced texts likely made an active choice for them to be that way (perhaps feelingthat their documents were too short when single spaced), meaning that they likely reflect agreater awareness of the potential impact of overall design decisions than was possessed by theauthors of the software default texts mentioned above.

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As has been discussed at length, PCF texts are fundamentally magic documents createdin order to “overpower” the legitimate legal system. They do this by taking the form of LCF
texts as a starting point and heightening what are, from the Sovereign Citizen point of view,the most authoritatively salient features. Even if a given feature was not actively considered by
Sovereign Citizen authors while writing (as the overall design features discussed in this section
seem unlikely to have been), this process suffuses every aspect of PCF texts, including theirinterlinear spacing, text alignment, and font. This is because PCF texts are ultimately moreconcerned with the aesthetics of authority than with any sort of cogent legal argumentation. In
that sense, every individual choice made in a PCF text matters because it contributes to thattext’s overall semiotic significance; single spaced text, as mentioned above, can at once be theresult of an author not changing the default settings in Microsoft Word at the same time that it
also enhances the literal concentration of supposedly authoritative legal content on a page. Andeven if the authoritative contribution of these overall design factors is minimal relative toclearer instances of Sovereign Citizen magical heightening, because they form the baselinefrom which all instances of textual emphasis are measured, identifying these choices is literally
fundamental to coming to an understanding of the PCF genre and its parasitic relationship to
the LCF genre. The following subsection continues this discussion with an examination of
captions and the opening pages of LCF and PCF texts.

5.3.2 Captions and Opening Pages
There is almost no variation in the layout of the opening pages of LCF texts. 137 of the 138
texts in the LCF corpus begin with a caption (see discussion in Chapter 3),2 which is followed
in all but four cases by a heading giving the title of the text (e.g. “Defendant’s 735 ILCS 5/2619(a)(9) Motion to Dismiss Plaintiff’s Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief” inFigure 5.3 below) and then the beginning of the document’s body text. An example of such atypical opening page follows as Figure 5.3:

2

The only LCF text not to have a caption is a draft settlement agreement which was submitted for court approval
and would not be expected to have a caption, as it would have been included as an attachment to a separate
document.

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5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.3 Typical opening page of a legitimate courtroom filing

In one of the four LCF texts not to follow the structure of the page in Figure 5.3, the remainderof the first page following the caption is blank, with the text’s title and body text beginning on
the top of the next page; this deviation appears to reflect a purposeful aesthetic choice on the161

part of the text’s author. In the remaining three, due to the complexity of the relevant litigation,
the caption itself was so large that there was no room for anything else on the first page. The
near-universal presence of a caption on the first page of LCF texts as well as its fixed
formulation make it a strong indication of a document’s legitimate legal status. For that reason,
it is worth examining the component parts of a caption in more detail, as well as a caption’s
aggregate effect on the opening pages of LCF and (where present) PCF texts.
As discussed in Chapter 3, captions in the LCF and PCF corpora have been treated as
single, discrete features, meaning that neither the text that these captions contain nor theirgraphic aspects have been included in any other portion of the analysis. This is because thenames of the parties involved and other such relevant details will necessarily change from caseto case, but the overall structure of a caption is incredibly consistent, and its overall effect isgreater than the sum of its individual parts. Elsewhere in an LCF text, for example, a delimiter
may serve as a line for a signature or be employed to separate a page’s body text from its
footnotes. Though in such cases the delimiter is related to other features on the page, thisrelationship is less important than that between the delimiter in a caption and its surrounding
text; a signature does not require a line (dotted or otherwise) to be signed, and often there is nodelimiter between a page’s body text and footnotes. Every caption in the LCF corpus, however,involves a fixed set of four elements. The caption from Figure 5.3 is reproduced below withlabels added to indicate its requisite components as Figure 5.4:

Figure 5.4 Standard legitimate courtroom filing caption with labels

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5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
The four necessary elements of a caption are:
A. The jurisdictional statement. This is required by the court (Circuit Court of Cook
County 2020) in the exact formulation “In the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois”
followed by the relevant department and division. The jurisdictional statement typicallyspans the width of the page and appears at the top, though below any other header that
may be present.
B. The names and the roles of the parties involved in the case. With few exceptions (noneof which are relevant here), civil matter such as the cases in the LCF and PCF corpora
will have both a plaintiff and defendant. Party names appear below the jurisdictional
statement on the left side of the page.
C. The case number. Case numbers take the format “XX AA YYYY” where XX are thefinal two digits of the year in which the case was originally filed, AA is the division towhich the case was assigned (determined by the issues being litigated) and YYYY is
the specific number assigned to that case. Case numbers are given sequentially from 1
beginning on January 1st of the year in which a case was initially filed. All texts in boththe LCF and PCF corpora were filed in the Chancery Division of the Circuit Court of
Cook County, meaning that the cases to which they belong all have a “CH” in theirassigned case number.3 The case number appears opposite the party names, below thejurisdictional statement on the right side of the page.
D. The vertical delimiter. This takes the form of either a solid line or a column of individual
parentheses which separates the party names and the case number.
Within those strictures, however, lies the potential for a degree of variation. Where relevant,captions may also include features such as the address of property related to the dispute, labeled“E” in Figure 5.5:

3

Several texts in the PCF corpus appear to have incorporated (either wholly or in part) aspects of texts whichwere first filed before other courts and therefore contain references to either different divisions within the Circuit
Court of Cook County or to courts in other states.

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Figure 5.5 Legitimate courtroom filing caption including the address of property relevant to the caseAnd, in cases of more complex litigation, additional configurations of party names and theroles of those parties may also be included, as seen in “F” in Figure 5.6:

Figure 5.6 Legitimate courtroom filing caption showing both a suit and a countersuit

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5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
All captions in the LCF corpus, including the variants in Figure 5.5 and Figure 5.6, contain theelements A through D listed above, and therefore have the same overall effect: namely, they
establish that the text in which they appear is a legitimate courtroom filing and list the exact
case to which the text in which they are found belongs.
Given the near-universal presence of captions observed in legitimate courtroom filings,
it seems notable that, even allowing for a much higher degree of variation (e.g. by counting as
captions features which do not follow the prescribed text of the jurisdictional statement or are
missing a vertical delimiter), almost a quarter of PCF texts (62 of 250) do not have anything
resembling one.4 From a parasitic genre perspective, this makes very little sense; if PCF texts
are simply trying to imitate the form of LCF texts, then leaving out such a common and visually
distinctive feature is a significant error, since its absence is likely to tip off a reader that a given
PCF text is not, in fact, a legitimate courtroom filing. Lack of genre competence on the part of
the authors of these PCF texts is always a potential explanation for such a difference, of course,but (as was stated at the outset of this chapter) the more obvious the difference between thetwo corpora is, the more likely it is that such a difference is both purposeful and an example ofmagical heightening. The function of a caption in an LCF text is to clearly locate that text inthe legitimate legal system. Because all texts in the PCF corpus were filed in a courtroom, theSovereign Citizen litigants involved clearly knew they were interacting with that system. By
not engaging with the legal system in this customary manner, therefore, a Sovereign Citizen
either is displaying a truly remarkable lack of genre competence, or, perhaps more likely, canbe seen as attempting to place their texts outside of the standard operation of that system. The
majority of captionless PCF texts were framed as either letters or as notices to the public, as
seen in Figure 5.7 and Figure 5.8, respectively:

4

Table 5.3 states that there are 195 captions present in the 250 texts of the PCF corpus. The discrepancy between
this statistic and the above statement that 62 PCF texts do not contain a caption is explained by the fact that, unlike
in texts of the LCF corpus, some PCF texts contain more than one caption.

165

Figure 5.7 Captionless pseudolegal courtroom filing formatted as a letter

166

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.8 Captionless pseudolegal courtroom filing formatted as a public notice

The opening pages of the two PCF texts shown above each contain elements of a caption, suchas party names, and, in the case of Figure 5.8, even a relevant case number (the “FHA CASE
number” listed in Figure 5.7 likely refers to the Federal Housing Administration, which could167be relevant to the proceeding but would not be a proper substitute for the court-assigned casenumber). Neither, however, contains the two columns separated by a vertical delimiter foundin every LCF caption, nor do they contain a jurisdictional statement. The absence of this latterfeature in particular seems like the strongest evidence that the authors of these PCF texts areattempting to place them apart from the legitimate legal system, particularly when combinedwith the almost talismanic use of legal language in each. Figure 5.7 is titled “Affidavit of Noticeof Conditional Acceptance Pending Proof of Claim and Verification and Validation of AllegedDebt” which, harkening back to the discussion of the use of technical legal terminology in
Section 4.3, seems more like a Markov chain of legal terms than it does any title in the LCF
corpus, while Figure 5.8 insists that “THIS IS NOT A PUBLIC COMMUNICATION” despite
the handwritten note (seemingly added by someone in the clerk of court’s office after the
document was submitted) that “This Document is a Matter of Public Record.” In neither caseis there the sort of clear placement of these texts in the legal (or any other) system that would
be provided by a properly formatted caption. Beyond the practical issues present in theseexamples (e.g. how, in isolation, could a reader identify which case one of these captionlesstexts belongs to?), captionless PCF texts also raise some more fundamental questions regarding
their intended operation: if Sovereign Citizens are trying to place their texts outside of thestandard operating procedure of the legal system, how do they expect them to simultaneously
operate within it? And, if Sovereign Citizens are rejecting the authority of the legal system,
then under what authority are they trying to enforce their desired outcome? Given thedecentralized nature of the Sovereign Citizen movement, it is doubtful that there exists
anything approaching a consensus explanation. Unlike with the “software default” design
elements mentioned in the previous section, however, these choices seem at least to be muchclearer proof of the magically heightened nature of PCF texts.
Even in the first pages of PCF texts with captions, this sort of magical heightening isoften evident. Figure 5.9, for example, features both a series of images and a sort of “precaption” above the jurisdictional statement:168

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.9 Opening page of a pseudolegal courtroom filing containing a “pre-caption”

By invoking the authority of “THE MOORISH NATIONAL REPUBLIC FEDERAL
GOVERNMENT NORTHWEST AFRICA” in such a position on the page, this PCF text
references what is, at least spatially speaking, a “higher power” than that of the Circuit Court
169

of Cook County, Illinois. The arrangement of various graphic elements at the top of the page
as well as the inclusion of the same case numbers contained in the properly formatted caption
below give the sense that there are perhaps two captions on the page, with the upper one clearly
formatted to emphasize its supposed legal primacy. Right at the outset of this PCF text, then,it is clearly adapting a standard legal form for its own pseudolegal purposes. Despite the clear
and consistent formatting of the first pages of LCF texts, these PCF texts have deviated fromthat format; it appears that they often do so to establish from the very beginning that they will
not be playing by the rules of the legitimate legal system.
The opening pages of the PCF texts shown above are much more complex,
multimodally speaking, than the opening page of the LCF text in Figure 5.3. Putting aside forthe moment the images used in Figure 5.8 and Figure 5.9 (images are discussed below in
Section 5.5), all of these PCF texts appear to feature many more instances of textual emphasisthan the LCF texts examined in this section. The next section therefore examines the use of
textual emphasis in the LCF and PCF corpora.

5.4 Textual Emphasis in Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings
While PCF texts are often noted for their use of images (and, as will be discussed in Section
5.5, do in fact make significantly more frequent use of graphic elements than LCF texts), thevast majority of the pages in both of the LCF and PCF corpora are comprised solely of written
text. As a result, instances of textual emphasis are far more common in both corpora than any
other visual component and therefore deserving of particular attention. This section examines
the ways in which texts in the LCF and PCF corpora visually or spatially emphasize theirwritten contents. Section 5.4.1 compares the overall use of textual emphasis in the two corpora.
Section 5.4.2 then discusses the use of bolding, capitalization, italicization, and underlining in
more depth after which 5.4.3 examines other methods of textual emphasis including variation
in interlinear spacing and font within a page.

5.4.1 Textual Emphasis
The instances of textual emphasis observed in the LCF and PCF corpora have been broken
down into four categories:
1. Individual emphasis: instances in which text was either bolded, italicized, underlined,or capitalized, but not more than one of those things.

170

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
2. Multiple emphasis: instances in which text was emphasized via some combination ofbolding, italicization, underlining, and capitalization.
3. Alignment & emphasis: instances in which text was emphasized via bolding,italicization, underlining, and capitalization as well as by a change in its alignment or
justification on the page.
4. Other emphasis: every instance of textual emphasis not captured by the preceding
categories.
Each individual occurrence of a given form of textual emphasis was noted separately, meaningthat a given page could contain multiple instances of the same type of emphasis (e.g. multipleemphatically capitalized words in a PCF text). Every observed instance of textual emphasis in
the LCF and PCF corpora is presented on the following page in Table 5.2, with the mostcommon form of emphasis in each corpus in the four above-mentioned categories highlighted
in green:

171

Table 5.2 Textual emphasis in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora. Features highlighted
in green are the most frequent in their category.

IndividualEmphasisbolditalicunderline
caps
Subtotal
IndividualEmphasis
b/i
b/u
b/c
i/u
i/c
u/c
b/i/u
b/i/c
b/u/c
i/u/c
Subtotal
Alignment &Emphasis
b/cen
i/cen
u/cen
c/cen
b/i/cenb/u/cenb/c/ceni/c/cenu/c/cenb/u/c/cen
Subtotal
Other
Emphasisalign/justify
alt font
font size
spacingfootnote
smallcaps
Subtotal
Total

LCF (1169 Pages)
PCF (1167 Pages)
Per 100
Overall
Per 100
Overall
Total
Total
Pages
Percentage
Pages Percentage
492
42
7.8
1199
103
15.2
2051
175
32.4
699
60
8.9
329
28
5.2
506
43
6.4
982
84
15.5
2026
174
25.7
3854
329
60.9
4430
380
56.2
Per 100
Overall
Per 100
Overall
Total
Total
Pages
Percentage
Pages Percentage
37
3
0.6
501
43
6.4
113
10
1.8
136
12
1.7
272
23
4.3
449
38
5.7
65
6
1
108
9
1.4
0
0
0
58
5
0.7
3
0
0
41
4
0.5
4
0
0.1
141
12
1.8
1
0
0
6
1
0.1
84
7
1.3
106
9
1.3
0
0
0
1
0
0
579
49
9.1
1547
133
19.6
Per 100
Overall
Per 100
Overall
Total
Absolute
Pages
Percentage
Pages Percentage
55
5
0.9
59
5
0.7
6
1
0.1
0
0
0
2
0
0
3
0
0
9
1
0.1
49
4
0.6
10
1
0.2
5
0
0.1
20
2
0.3
25
2
0.3
80
7
1.3
213
18
2.7
1
0
0
3
0
0
8
1
0.1
19
2
0.2
366
31
5.8
226
19
2.9
557
49
8.8
602
50
7.5
Per 100
Overall
Per 100
Overall
Total
Absolute
Pages
Percentage
Pages Percentage
543
46
8.6
494
42
6.3
24
2
0.4
183
16
2.3
3
0
0
247
21
3.1
641
55
10.1
223
19
2.8
110
9
1.7
134
11
1.7
12
1
0.2
9
1
0.1
1333
113
21.1
1290
110
16.3
6323
540
7869
673
-

172

χ2
184.981243.59.3127218.4515.852
χ2319.740.040392
14.045
3.174945.00323.932101.890.0004938
323.13
χ20.49252
18.713
2.1438
3.19E-27
35.326
1.871173.8674.2615
χ2
27.27991.024
191.84325.830.010536
0.8872441.971

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
As shown in the above table, instances of textual emphasis are overall more common in the
PCF corpus than the LCF corpus. Of all the observed methods of textual emphasis across thetwo corpora, there was a statistically significant difference found for 16 methods, with 12 being
more common in the PCF corpus than in the LCF corpus. At the same time, preferences in the
LCF corpus were much stronger than in the PCF corpus; in the individual emphasis category,LCF texts used italics more than they did bolding, underlining, and capitalization combined,
and the combination of bolding, underlining, capitalization, and centering was similarly theoverwhelming LCF choice in the alignment and emphasis category. There are no similarly clear
favorites in the textual emphasis of the PCF corpus.

5.4.2 Bolding, Underlining, Italicization, and Capitalization
In instances where only one method of textual emphasis is applied (i.e. text is only bolded,
capitalized, underlined, or italicized, rather than any combination of those factors), italics occur
significantly more frequently in LCF texts than in PCF texts, while bolding, underlining, and(as was briefly touched upon in the previous chapter) capitalization occur significantly more
frequently in PCF texts. These methods of individual emphasis are, on the whole, significantly
more frequent in the PCF corpus than the LCF corpus. In the five instances where there is asignificant difference in the frequency of multiple emphasis between the two corpora (e.g. text
which has been both bolded and italicized), the combinations are more frequent in the PCF
corpus than the LCF corpus. Taken all together, such instances of multiple emphasis are alsosignificantly more common in the PCF corpus than the LCF corpus. In cases where textual
emphasis is combined with a change in the alignment of a text (invariably centering, with all
instances in both corpora where this occurred functioning as document titles or section
headings), capitalization and centering, as well as the triple combination of bolding,capitalization, and centering occurred significantly more frequently in the PCF corpus than the
LCF corpus. The combination of bolding, underlining, capitalization, and centering, however,occurred significantly more frequently in the LCF corpus than the PCF corpus.
This last result is notable because it runs contrary to the general trend of PCF texts
making more frequent use of a greater variety of methods of emphasis than LCF texts; in thefeatures observed so far in this thesis, PCF texts have generally had a “more is more” ethos
and, given that the combination of bolding, underlining, capitalization, and centering was themost complex method of textual emphasis observed in either corpus, it is therefore somewhat
surprising to see it being used relatively more frequently in LCF texts. This is explained,173however, by a competing trend in LCF texts: namely, the strength of their preferences forcertain stylistic choices. While not necessarily dictated by either the Bluebook or a court-issued
style guide, there is a clear “house style” for legitimate courtroom filings. Not only are italics
significantly more common in LCF texts than in PCF texts, for example, but they are also morecommon than the rest of the methods of individual textual emphasis in the LCF corpus
combined. Similarly, the combination of bolding, underlining, capitalization and centering fortitles and headings in LCF texts is more common than the rest of the observed “Alignment &Emphasis” categories combined. Conversely, there are no such clear favorites within the
textual emphasis choices of the PCF corpus.
Consistent with other findings in both this and the previous chapter, the layout anddesign choices of PCF texts seem to vary to a much greater degree than the choices made in
LCF texts. Where LCF texts have a consistent style that generally persists across cases andregardless of author, there is a much greater amount of variation in the methods of textual
emphasis employed in the texts in the PCF corpus than in their LCF counterparts. For example,
LCF texts generally use italics either to indicate the particular relevance of a selection of text
or as part of citation formatting, as in the following Figure:

Figure 5.10 Typical uses of italics in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus

Even when an individual LCF text makes a choice that differs from the general tendency oftexts in the corpus, it is at least consistent within itself (e.g. the prototype LCF text included as174

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
Appendix 5.1 and the related discussion in Section 5.6.2). This is not necessarily the case with
PCF texts, where methods of emphasis can vary significantly even within the same page:

Figure 5.11 Inconsistent textual emphasis in a pseudolegal courtroom filing

Citations are not underlined in paragraph B of Figure 5.11 but they are in paragraph C(2).
Quotations are bolded and/or underlined and/or italicized with no apparent logic behind the useof one method over the other. Rather than the systematic approach that characterizes textual
emphasis in legitimate courtroom filings, this more chaotic style of emphasis once again gives
175the impression that as many things as possible were tried in the PCF text in the hopes that agreater concentration of features would magically increase the ultimate authority of that text.
In its discussion of negation in the LCF and PCF corpora, the previous chapter examined thetendency of PCF texts to emphatically capitalize “NO” and the “shouting” effect that has been
noted to impart to readers. Capitalization is often used when writing the names of parties inboth the LCF and PCF corpora (in fact, that is almost the exclusive use of capitalization on its
own in the LCF corpus), but a substantial number of instances of capitalization in the PCF
corpus are of that emphatic variety:

Figure 5.12 Emphatic capitalization in a pseudolegal courtroom filing

In some cases (the prototype text included as Appendix 5.2, for example), nearly every bit ofwriting in a PCF text has been emphasized in some way. This further supports the magicalreading of PCF texts: they are attempts to overpower LCF texts by essentially shouting overthem (Robb 2014). At the same time, it raises a question about a potential failing of the legal
system: if Sovereign Citizens sincerely feel the need to “shout” so much in this way, that likely
means they are not feeling heard by the legitimate legal system. That does not justify this sortof pseudolegal conspiracy thinking or the very real harms that result from it, of course, but tothe extent that there is a trend in PCF texts of emphasizing the power and identities of theirauthors and the apparent depths of their feelings, it is likely worth considering as the legitimate
legal system looks for ways to address these problems.

5.4.3 Other Methods of Textual Emphasis
Though texts in the LCF corpus make significantly more frequent use of what is described inTable 5.2 as “Other Emphasis”, the difference in their overall expected frequency per 100 pages
is slight (113 in the LCF corpus to 110 in the PCF corpus). Within that category, however,there are some clear trends: there is significantly more emphasis via alignment and justificationof text (in this case without bolding, italicization, or underlining) and via alternative spacing(e.g. shifting from double or 1.5 spacing to single spacing) in the LCF corpus than the PCF
176

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
corpus. As in the previous section, there is very little variation in the contexts in which thesemethods of emphasis occur: LCF texts generally modify the alignment and spacing of text
either in the case of a block quote or for the signature block which occurs at the end of a text:

Figure 5.13 Block quote formatting in a legitimate courtroom filing

Figure 5.14 Signature block formatting in a legitimate courtroom filing177

Texts in the PCF corpus, by way of contrast, make significantly greater use of a range of fonts
and differing font sizes than texts in the LCF corpus, which almost never vary in their choiceof font variety or font size within a text. PCF texts alter the font size of text for one of two
reasons: first, to indicate a document or section title, as in Figure 5.15:

Figure 5.15 Alternate font size in the title of a pseudolegal courtroom filing

Or to give particular force to a portion of body text, as in Figure 5.16:

Figure 5.16 Alternate font size used to emphasize text in a pseudolegal courtroom filing

Emphatic choices such as these can be considered higher impact in the sense that they are much
more immediately noticeable to a reader and are yet another example of the preference for highconcentrations of such features in PCF texts. In Figure 5.17, for example, the font on a single
page of a PCF text changes no fewer than eight times:

178

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.17 Multiple font changes in a single page of a pseudolegal courtroom filing

As mentioned in the discussion of parasitic genre in Chapter 2, Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal
courtroom filings are in constant conversation not just with legitimate courtroom filings, butalso with one another and new pseudolegal strategies and resultant trends in formatting choices
can be expected to develop naturally over time. If emphasis in the PCF corpus is meant to179

signify a desire to be heard more than it is to guide the reader in any particular sense, theninstances of overlapping emphasized text, as in Figure 5.18, may become more common overtime:

Figure 5.18 Emphasized text as a watermark in a pseudolegal courtroom filing

The use of a bolded and capitalized watermark such as this is, in a sense, an even more efficient
way of communicating the apparent intensity that Sovereign Citizens are attempting to impart
into their texts. Particularly because the watermark in Figure 5.18 actively reduces the overall
legibility of the text it overlaps, features such as this further support the suggestion made earlier
in this chapter that PCF texts are constructed more to communicate emotionally than they are
to make a particular set of arguments (pseudolegal or legitimately legal).

180

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
5.5 Images in Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings
This section turns to an examination of the most frequently noted and explicitly magicalfeatures of PCF texts: their use of images (i.e. individual graphic elements other than the written
word). In addition to examining the frequency of these features across the LCF and PCF
corpora, this section also compares their distribution on the page through an examination of aseries of heatmaps (see Section 3.5.6). Every observed image in the LCF and PCF corpora isreported in Table 5.3, with the most common form of emphasis in each corpus highlighted ingreen:

Table 5.3 Graphic features in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora. Features highlighted
in green are the most frequent in their category.

Graphic
CaptionPhoto
Illustrations
Stamp
Seal
Thumbprint
Table
List
Delimiter
HeaderFooter
Handwriting
Total

LCF (1169 Pages)
PCF (1167 Pages)
Per 100
Per 100
Total Pages Percent Total
Pages
Percent
χ2
136
12
5.4
195
17
5.1
0.18462
3
0
0.1
4
0
0.1
0
0
0
34
3
0.9
20.97
0
0
0
18
2
0.5
10.332
41
4
1.6
105
9
2.7
8.0855
0
0
0
52
4
1.4
33.024
17
1
0.7
0
0
0
23.314
782
67
30.9
925
79
24.2
34.737
356
30
14.1
814
70
21.3
52.226
19
2
0.8
90
8
2.4
22.241
1045
89
41.3
684
59
17.9
231.53
129
11
5.1
901
77
23.6
420.76
2528
216
3822
328
-

There is a statistically significant difference in the frequency of 10 of the 12 observed features.
Eight of those 10 occur more frequently in the PCF corpus than in the LCF corpus, with the
exceptions being the use of tables and footers in the LCF corpus. Section 5.5.1 examines theimages present in both the LCF and PCF corpora, while section 5.5.2 examines those features
present in only one of the two corpora.

5.5.1 Images Present in Both Corpora
Putting to the side captions (which have been discussed both in the prior chapter and above in
Section 5.3.2) and photographs (which were so infrequently observed in both corpora that they
are not useful for drawing any broader conclusions about either LCF or PCF texts), there is a181statistically significant difference in the frequency of every other observed graphic feature
between the LCF and PCF corpora. With the exceptions of tables, which appear only in the
LCF corpus and will be discussed more in the following section, and footers, all of thesegraphic features (i.e. 8 of the 12 categories) are significantly more common in the PCF corpus
than in the LCF corpus.
As defined for the purposes of this thesis, headers and footers have no standardized
content, and instead refer to text positioned at either the top or bottom of a page, respectively,
which is clearly separated from a page’s main body text. Headers occur significantly more
frequently and at more than four times the rate in the PCF corpus than in the LCF corpus, while
the opposite is true of footers, which occur significantly more frequently, and about one and ahalf times as often, in the LCF corpus than the PCF corpus. Page numbers are the most common
contents of both headers and footers, with LCF texts sometimes including either their court
assigned case number or internal law firm filing numbers, with an example of the latter givenin the following Figure:

Figure 5.19 Footer from a legitimate courtroom filing with an internal document filing number

These filing numbers, which are generated and assigned by a law firm’s case management
software, are used for internal tracking and organizational purposes; they have no legal
meaning and would not be of note to the court. Most commonly, in both LCF and PCF texts,
the only thing contained in a footer is a page number, generally placed at the center of thepage, as in the following example from an LCF text:182

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.20 Footer from a legitimate courtroom filing with a centered page number

As shown below in the heatmaps in Figure 5.21, footers in the LCF corpus are overwhelmingly
placed at the center of the page. Instances of right-aligned footers, such as the internal filingnumber example in Figure 5.19, are so rare that the LCF footer heatmap does not register them.
While the PCF footer heatmap similarly indicates that the majority of PCF footers are similarly
centered, it does contain a secondary hotspot in the bottom right corner of the page:

Figure 5.21 Spatial distribution of footers in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora

As with the some of the differences in the overall layout of LCF and PCF texts discussed above,
this secondary hotspot likely results from a lack of genre competence and a lack ofconsideration on the part of the authors of PCF texts (the former because LCF texts appear to
rarely, if ever, place a page number in that location and so PCF texts are getting it “wrong” inthat sense, and the latter because certain versions of Microsoft Word place page numbers in a183

page’s bottom right corner by default). In instances where PCF texts place a footer in thebottom right position, they do so without any clear alternative purpose:

Figure 5.22 Footer from a pseudolegal courtroom filing with a right-aligned page numberThis is not to say that the intent behind any single design choice in a text can be definitively
identified via a post-hoc examination. However, in many instances where pseudolegal
courtroom filings depart in their design from what would be expected of a legitimate courtroom
filing, these choices seem much more purposeful, as in the following PCF footer:

Figure 5.23 Footer from a pseudolegal courtroom filing with accompanying text

The footer in Figure 5.23 reads:

NOTICE AND WARNING THIS IS A SELF EXCECUTING CONTRACT FAILURE
TO RESPOND WITH AN AFFIDAVIT TO REBUTT POINT FOR POINT
CONSTITUTES ACCEPTANCE OF ALL THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS BYACQUIENCE THE SUPREME COURT HAS STATED WHEN YOU HAVE A

184

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
LEGAL AND MORAL OBLIGATION TO SPEAK AND YOU DON’T THAT ISFRAUD!!!!!!

No footer in the LCF corpus contains comparable accompanying text. This text, which isrepeated on the bottom of every page of the PCF text in which it is found, contains both multiple
typos (“REBUTT” and “ACQUIENCE”) and an impressive array of distinctively Sovereign
Citizen pseudolegal features: emphatic capitalization (including no fewer than six exclamation
points), misstatements of contract law, the use of second person in reference to the reader, anda contraction. While this quantity of text in a footer is on the higher end of that found in the
PCF corpus, it goes to show that when Sovereign Citizens actively want to deviate from thetypical layout and design choices made in LCF texts, they are rarely subtle in doing so; as wasseen with the methods of textual emphasis examined in Section 5.4, where there is a marked
difference between LCF and PCF texts, PCF texts tend to have a higher concentration ofgraphic features than texts belonging to their host genre.
The use of lists in LCF and PCF texts provides a somewhat more subtle example of
PCF texts heightening features found in LCF texts. As seen in Table 5.3, lists occur
significantly more frequently in the PCF corpus than in the LCF corpus, at a normalized rateof 79 times per 100 pages as compared to 67 times per 100 pages in LCF texts. The following
heatmaps display the typical spatial distribution of lists in both corpora:

Figure 5.24 Spatial distribution of lists in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora185

As discussed in Section 3.5.6, hotspots in these heatmaps are concentrated on the center pointsof the observed features. Accordingly, the LCF heatmap should be read as indicating that the
typical center point of the lists in that corpus was roughly halfway up the page with relatively
little variation in either height or indentation, not that lists in the LCF corpus were generally
very short. Lists in the PCF corpus, by way of contrast, display a higher degree of both verticaland horizontal variation in their center point than their LCF counterparts. Figure 5.25 andFigure 5.26 show how lists generally appear in the LCF and PCF corpora, respectively:186

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.25 List formatting in a legitimate courtroom filing187

Figure 5.26 List formatting in a pseudolegal courtroom filing

LCF texts tend to favor single-level lists while PCF texts are more likely to employ multi-level
lists. The list in the PCF text in the above figure contains no fewer than five sub-levels, leading188

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
to unwieldy potential citations to document sections such as “7.1(c)(2)(A).” While this depthof list would not necessarily be out of place in a contract or a statute (two other genres of legal
writing which the PCF text in Figure 5.26 is clearly inspired by), it is a markedly different andmuch more complex layout choice than that made in the list found in the LCF text in Figure5.25. Unlike in the discussion of page numbers above, where it seems likely the bottom-rightaligned numbers in PCF texts resulted from a combination of a lack of genre competence anddefault word processor settings, this greater list complexity in PCF texts relative to LCF texts
is more likely to reflect an intentional choice on the part of individual Sovereign Citizen authors
and is therefore better understood as another attempt on the part of PCF authors to enhance themagical powers of their texts by heightening the presence of a feature commonly found in LCF
texts. Earlier in this chapter, this effect was observed via a more frequent use of certain methodsof textual emphasis; here, it is achieved through a text’s layout. From a magical perspective, if
LCF texts are seen as gaining part of their power via elements of their layout and LCF texts
use single-level lists, then PCF texts will be able to lay claim to even greater power by
employing a greater amount of lists with more levels; once again, PCF texts have been foundto make more frequent use of images than LCF texts and to place them in a wider variety oflocations on the page.
PCF texts use significantly more seals (which have been defined for the purposes ofthis thesis as graphic features which appear intended to verify either the identity of a text’s
author or of the text itself) than LCF texts. Seals occur approximately two and a half times asoften in the PCF corpus than they do in the LCF corpus. The most common type of seal present
in the LCF corpus is an ink stamp bearing an attorney’s name and registration number, while
the most common type of seal in the PCF corpus is a notary seal. Examples of both are given
below in Figure 5.27 and Figure 5.28:

189

Figure 5.27 Attorney registration stamp in a legitimate courtroom filing

Figure 5.28 Notary seal in a pseudolegal courtroom filing

In both corpora, these seals generally appear on a document’s final page near a signature block(the stamp reading “Filed” in Figure 5.27 is not considered a feature of the LCF text for the190

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
purposes of this thesis, because, as was explained in Chapter 3, such seals are applied by the
court clerk once a document has been filed rather than by a text’s author in the drafting process).
The notary seals used in PCF texts are all consistent with those found in the LCF corpus, suchas the one shown in the following Figure:

Figure 5.29 Notary seal from a legitimate courtroom filingThis indicates that the notary seals in PCF texts are likely legitimate (i.e. that the stamps wereapplied by actual notaries rather than resulting from any particular Sovereign Citizen magicalheightening). Given that notaries are themselves government-authorized functionaries, it seems
notable that Sovereign Citizens are willing to work with them in the creation of their texts.
With that said, the actual role of a notary in these cases would be limited to verifying that theindividual signing a given text provided proof that they were who they claimed to be, and in
this sense, it could be seen to be another way of making the government acknowledge theidentity (and implicitly, the power and authority) of individual Sovereign Citizens. It wasobserved that the names of several notaries are repeated throughout the PCF corpus, and thatsome of those notaries appear to share names with Sovereign Citizen litigants in other cases in
the corpus. Though this could be coincidental, it suggests that some Sovereign Citizens may
have themselves become notaries and that there is at least a degree of organization andcooperation within the Chicago-area Sovereign Citizen community. It may also explain why
individual Sovereign Citizen litigants are willing to work with representatives of the legal
system in this instance. Examining such potential real-world connections between Sovereign
Citizen litigants is beyond the scope of this thesis, however, and this subject is left for future
study.
Several seals present in PCF texts have no clear analogues in the LCF corpus. Without
access to the original texts, it is not possible to determine the exact nature of each of these seals
with complete certainty, but they generally appear to be either embossed stickers as in Figure
5.30:
191

Figure 5.30 Embossed sticker seal in a pseudolegal courtroom filing

Or coats of arms, as seen in Figure 5.31:

Figure 5.31 Coat of arms in a pseudolegal courtroom filing

The sticker in Figure 5.30 appears to say “Notary Public” in its center and accompanies two
separate seemingly legitimate notary seals. There is no legal reason that the signature of theSovereign Citizen author of that text would need to be witnessed by more than one notary, nor
is there any clear legal purpose to the sticker. Instead, this seems like yet another example of192

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
the magical heightening practices of PCF texts. If an LCF text would use one notary stamp,then, in line with Sovereign Citizens’ aforementioned “more is more” ethos, not only will a
PCF text use two, but it might as well also include a bonus sticker to further emphasize thedegree to which the text has been notarized, as if that were a factor in a text’s legal validity.
According to the magical thinking that motivates this sort of practice, this enhances the powerof the PCF text and therefore increases its likelihood of successfully overpowering thelegitimate legal system. This focus on the verification of the identity of individual Sovereign
Citizen authors fits with both the importance of truth-related words such as “affiant” noted in
Chapter 4’s discussion of the use of legal language in PCF texts, and with the overall
importance that the authors of these texts appear to place on centering the identity in theirwritings. The use of the coat of arms in Figure 5.31 can be seen as a related attempt to bothassert the identity of the text’s author as, presumably, someone entitled to use that coat of arms,
and to establish their claimed foreign sovereignty as the source of their immunity from thepowers of the US state and federal governments. Though no other seal in the PCF corpus makes
this sort of claim, it has much in common with the use of illustrations in PCF texts discussed
in the following section.
Delimiters occur significantly more frequently and more than twice as often in the PCF
corpus as they do in the LCF corpus. Delimiters are graphic elements such as lines used tomark out different areas of a page (delimiters occurring in legal captions are not included in
the count in Table 5.3 as they were instead considered above in the broader discussion of
captions Section 5.3.2). The vast majority of delimiters in the LCF and PCF corpora occur aspart of signature blocks, where they form the lines onto which individuals place theirsignatures, though they also commonly serve to separate the body text of a page from its
footnotes, as seen in the following examples from the LCF corpus:

Figure 5.32 Delimiter as signature line in a legitimate courtroom filing

193

Figure 5.33 Delimiter separating body and footnote text in a legitimate courtroom filing

The PCF corpus often uses delimiters to create what are essentially “fill in the blank” sections,with those sections generally being completed by a notary:

Figure 5.34 Delimiters in a notarized section of a pseudolegal courtroom filing

Though comparable sections exist in some LCF texts, they are much less elaborate:194

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.35 Delimiters in a notarized section of a legitimate courtroom filing

Compared to their LCF equivalents, these notary form sections in PCF texts are almost minitexts within a text. They appear to serve the dual purpose of increasing the formal nature of
PCF texts by adding additional structure while simultaneously additionally emphasizing thepresence of the notary seal.
The final shared graphic feature to be discussed in this section is the use of handwritten
text. Handwritten text is significantly more common in PCF texts than LCF texts, occurring
seven times as often. The vast majority of instances of such handwriting in both LCF and PCF
texts are signatures, generally occurring at or near the end of a document. As with other features
discussed above, Sovereign Citizens seem intent on outdoing LCF texts in terms of both thequantity and content of the signatures in their texts, as in the following excerpt in which a
Sovereign Citizen includes two full signature blocks in quick succession:

195

Figure 5.36 Identical signature blocks on the same page of a pseudolegal courtroom filing

In other cases, in addition to writing their names, Sovereign Citizens append phrases such as“without prejudice” as well as references to the Uniform Commercial Code:

Figure 5.37 Signatures followed by “without prejudice” and references to the UCC in a pseudolegal courtroom
filing196

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

While legally meaningless, such accompaniments to signatures are part of many of the morecommon Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theories. Their real effect is to enhance the perceived
magic character of the signing process (see Luhrmann 1989, p.221) for the Sovereign Citizen
signatories, thereby enhancing their estimation of the text’s magical potency. Once again,
Sovereign Citizen texts personally involve and invoke their authors at a much greater rate thanLCF texts.
Seals, delimiters, and handwriting all most commonly occur on the final pages of thetexts in which they appear. The following heatmaps show their typical spatial distribution in
the LCF and PCF corpora:

Figure 5.38 Spatial distribution of seals in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora

197

Figure 5.39 Spatial distribution of delimiters in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora

Figure 5.40 Spatial distribution of handwriting in the Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpora

Across all three sets of heatmaps, a clear and distinct pattern emerges for each corpus: seals,delimiters, and handwriting all tend to occur in a consistent single column on the right side of
the page in LCF texts and in multiple columns spread across the page in PCF texts (the hotspot
in the bottom left corner of the LCF and PCF delimiter heatmaps relates to the use of lines
separating body text from footnote text as seen above in Figure 5.33). In both corpora, thevertical variation in the placement of these features is explained by the fact that they tend to
appear following the end of their document’s main body text. Because the exact endpoint of198

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
that main body text naturally varies depending upon a number of factors (e.g. wordcount, fontsize, etc.) the vertical placement of these three images does as well. The difference in thehorizontal placement of these features between the two corpora, however, appears moremeaningful: not only are seals, delimiters, and handwriting all significantly more common in
the PCF corpus than in the LCF corpus, but they also all occur in more positions on the page.
As has been noted throughout this section, PCF texts will often take existing features of LCF
texts and heighten them by increasing their frequency, adding additional emphasis, orsometimes both at once. This heightening often seems to involve an increased focus on theidentity of the author of the PCF text in question rather than on the substance of any(pseudo)legal arguments they may be making. This section has explored the ways in which thisprocess occurs in graphic features which are shared by both the LCF and PCF corpora; thefollowing section turns to an examination of the graphic features which are found in only oneof the two corpora.

5.5.2 Images Unique to One Corpus
As shown in Table 5.3 on page 181, tables are the only graphic feature to occur in the LCF
corpus which do not occur in the PCF corpus, while there are three features in the PCF corpus
which do not occur in the LCF corpus: thumbprints, postage stamps, and illustrations. Thesefeatures merit closer examination because of the degree to which they so clearly distinguishthe texts belonging to the LCF and PCF genres.
The presence of tables in the LCF corpus and their absence in the PCF corpus isconsistent with the tendency of LCF texts noted throughout this chapter to present information
clearly and accessibly, as well as with what is essentially the opposite tendency in PCF texts.
This thesis has suggested that the goal of PCF texts is not to communicate any particular pieceof information, but rather to magically overwhelm the opposing forces of the legitimate legal
system; to the extent that presenting information in table form is an attempt to more effectively
communicate, then, such a practice would be anathema to the magic purposes of PCF texts. A
representative table from the LCF corpus follows as Figure 5.41:

199

Figure 5.41 Table from a legitimate courtroom filing

The purpose of this table is clear, its presentation of information is straightforward, and its
math is correct. It is, therefore, essentially the opposite of a PCF.
The features which are unique to the PCF corpus are, perhaps unsurprisingly, amongst
the features which are generally said by outside observers (e.g. Anti-Defamation League 2016)
to be most characteristic of PCF texts relative to legal texts.5 Given the lack of comparable
features in the LCF corpus, the presence of thumbprints, postage stamps, and illustrations in
the PCF corpus is unlikely to be the result of attempts at parasitic imitation; instead, thesefeatures are better understood as part of the magic nature of PCF texts. Indeed, given theprominence of these features in most observers’ accounts of PCF texts, these features may
actually be considered the most magical parts of PCF texts, insomuch as they appear to be thosewhich most clearly detract from their parasitic efforts by marking them as something clearly
other than a legitimate courtroom filing.
An examination of the distribution of these three features reveals that they exist in acomplementary distribution:5

Based on what others have reported (e.g. Williams 2016), it is likely that the texts in the PCF corpus as originally
filed made at least some use of color, particularly in their signatures and use of thumbprints. Red and blue seemto be the most commonly noted, with red sometimes stemming from the use of blood in lieu of ink (Conti 2018).
As previously discussed, however, it was not possible for this thesis to examine this aspect of PCF text becauseof the format in which the documents examined were obtained.

200

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.42 Spatial distribution of images unique to the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus

Though there is some variation (particularly in the placement of thumbprints), a clear hotspot
is visible in each heatmap in Figure 5.42: Illustrations tend to occur in the top left corner of apage, thumbprints in the bottom left corner, and postage stamps in the bottom right corner. Thisapparent consistency for each feature suggests both that there is a degree of purposefulness intheir placements and that the purpose of each may differ.
About 60% of illustrations in PCF texts occur on the first page, generally as part ofsomething approximating the captions which characterize the first pages of LCF texts (see201Section 5.3.2). The majority of all illustrations in the PCF corpus are clearly intended to relate
to the US government, as in the following figure:

Figure 5.43 American flag illustration in a pseudolegal courtroom filing

The American flag is the most common single illustration present in the PCF corpus, followed
closely by a modified version with vertical, rather than horizontal, stripes and the colors of the
portion containing the stars inverted:

Figure 5.44 Modified American flag illustrations in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus

Other American symbols are occasionally present as well, such as approximations of thepresidential seal or the “All Seeing Eye” present on the back of the one-dollar bill:202

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.45 Additional US-themed illustrations in a pseudolegal courtroom filing

Notably, there are no illustrations of the Illinois or Chicago flags in the PCF corpus. As all
texts in the PCF corpus were filed in a state level court in Chicago, to the extent that thepresence of any flags might be expected or “proper” (though, as said before, there are none in
the LCF corpus), it would be those. The use of the national flag makes the most sense when
considered alongside the trend of referring to US federal, rather than state, law discussed in theprevious chapter. The modified and color-inverted version of the American flag can similarly
be understood as the next step in the magical heightening process: if making use of theAmerican flag rather than a state flag is laying claim to a higher level of authority, then thismodified American flag is an attempt to contact some still higher level of magical power andauthority. Sovereign Citizens refer to this flag as the “United States Civilian Flag” or “U.S.
Civil Flag” and claim that it represents “a Civilian government run by the American People
under the Common law” (USCivilFlags.org 2022), while what is generally believed to be the“official” American flag is actually the “Military Flag of the United States” (Anonymous
Patriot 2011) and serves as proof of the governments suppression of that original common law(see the discussion in Chapter 1 for more on the general contours of Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal theory). While this “U.S. Civil Flag” bears a resemblance to one used by the Sonsof Liberty in 1767, that flag (sometimes called the “Rebellious Stripes” (Sterbenz 2016)) did
not have a star field portion, nor has any official version of the flag of the United States everhad vertical stripes (Harrington 2019). By laying claim to such a history, however, Sovereign
Citizens are essentially making an appeal to precedent: if this U.S. Civil flag predates the“Military Flag,” then surely it can draw upon older, more powerful magic.6
Other Sovereign Citizens refer to this instead as the “Title 4 Flag” and connect it to a complicated series ofconspiracies centered around the postal service (Netolitzky 2018b, p.1063). This is far from the only flag-based
pseudolegal theory put forward by the Sovereign Citizens; gold fringe on a flag, for example, which is particularly
6203

The use of illustrations in other PCF texts takes this heightening process in a different
direction. Rather than implicitly invoking the authority of the federal government (or somemodified version thereof), these texts instead make use of illustrations to lay claim to theauthority of a foreign government. This most often takes the form of either a claimed
association with a (generally non-existent) Native American tribe (see Dew 2015) or with some
sort of “Moorish” government (Pitcavage 2016), as seen in the following excerpt:

Figure 5.46 Moorish illustrations in a pseudolegal courtroom filing

Regardless of the exact claim being made, the effect is the same: it is yet another attempt on
the part of the authors of Sovereign Citizen texts to show that not only does the court have noauthority over them, but, in fact, they have authority over the court.
Illustrations, thumbprints, and postage stamps all form part of an overarching effort toemphasize the power and identity of the author of the text in which they appear. An
examination of the use of postage stamps in the PCF corpus reveals just how interdependent
these features can be: every occurrence of a postage stamp in a PCF text is accompanied by ahandwritten signature, and half are also accompanied by a thumbprint, as in the following
examples:common in courtrooms and military contexts, is often pointed to as evidence of the government’s secret impositionof admiralty law onto the people (Southern Poverty Law Center 2010).

204

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.47 Postage stamps accompanied by other distinctive Sovereign Citizen features in the Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filing corpus

Thumbprints, particularly when made in one’s own blood (Conti 2018; Netolitzky 2018b,
p.1063), are used to prove that a Sovereign Citizen is a “natural person” rather than a“strawman” (see the discussion in Chapter 1) while postage stamps are generally believed totransform the Sovereign Citizen into the “Postmaster” of their own personal nation-state(Netolitzky 2018b, p.1058).7 In this way, both postage stamps and thumbprints serve a similarfunction to notary seals (see the discussion in the Section 5.5.1), insomuch as they appear
intended to lend an element of authority or verification to their accompanying signatures. 8
Unlike postage stamps, however, thumbprints seem capable of functioning on their own in PCF
texts. As seen in Figure 5.42, there is a clear thumbprint hotspot in the bottom left corner ofthe page. Thumbprints which appear in this position invariably do so without any
accompanying features, as in the following excerpt:

7

Postage stamps play a significant role in a number of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theories, though only one
such theory (quantum grammar, discussed below in Section 5.6.3) is explicitly invoked in in the PCF corpus. See
Netolitzky (2018b, pp.1057–1069) for more on these postage-centric pseudolegal theories.
8
Though there is no evidence to this effect in the PCF corpus, it is worth noting that the relationship between
notary seals and thumbprints is likely even closer and more parasitic than stated above. Per 5 ILCS 312/3102(c)(6), notaries in the state of Illinois are legally required to record a signer’s right thumbprint when notarizing
certain documents related to the transfer of property (Illinois General Assembly 2022a), and both the American
Association of Notaries and the National Notary Association recommend that notaries record their signers’
thumbprints whenever possible (NNA Staff 2013; American Association of Notaries 2017). It seems entirely
possible, though not provable in this study, that the use of thumbprints in PCF texts either has its origins in or has
been significantly bolstered by this practice.

205

Figure 5.48 Thumbprint appearing without other graphic features in a pseudolegal courtroom filing

PCF texts which make use of thumbprints in this way use them across multiple pages, in somecases including one in the bottom left corner of every page in a text. On several occasions,
thumbprints were placed in a similar position on the backside of a page, where they were theonly feature (graphic or textual) present, and in Figure 5.49, the thumbprints of multiple people
were used alongside their signatures:

Figure 5.49 Thumbprint array in a pseudolegal courtroom filing206

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

If one person’s signature imparts power, the above figure seems to suggest, then three surely
impart even more. Discussion in this and the prior chapter has noted multiple ways in which
pseudolegal courtroom filings seem to be constructed to emphasize the presence or personhoodof their authors (e.g. through a significantly higher use of first person pronouns as compared to
LCF texts, or via their more conversational tone, which contributes to the impression that theauthor is speaking directly to the reader). It might be that the clear personal connection between
a text’s author and their thumbprint is why this particular feature is able to stand on its own ina way that the other graphic features in PCF texts are not. From a magical perspective, athumbprint is a direct expression of the identity of an individual Sovereign Citizen andtherefore perhaps the clearest representation of the power and authority over the legal system
which they attempt to claim. In the following example from a PCF text, this connection is madeeven more explicit with a thumbprint labled as the “Seal of Court”:

Figure 5.50 Thumbprint as the “Seal of Court” in a pseudolegal courtroom filing

Here, then, a thumbprint is not only enough to establish a Sovereign Citizen’s identity, but also
to effectively allow them to directly usurp the role of the court. Things are taken a step further
still when, next to the signature at the bottom of the page, the Sovereign Citizen is identified
as a “prosecutor.” All texts in the PCF and LCF corpora are from civil law cases rather than207

criminal law cases, meaning that none would involve a prosecutor, instead having a plaintiff
and a defendant. Nevertheless, this Sovereign Citizen is essentially trying to serve as judge,
jury and (presumably non-literal) executioner, wielding their illegitimately claimed legal
authority to, in the above example, issue orders to some third party “officer.”
As a parasitic genre, PCF texts are in constant conversation with LCF texts, either
copying or heightening the features of their host genre as best suits their imitative or magicalneeds, and the majority of this thesis has been looking at the contents of the PCF corpus in this
dialogic context. At the same time, as is true of all genres, PCF texts are also in conversation
with one another, and the presence and use of their unique features relative to LCF texts canalso be analyzed in relation to the presence and use of those features in other PCF texts.
Looking at it from this intra-genre perspective, it is possible to establish a continuum of the useof thumbprints in individual PCF texts, ranging from instances in which they seem to haverelatively minor power, as in Figure 5.47 where thumbprints are used in conjunction with othercharacteristic PCF features such as postage stamps, to more substantial instances such as Figure
5.48, where a thumbprint appears on its own with the apparent belief that this will be sufficientto establish the identity and authority of a text’s author, to extreme cases such as Figure 5.50,
where a thumbprint is used to lay claim to the authority of the court itself. As these inter- andintra-genre conversations continue over time, it is reasonable to assume that use of unique PCF
features, such as thumbprints, will continue to change and, given their nature as magic texts, toheighten over time. One text in the PCF corpus gives an example of what additional suchheightening can look like:208

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.51 Pseudolegal courtroom filing containing an entire footprint

This page includes a number of features which clearly distinguish PCF texts from LCF texts:
there is a postage stamp with a signature written over it in the top right corner, an additional
Sovereign Citizen-style signature towards the center of the page (including both a209

“:FirstName:LastName” and “:LastName:FirstName” formulation), a Sovereign Citizen-styleaddress just below that (as shown by the use of “c/o” and the bracketed zip code), and a
thumbprint in the bottom right corner. The most notable feature, however, is the full footprint
running diagonally across the page.
While at least one other report exists of a Sovereign Citizen producing a similarly“stamped” document (Segall 2016), this is the only instance of a footprint in either the LCF or
PCF corpus, and it therefore cannot be relied upon as evidence of any larger trend in PCF texts.
However, if it is thought of as a new extreme on the thumbprint continuum described above,
then it provides interesting insight into the way that genres can evolve and how Sovereign
Citizen texts can magically heighten their own distinctive features. While a handprint would
perhaps be more of a natural next step up from a thumbprint than a footprint, this choice canbe seen as making a kind of magical sense, insomuch as magic is designed to evoke feelings
that “are at least unusual” (Luhrmann 1989, p.231). If PCF texts heighten existing features of
LCF texts through additional capitalization or bolding, for example, a footprint might be readas a heightened thumbprint, since it is larger and therefore more visually impactful. 9 As has
been seen repeatedly in this and the previous chapter, PCF texts place a great deal of importanceupon emphasizing the identity of their authors and the use of thumb- and footprints is a clear
way to do so. It also makes sense, therefore, that identity-focused features tend to be some ofthose which most clearly distinguish LCF and PCF texts, and that those are the features PCF
texts are most likely to heighten. From a Sovereign Citizen perspective, the use of a full-page
footprint is both a clear statement of identity on the part of a text’s author and “unusual” enoughto fit the genre’s larger magical purposes.
Though this thesis is not examining the evolution of the pseudolegal courtroom filinggenre over time, to continue the biological metaphor of parasitic genre, the emergence of new
and unique features of Sovereign Citizen texts is a natural part of the evolutionary process.
There is no guarantee, of course, that such emergent features will be taken up at a sufficient
rate by other Sovereign Citizen authors to survive the “natural selection” process; it may beinstead that applying ink to one’s foot and then using that foot to stamp a page in an attempt toimbue it with legal authority will prove too much even for the members of the Sovereign
Citizen movement. At the same time, the existence of quantum grammar documents (seeChapter 1 and Section 5.6.3) shows that movement members have a high tolerance for features

9

The use of a footprint may also be a parasitic appropriation of a feature common to another sort of legal
document: hospitals in the United States have recorded a baby’s footprints as part of their official birth certificate
since the 1960s (US Birth Certificates 2022).

210

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
far outside the norm of what would be expected not just of legitimate courtroom filings, buteven many pseudolegal courtroom filings. Ultimately, the use of features such as illustrations,stamps, and thumbprints in PCF texts, which are both unique to the PCF corpus and actively
harmful to those texts’ chances of parasitic success, are further evidence of the fundamentally
magic nature of PCF texts. The more prominently displayed such a feature is, the more likely
it becomes that the inclusion of that feature was considered so important to magical purposesof a PCF text that its author determined it was worth the enhanced risk of imitative failure.

5.6 Key Multimodal Features and Prototype Analysis of Legitimate and Pseudolegal
Courtroom Filings
This section performs a close reading of the most prototypical text from both the LCF and PCF
corpus as determined by their use of the methods of textual emphasis and images discussed
throughout this chapter. As in Chapter 4, prototypicality was determined using ProtAnt(Anthony and Baker 2017) following a keyword analysis in AntConc (Anthony 2019). Unlike
in Chapter 4, however, the keyword analysis in this case focused on the use of textual emphasis
and images in the LCF and PCF corpora to the exclusion of their written contents. This was
accomplished by using the.txt files listing the features on each page which were generated by
UAM Image Tool (O’Donnell 2011) as part of the multimodal markup process. Aftermodifying the definitions in AntConc and ProtAnt so that each identified feature would becounted as one token (e.g. ensuring that a feature marked as “align/justify” would be counted
as one “align/justify” token rather than as two separate “align” and “justify” tokens), theinstances of textual emphasis and images observed in the LCF corpus were compared to thoseinstances observed in the PCF corpus, and vice versa. To allow for the discussion of a broader
range of features, the prototypes discussed in Sections 5.6.2 and 5.6.3 are the highest ranked
prototypes which included at least 5 distinct types of key multimodal features. The second
highest-ranked LCF text and the ninth highest-ranked PCF text were selected for examinationin this way. Section 5.6.1 presents the key features of LCF and PCF texts identified in this way,after which Sections 5.6.2 and 5.6.3 review the texts identified as the LCF and PCF prototypes,
respectively.

5.6.1 Key Multimodal Features
The keyword analysis described above identified seven key features of LCF texts and 18 key
features of PCF texts. These key features and their frequencies in both the LCF and PCF
211corpora are given below in Table 5.4 and Table 5.5. The “LL” column in these tables gives
their loglikelihood score, which was used to measure the statistical significance of the observed
difference in the frequency of a given feature between the two corpora (an LL value greaterthan 6.63 indicates p < 0.01), and the “%DIFF” column gives their %DIFF score, the effectsize metric which was used to rank the features which were found to be statistically significant.

Table 5.4 Key multimodal features in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus

Rank

Key Feature

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

italics
spacingfooterb/u/c/centeredalign/justify
table
i/centered

LCF
Freq.
2051
642
1046
368
543
17
4

LCF Per
100 Pages
175
55
89
31
46
1
0

PCF
Freq.
699
223
684
226
494
0
0

PCF Per
100 Pages
60
19
59
19
42
0
0

LL

%DIFF

286.8791
279.5919
101.6334
114.6971
44.93054382.969
954.8162

1293.83
359.1
228.9
87.42
37.54
28.61
6.73

Table 5.5 Key multimodal features in the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus

Rank
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Key Feature
handwritingb/ifont-size
caps
bold
b/i/u
alt-font
delimiteri/cthumbprint
drawing
headerb/c/centeredu/cc/centered
stamp
seal
b/c

PCF
Freq.
901
501
247
2026
1199
141
183
814
58
52
34
90
213
41
49
18
105
449

PCF Per
100 Pages
77
43
21
174
103
12
16
70
5
4
3
8
18
4
4
2
9
38

LCF
Freq.
130
37
3
985
493
4
24
356
0
0
0
19
80
3
9
0
41
272

LCF Per
100 Pages
11
3
0
84
42
0
2
30
0
0
0
2
7
0
1
0
4
23

LL
425.6476
926.9498
6144.374
55.997184.45292573.452
478.2998
73.41548697.742
7787.631
5057.297
259.2544
101.9309
936.5155312.9208
2630.334
94.231125.1961%DIFF
475.08366.02253.57
159.76152.9
129.97
99.27
84.46
65.6
58.8
38.42
32.85
31.88
29.47
20.44
20.33
14.21
9.01

As discussed in Section 5.4.2, italics and the combination of bolding, underlining,
capitalization, and centering were not only the most common features of LCF texts in the single
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5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
emphasis and alignment & emphasis categories (see Table 5.2 on page 172), but they were also
more common than the rest of the other observed features in their categories combined. The
lower number of key multimodal features in the LCF corpus as compared to the PCF corpus
further supports the notion that LCF texts have a more fixed generic structure.
In terms of the key multimodal features of pseudolegal courtroom filings, handwriting
being positioned at the top of the list demonstrates the importance of the personal touch to thegenre relative to legitimate courtroom filings, and the appearance of a number of more visually
impactful features such as the use of alternate fonts and variation in font size further support
the idea that PCF texts are more concerned with being striking to look at than their LCF
counterparts. The greater number of key PCF features relative to LCF features is reflective of
the higher degree of variation within the texts of the PCF corpus than in the texts of the LCF
corpus.

5.6.2 Legitimate Courtroom Filing Graphic Prototype
The LCF multimodal prototype text is included in its entirety as Appendix 5.1. Titled“Defendants’ Reply in Support of Motion for Leave,” it serves as an example of the various
multimodal features of legal documents observed throughout this chapter. In terms of its overalldesign, the text is double spaced and written in a justified, serif font, in line with the mostcommon overall design choices of LCF texts discussed in Section 5.3. Similarly, its first page,shown here in Figure 5.52, includes a properly formatted caption and the other elements typicalof the opening pages of LCF texts discussed in Section 5.3.2:

213

Figure 5.52 Opening page of the legitimate courtroom filing graphic prototype text

Both on this opening page and throughout the entire text, headings are bolded, underlined,
capitalized, and centered, while footers contain only a page number and are center-aligned,(practices of LCF texts noted in Sections 5.4.2 and 5.5.1, respectively).
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5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
Within the prototype document’s body text, emphasis is used sparingly andsystematically. Italics are used for legal Latin terms and citations, as seen in the following
figures:Figure 5.53 Italicization of legal Latin in the legitimate courtroom filing graphic prototype

Figure 5.54 Italicization of citations in the legitimate courtroom filing graphic prototype

Bolding, conversely, is used to reference other texts from the same case:

Figure 5.55 Bolded text in the body of the legitimate courtroom filing graphic prototype

Outside of headings, the only instance of the full capitalization of a word in the prototype LCF
text is the word “WHEREFORE” at the beginning of the text’s final paragraph, the overall

215

construction of which is formulaic and similar to that of the concluding paragraphs in the
majority of other texts in the LCF corpus:

Figure 5.56 Full capitalization of a word in the body of the legitimate courtroom filing graphic prototype

The only variation from any of the above qualities comes in the text’s signature block, which
immediately follows its closing paragraph:

Figure 5.57 Signature Block in the legitimate courtroom filing graphic prototype

The above Figure contains the only instance of handwriting in this text, as well as the only useof single-spacing and multiple columns of text outside of the caption.
Looking at one of the text’s interior pages, perhaps the most notable feature(particularly in relation to the prototype PCF text discussed in the following section) is how
little variation from the typical document design choices of this text is present:216

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.58 Interior page from the legitimate courtroom filing graphic prototype

Italics and bolding are used sparingly, and its footer, which contains only a page number, could
not be more minimal while still containing content. There is no other deviation from the217standard format of the body text; nothing in this text is formatted as a list, for example, nor are
there any tables present.10
Based upon the written contents of the LCF prototype, prior to the filing of thisdocument, the defendants had filed a separate document with the court entitled “Motion for
Leave to File Counterclaim,” which is essentially a request for the court to hear a related lawsuitfrom them against plaintiffs at the same time that it considers the case in which this document
was filed. In response, the plaintiffs filed a document urging the court to deny that motion. This
prototype text is itself a reply to that plaintiffs’ response which attempts to convince the courtthat the plaintiffs’ legal arguments are either incorrect or otherwise inadequate and that
defendants’ original request to file a counterclaim should be granted. Putting aside the specifictextual ways in which the prototype text attempts to do this (see the discussion of legal English
prototypes in the previous chapter for more on that theme), this text is notable for the efficiency
with which it focuses on that goal. The minimal deviation from its baseline layout and design
choices serve to keep the reader focused on the argument that it is making, with the only
sections which notably stand out (the caption and the signature block) being located at its
beginning and end, and whose forms are rigidly defined by the genre.
The design of LCF texts can get more complicated than it does in this prototype text,
but, as seen earlier in this chapter, even in those more graphically dense cases the choices madealways seem intended to help maintain the readers’ focus on the legal issues at hand (e.g. bysimplifying complex information into a table). In stark contrast to the heterogenous andidiosyncratic nature of pseudolegal courtroom filing genre, the legitimate courtroom filinggenre is a highly conventional one, and the author of an LCF text is minimally influential overits structure. The overall multimodal character of this prototype LCF text can perhaps best be
described as “no-nonsense”; things are laid out and presented simply and with little variationfrom the norm. The following section will use this LCF prototype as a baseline against which
to examine the parasitic, magical nature of a PCF prototype whose description is fundamentally
the opposite.

As noted in Chapter 3, the box on the left side of Figure 5.58 containing the text “Electronically Filed” would
have been added as part of the filing process and is not considered part of the text for the purposes of this thesis.
Multiple texts submitted concurrently in this way are treated as a single filing and paginated consecutively which
is why the text in that box indicates this is “PAGE 5 OF 15” while, in the context of the prototype text, it is actually
page 4 of 5.
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5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
5.6.3 Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Graphic Prototype
The PCF multimodal prototype text is included in its entirety as Appendix 5.2. This text is aquantum grammar text. Quantum grammar Sovereign Citizen texts, which have been
mentioned repeatedly in this thesis (see, e.g., Sections 1.3 and 4.2.2), are amongst some of themost distinctive PCF texts and are notable within the realm of Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal
documents for the sheer concentration of distinctively Sovereign Citizen features they contain(hence the prototypicality of this particular text) and for their clear origin. Quantum grammar
texts are the brainchild of a now-deceased Sovereign Citizen guru who referred to himself as“:David-Wynn: Miller” (for this reason, quantum grammar is sometimes referred to as“Millerese”) (Hay 2020). Miller appears to have been the rare Sovereign Citizen guru toactively participate in the creation of documents made following his theories; his signature,
personal seal, and thumbprint often appear in quantum grammar texts, including in thisprototype. The first page of this multimodal prototype PCF text is given below as Figure 5.59:

219

Figure 5.59 Opening page of the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype

Before the main text of this document even begins, this page contains two thumbprints, two
signatures, a postage stamp, an illustration of the American flag, and what appears to be an ink
stamp claiming to have been issued by the “FEDERAL-POSTAL-COURT.” Aligning with that220

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
postal theme, the format of the “FEDERAL-POSTAL-REGISTER-NUMBER” handwritten in
the ink stamp area appears to be either taken from or at the very least inspired by the numbers
used to track certified mail sent via the real US Postal Service. Below that are the signatures
and thumbprints of the “Clerk-of-the Court,” “J.-D..:Sgarlata” and “:David-Wynn:Miller”
himself. From the very beginning, the parasitic intent of this PCF text is clear. The electronic
filing stamp found in the prototype LCF text examined in the prior section and a closer look at
this “FEDERAL-POSTAL-COURT” filing stamp are given below:

Figure 5.60 Legitimate courtroom filing and pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype filing stamps
compared

Both contain an apparent filing number and the time at which the document was “filed.” The
PCF filing stamp is also accompanied by the signature and thumbprint of the “Clerk-Of-TheCourt” and takes up more room on the page. This is, in itself, a good example of both the PCF
text genre’s attempts at genre parasitism and of magical heightening. The filing stamp, which
is issued by the court itself rather than by the author of the LCF text, is a very direct sign of thecourt’s legal authority. By copying that, the PCF text makes a clear claim that it possesses that
legitimate authority and heightens it by providing additional supporting “evidence” in the formof the signature and inherently talismanic use of a thumbprint.
Section 5.3.2 discussed the role of the caption in LCF texts and the ways in which it isused to establish the place of legitimate courtroom filings in the legal system in both a generaljurisdictional sense and more specifically in terms of the case to which they pertain. While221there is not a properly formatted caption in this prototype PCF text, as with the filing stamp
example discussed above, there appears to be yet another instance of parasitic appropriationand heightening in this prototype PCF text. The caption from the prototype LCF text and thecomparable section of the prototype PCF text, including several labels pointing out areas ofparticular similarity, are below:

Figure 5.61 Legitimate courtroom filing and pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype captions compared222

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Part A of both texts functions as a jurisdictional statement; where the LCF text has been filed“IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS,” the PCF text purports to havebeen filed “In the DOCUMENT-CONTRACT-FEDERAL-POSTAL-STATION-COURTVENUE-PERFORMANCE.” Part B in each names the relevant parties and their relationships
to the case (though the use of “claimant” and “vassalee” in the PCF text are not in line withstandard legal practice). Though Part C of the PCF caption does not appear to contain a casenumber (legitimate or otherwise) it does list the address of property which appears to be
relevant to the underlying lawsuit, which was noted above in Section 5.3.2 as an optional partof the standard legal caption. A number of factors serve to magically heighten this PCF caption
relative to the standard LCF caption. While both involve the use of bolded text and capitalletters, the variation in font size and underlining in the PCF caption, in addition to complicatedacronyms which characterize quantum grammar texts, all serve to set it apart.
Other sections of the PCF prototype text appear similarly inspired by sections oflegitimate courtroom filings, including the following excerpts which appear similar to thestructure of a definitions section of a contract and a legitimate legal “complaint” text:

Figure 5.62 Pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype section seemingly inspired by the definition sectionof a contract

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Figure 5.63 Pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype section seemingly inspired by legitimate legal
complaint texts

Both of these examples also display the complicated intra-textual referencing that characterizes
many Sovereign Citizen texts, but particularly quantum grammar ones.
In terms of methods of textual emphasis, almost everything in the prototype PCF text
is capitalized and underlined, and a substantial portion of it is also bolded. While the intent
behind that may be to communicate that everything in this text is of great import, the effect isultimately a muting one; when everything is positioned as being hugely important, in otherwords, it is essentially the same thing as saying that nothing is. Compare the interior page fromthe prototype LCF text above in Figure 5.58 on page 217 with the following:224

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.64 Interior page from the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype

Both pages are essentially unmodified body text. Despite (or perhaps because of) the extent
of the bolding, capitalization, and underlining throughout the page, no area of Figure 5.64

225

clearly stands out as the most important, or even as relatively more important than most of
the rest of the page.
Italics are present in the prototype PCF text, though rarely, and there is one instance ofhighlighted text as well:Figure 5.65 Italics and highlighting in the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype

If these more sparingly employed methods of textual emphasis are meant to occur in particular
contexts, the exact nature of those contexts is not clear. Similarly, variation in font choice andsize occurs rarely in the prototype PCF text, but with a clearer rationale. Font choice variation,
as shown in Figure 5.66, occurs three times in the prototype text, always at the top of the page.

Figure 5.66 Variation in Font Choice in the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype

Font size variation is slightly more common than those other methods of textual emphasis in
the PCF prototype, though still has fewer than ten occurrences in the main body text (i.e.
excluding footers), and generally occurs at a section break, as seen in Figure 5.67:

226

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.67 Variation in font size in the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype

As difficult to parse as this prototype PCF text may seem at first glance, the above discussion
all indicates that it does in fact possess a coherent structure and internal logic which has clear
ties to the legitimate courtroom filing genre.
Throughout this thesis, one of the primary differences that has been noted between LCF
and PCF texts has been the way in which PCF texts emphasize the personal identity andsupposed power of their authors as compared to the more objective and distanced positioning
of LCF texts relative to their authors. This is true of quantum grammar PCF texts as well,though with a slight twist on the usual presentation: though the identity of the Sovereign Citizen
litigant is emphasized throughout, the identity of “:David-Wynn:Miller”, the Sovereign Citizen
guru behind this particular pseudolegal theory, receives even greater attention. Miller’s
signature and thumbprint occur three times in the prototype LCF text, accompanied once by apostage stamp (as seen in Figure 5.59) and once by what appears to be a customized embossed
seal bearing his name:227

Figure 5.68 Signature, thumbprint, and seal of “:David-Wynn:Miller”

Miller, to be clear, is not an actual party to the suit from which this prototype text was taken.
The Sovereign Citizen defendant in that case is named VaShan Kyles (though styled in the
document as “:VaShan:Kyles”) and their signature appears only twice in the prototype text,
without thumbprint, stamp, or other notable accompaniment on either occasion:

Figure 5.69 Sovereign Citizen litigant signature in the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype

Further emphasizing Miller’s role as the most important person in the prototype text, rather
than the litigant, each page contains a footer to the following effect, reinforcing his claim on
the entire text:

Figure 5.70 Footer from the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic prototype

Miller even goes as far as advertising his services in the prototype PCF text, including by giving
the address for his personal website at one point:228

5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs

Figure 5.71 An advertisement for :David-Wynn:Miller's Website in the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic
prototype

While a lawyer may include an email address in their signature block (see Figure 5.57), this isa different matter entirely; an email address is an avenue for communication, while a website
address accompanied by boasts of one’s expertise resulting from “85,000-HOURS-WORLDWIDE-SEARCH of the QUANTUM-MATH-CERTIFICATION” is more of a recruitment
tool. That raises the question of whom, exactly, Miller is intending to recruit. Judges andopposing lawyers seem unlikely to visit Miller’s website out of anything other than a sense ofmorbid curiosity, and it is even more unlikely that the few that do would become adherents to
his school of pseudolegal thought. At the same time, neither can this advertisement be meant
for the Sovereign Citizen litigant involved in the case, since they have already engaged Miller’s
services. Instead, the target must be other Sovereign Citizens and laypeople not yet subscribed
to quantum grammar theory.
This prototype PCF text was designed to be legal-seeming but ultimately inaccessible;that is how Sovereign Citizens are convinced it possesses greater authority than legitimate
courtroom filings. To the extent that it makes a cogent argument, it appears to be saying that
the Sovereign Citizen litigant never signed a valid mortgage and therefore cannot have theirhome foreclosed upon by the bank. This claim is justified with reference to a complex systemof supposedly legally binding grammatical rules. Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal theories are,definitionally, not true; the reliance on these demonstrably false conspiracies is what separates
a Sovereign Citizen litigant from a more typical pro se litigant. Despite the clear ultimate
inaccessibility and objective legal falsehood of quantum grammar, however, this prototype
PCF text does at least seem to be internally consistent. The text in Figure 5.62 provides a key
to the many acronyms used throughout the text (e.g. “:D.-C.-F.-P.-S.-C.-V.-P.: DOCUMENTCONTRACT-FEDERAL-POSTAL-STATION-COURT-VENUE-PERFORMANCE”),

andthe text’s final page contains the supposed rules of quantum grammar, a selection of which are
given here:229

Figure 5.72 A section listing some of the rules of quantum grammar in the pseudolegal courtroom filing graphic
prototype

Of course, the inclusion of the acronym explanations and the rules of quantum grammar do not
actually make the prototype text more accessible, but they do serve to make it seem that way.
It is yet another way in which the PCF text is structured to convince a reader who may alreadybe inclined to find a legal document overly complicated that this is as legitimate as an LCF
text, if not more so.
As has been noted before, the dual parasitic and magical natures of Sovereign Citizen
texts are in constant tension with one another. This is because they ultimately have different
aims: a PCF text’s parasitic purposes (which can perhaps be better attributed to a Sovereign
Citizen guru like “:David-Wynn:Miller”) are intended to win over individual Sovereign
Citizens, while its magical efforts are intended to allow those Sovereign Citizens to overpower
the legitimate legal system. At no point in this process is the document’s actual reception in
the legitimate legal system a factor. The legitimate legal system may benefit from paying atleast a degree of closer attention to these sorts of documents, however; while validating thesepseudolegal theories in any way would be an obvious mistake, acknowledging the identity andpersonal dignity of Sovereign Citizen litigants could well be a step towards minimizing theattraction and mitigating the harmful effects of the Sovereign Citizen movement.

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5. Multimodality in LCFs and PCFs
5.7 Conclusion
Where Chapter 4 examined the use of legal English in LCF and PCF texts, this chapter has
examined the use of textual emphasis and images in the two corpora. Consistent with thefindings of the previous chapter, the above analysis has found that, relative to LCF texts, PCF
texts place much greater emphasis on the identity and supposed power of their authors. In
Chapter 4 that was reflected by PCF texts’ more frequent use of features such as first-person
pronouns. Here it is seen multimodally via the quantity of “personal touches” throughout the
PCF corpus, such as in the inclusion of handwritten text, particularly signatures, and the use of
thumbprints. At every level examined in this chapter, from overall layout and design choices
to the use of specific graphic features, LCF texts have consistently been more restrained in boththe quantity and variety of their choices than their PCF counterparts, while PCF texts appear
to have been more influenced by the individual stylistic preferences of their authors.
Discussion of the prototype LCF and PCF texts raised the question of who PCF texts arereally meant to convince of their authority and concluded it is more likely to be the Sovereign
Citizens using them than representatives of the legitimate legal system. Particularly in cases
where a Sovereign Citizen guru is a strong presence, it may be better to think of the interaction
between Sovereign Citizen litigants and the legal system as involving the guru as a third party.
The following chapter will conclude this thesis with a discussion of its overall findings andtheir implications.

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6. Conclusion
6.1 Introduction
This thesis has examined the relationship between the discourse of legitimate courtroom filings(“LCFs”) and Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings (“PCFs”) as well as what that
relationship reveals about how authority is manifested in written legal texts. As part of thatexamination, it has more specifically considered how the use of legal English compares inlegitimate courtroom filings and pseudolegal courtroom filings, how those two genres makeuse of graphic elements, and what their overall relationship reveals about the nature of parasitic
genre. All the while it has also looked at how the magical nature of the PCF genre and its
talismanic use of features characterisitic of the LCF genre play into the answers to thosequestions. This final chapter concludes the thesis by synthesizing the findings of the preceding
analyses and evaluating how they fit within and contribute to the existing literature, while also
acknowledging the limitations of this thesis and suggesting several possible avenues for future
research.
Section 6.2 reviews this study’s findings about the nature of the register of legal English
and describes the ways in which the Legitimate Courtroom Filing (“LCF”) corpus andPseudolegal Courtroom Filing (“PCF”) corpus make use of that register. Section 6.3 discusses
the ways in which the authors of legitimate and pseudolegal courtroom filings employ textual
emphasis and images to enhance a document’s apparent authority. Section 6.4 reevaluates theconcept of parasitic genre first outlined in the Literature Review in light of this thesis’ overallfindings and Section 6.5 considers this concept in light of the inherently magical nature ofpseudolegal courtroom filings. Section 6.6 then considers what overall conclusions this thesis
is able to draw about the manifestation of authority in written legal texts. Sections 6.7 and 6.8
conclude by discussing the limitations of the present study and proposing a number of potential
avenues for future research, respectively.

6.2 The Register of Legal English
This thesis’ first research question asks how the register of legal English compares in legitimate
courtroom filings and Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings. Section 6.2.1 presents
this thesis’ findings regarding the nature of legal English as compared to standard English after232

6. Conclusion
which Section 6.2.2 answers that research question regarding the use legal English in the LCF
and PCF corpora.

6.2.1 Legal English and Standard English
As was discussed in Chapter 2 (see Section 2.5.3), prior linguistic descriptions of the registerof legal English have been surprisingly without substantial empirical grounding. Though theliterature has arrived at a seeming consensus on the prevalence of certain features of legal
English relative to standard English (e.g. Kurzon 1989; Tiersma 2006; Hiltunen 2012), such asa greater frequency of negation and a lower frequency of pronoun use, this appears to havestemmed from something akin to a game of “telephone”1 in which the findings of earlier studies
have been increasingly misrepresented in later ones and used to support broader and broader
points over time. In order to systematically evaluate that consensus and to establish a baseline
for the presence of these supposedly notable features of legal English relative to standard
English, the frequency of a selection of those consensus features was compared in the LCF
corpus and in the combined written subcorpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American
English (“COCA-W”) (Davies 2008), after which the frequency and use of those features inthe LCF and PCF corpora was similarly examined. This thesis is both the first linguistic study
to examine the legitimate courtroom filing genre and the most substantial quantitativeevaluation of the relationship between legal English and standard English to date.
Table 6.1 summarizes this thesis’ findings regarding the relative frequency of a
selection of consensus features of legal English in the LCF corpus and COCA-W. Due to thelack of prior quantitative research in this area, there are no more specific comparisons to begiven in the “Consensus” column than whether a given feature is expected to be found more orless frequently in legal English than in standard English.

“Telephone” (also known, somewhat problematically, as “Chinese Whispers” in the United Kingdom) is achildren’s game in which a secret message is relayed down a chain of people with the goal of having the message
which reaches the final player be the same as the message which was given by the initial player (ICAL TEFL
2014).
1233

Table 6.1 Summary of findings regarding some “consensus” features of legal English observed in the
Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus relative to their frequency in COCA-W

FeatureNegation
Negation minus “n’t”
PronounPassive Constructions
Nominalizations

Consensus
More in LCF
More in LCF
Less in LCF
More in LCF
More in LCF

Observed
No significant difference
Significantly more in LCF
Significantly less in LCF
Significantly more in LCF
Significantly more in LCF

With the exception of overall negation, all “consensus” features of legal English were observedat the expected frequency in the LCF corpus relative to their presence in standard contemporary
American English as represented by COCA-W. Once the markedly informal (and thus lesslikely to be used in legal English) negator “n’t” was removed from consideration in both
corpora, however, negation appeared at the expected rate relative to standard English. This
thesis was not equipped to examine the question of what differentiates the register of legal
English from standard English at any greater depth, but even this look at a single previously
unexamined genre of legal writing appears to indicate that the “consensus” description of legal
English largely holds true, though some of its broader claims (e.g. regarding negation) may
need refinement. This difference in the expected versus observed frequencies of negation likely
stems from the reliance upon Charrow and Charrow (1979) in the “consensus” literature; asmentioned in Chapter 4, that study was looking at what negation was present in the California
civil jury instructions it examined rather than considering the use of negation in any broader
sense and therefore, given the clear lack of “n’t” in legal English, would not have considered
its use (see Section 4.2.2 for further discussion). While this does not necessarily call into
question the findings of any prior research which has relied on that consensus description oflegal English, it does indicate that the consensus description merits further study, particularly
for features which have not yet explicitly been considered such as the frequency of multiple
negation or of explicit performative speech acts across a wider variety of legal genres. Given
the novelty of this systematic (if admittedly limited) examination of the consensus descriptionof legal English, it is hoped that these results will serve as an important and originalcontribution to the study of language and law, and, as will be discussed further in Section 6.8,
as a fruitful starting point for future study.

6.2.2 Legal English in Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings
Though commentators agree that the language used in PCF texts is intended to mimic that of
LCF texts (e.g. Wessinger 1999; Dew 2015; Netolitzky 2018b), prior to this thesis there had
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6. Conclusion
not been an attempt to quantitatively compare the language used within or across the twogenres. From a purely imitative perspective, if PCF texts were supposed to be mere copies ofof LCF texts, then a reader could expect to find as many features as possible occurring at similar
rates in the two corpora. Several areas were identified, however, in which the frequency of agiven feature differed significantly between LCF and PCF texts. Table 6.2 presents the relative
frequency of the consensus features of legal English that were examined in Table 6.1 in the
LCF and PCF corpora:
Table 6.2 Summary of findings regarding some “consensus” Features of legal English observed in the
Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing corpus to their frequency in the Legitimate Courtroom Filing corpus

FeatureNegation
Negation (excl. “n’t”)
PronounPassive Constructions
Nominalizations

Amount Relative to LCF Corpus
No significant difference
No significant difference
Significantly more frequentNo significant difference
Significantly less frequent

In three of the five categories in the above table (including both ways in which negation was
examined), the texts in the PCF corpus used these features at a statistically similar rate to the
LCF corpus. The PCF corpus used pronouns at a significantly higher rate than the LCF corpus,
however, and nominalizations at a significantly lower rate. An examination of those featuresin context revealed the two general ways in which, if all PCF texts are attempting to do isimitate LCF texts, they appear to miss the mark: in the case of pronoun use, the authors of PCF
texts appear to be actively choosing to insert both themselves and the court into the narrative
through a significantly higher use of first and second person pronouns, while in the case of
nominalizations, their use at a statistically significantly lower rate seemed to more likely reflectof a lack of familiarity with the register of legal English (and relatedly a lack of genre
competence when it comes to the creation of legitimate courtroom filings).
This use of pronouns appears to indicate the alternative source of authority upon which
PCF texts are meant to draw: unlike LCF texts, which take their authority from that of the legal
system, PCF texts are claiming that it is the inherent power as of their authors as individuals
that makes them effective. Conversely, the significantly lower frequency of nominalizations
does not seem to serve such a purpose. Though one could imagine a Sovereign Citizen-tinged
version of the “Plain English” movement (see, e.g., Tiersma 1999, pp.211–230; Adler 2012)
making an argument that it is necessary to avoid the use of certain grammatical structures toavoid submitting to the authority of the legal system, there is no indication of such a motivation
235

here. In fact, the stylistically-obsessed quantum grammar pseudolegal courtroom filings
discussed at length in Section 5.6.3 appear to make exactly the opposite assumption by actively
encouraging more complicated syntax.
In addition to the “consensus” features of legal English outlined in Table 6.2, this thesis
also explored the use of legal technical terminology in the LCF and PCF corpora. A keyword
analysis focused on legal technical terms found that PCF texts made frequent reference to anumber of legal concepts that were, based on their lack of inclusion in the LCF corpus, notrelevant to legitimate legal contexts in which these documents were filed (see Section 4.3.2).
An examination of the legal “lockwords” in LCF and PCF texts (see Section 4.3.1) revealed
that even when PCF texts used legal technical terms that appeared in the LCF corpus, thosewords would often be used in ways which were clearly inconsistent with their proper legal
meanings. This use of a wider array of legal technical terms in the PCF corpus at a greater
frequency than comparable terms appeared in the LCF corpus is a clear indication of Sovereign
Citizens’ “talismanic” uses of legitimate legal features discussed more below in Section 6.5,
particularly when their use is so clearly divorced from their standard legal meanings. Given
that the terms are often not used consistently even within a single PCF text, they are clearlypresent more as symbols of authority than for any particular semantic content.
An unexpected result of comparing the use of legal English in LCF and PCF texts was
the finding that several ways in which PCF texts differed from LCF texts lined up with ways
in which spoken English has been noted to differ from written English (Biber et al. 1999). Thissimilarity to spoken English was most notable in the use of emphatic capitalization in PCF
texts, resulting in their having a “shouting” tone (as in the excerpt “There was no substantive
positive evidence presented and NO firsthand competent material fact witness…”, along withother examples in Table 4.6 on page 101). It was also visibile in their significantly higher useof pronouns, particularly first- and second-person pronouns, relative to the LCF corpus
mentioned earlier in this seciton. Compared to LCF texts, in which the relatively infrequent useof pronouns serves to impersonalize and distance their authors from their contents, the spokenlike elements of PCF texts impart an almost monologic character, where they refer to theirauthors in the first person and “shout” at the judge hearing their case using the second person.
Ultimately, however, this thesis was not equipped to evaluate the connection between thelanguage used in PCF texts and spoken English at any greater depth; such a comparison is left
for future study.
The use of emphatic capitalization and first- and second-person pronouns in the PCF
corpus are such obvious departures from what would be expected of a legitimate courtroom236

6. Conclusion
filing that it suggests they may be knowing deviations from the expected format of LCF texts.
Given that such features actively lessen the degree to which PCF texts appear like legitimate
courtroom filings, they must then indicate a subject of special importance to Sovereign Citizen
authors. Particularly when considered alongside the tendency in PCF texts to pair first-person
pronouns with appositive statements (e.g. “[I] declare that I, a living, breathing, undead woman,
am filing this affidavit…” in Table 4.12 on page 110) it is clear that these texts place a premium
on emphasizing the identities of their authors and that such “shouting” is seen as an effective
way to ensure that their concerns are heard (these qualities will be discussed further in Section
6.4). In contrast to their talismanic use of legal technical terminology, the emphasis that PCF
texts place on the identity of their authors and on the apparent strength of their emotions servesto challenge an apparent assumption of the legitimate courtroom filing genre: namely, that thepower of LCF texts stems from the wider legal system and that the identity of their authors isirrelevant to its legal authority.
Though there are many areas in which PCF texts appear (in a quantitative sense, atleast) to successfully imitate the language used in LCF texts, a close reading of a prototype text
from each corpus chosen based on their use of the legal technical keywords identified in Section
4.3.2 made clear the extent to which the two genres can differ. Where the prototype LCF text
(see Appendix 4.1) presented its legal arguments from a relatively impersonal perspective,eschewing clear reference to its author or any of that authors’ personal opinions through theuse of constructions such as “Considerations of fairness and efficiency also support a stay of
discovery”, the prototype PCF text (see Appendix 4.2) was focused instead on the identity of
its author, emphasizing, for example, that author’s status as the “True Heir” of a piece ofproperty and their claimed power to singlehandedly “destroy the [mortgage]” they had signed
to acquire it. Where the LCF prototype text makes references to statutes or other relevant pointsof law, it does so for a clearly articulated reason, while the PCF text refers to laws and legal
concepts as if they were magic words whose mere invocation is in itself sufficient to achieve
their desired ends.
Ultimately, given that both lawyers and the general public seem to have relatively little
difficulty in identifying Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal writings as something other thanlegitimate legal writings (e.g. Patrice 2013; Guillot 2016; Kelley 2019b), it is unsurprising tofind that LCF and PCF texts are easily differentiated by the ways in which they make use offeatures characteristic of legal English. What is more notable, however, and what was also
found in the examination of the multimodal features present in the two corpora discussed in
the next section, was how clearly that was true despite the many striking similarities between
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LCF and PCF texts. The examination of legal English in this thesis identified a number of ways
in which it is clearly differentiated from standard English and in doing so largely validated theconsensus description of legal English found in Section 2.5.3. In their attempts to usurp theauthority of the legitimate legal system, PCF texts have not just grasped many of thosedifferences but either heightened them via increased rates of use or subverted them through theaddition of a set of seemingly equal but opposite features. The following section turns to aneven clearer example of heightened features of LCF texts in PCF texts: their use of methods oftextual emphasis and images.

6.3 Multimodality in Legitimate and Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings
This thesis’ second research question asks how the multimodal contents of legitimate andpseudolegal courtroom filings compare. Given that the LCF and PCF corpora are comprised
entirely of static texts, this was explored via an examination of the graphic elements (i.e. theuse of textual emphasis and images) in the two corpora. Based on the attention these types offeatures, particularly images, have received in prior descriptions of Sovereign Citizen
documents (e.g. Southern Poverty Law Center 2010; Rooke 2012; Anti-Defamation League2016), they are likely the most distinctive elements of PCF texts. However, as with the use oflegal English in LCF and PCF texts, prior to this thesis there had been no substantial linguistic
analysis of these features in pseudolegal courtroom filings, either in isolation or relative to thepresence of comparable features in legitimate courtroom filings. This thesis is therefore thefirst linguistic study to have considered the prevalence of these features in a systematic way.
Section 6.3.1 discusses the use of methods of textual emphasis in the LCF and PCF corpora,
after which Section 6.3.2 looks at their use of images.

6.3.1 The Use of Textual Emphasis
Based upon a review of the most common font and text alignment choices in the two corpora,it was determined that the typical text in the LCF corpus was written in a serif font which was
double spaced and justified, while the typical PCF text was written in a serif font which was
single spaced and left-aligned. From the outset of this portion of the analysis, two trends
quickly became apparent:
1. LCF texts were generally designed in ways that resulted in more blank space on thepage, as seen in their use of double spacing as opposed to single spacing and in theirjustifying their text rather than having it be left aligned. Both choices result in a238

6. Conclusion
document that appears to be more internally consistent (e.g. by seeming more like acontinuous column of text) than their PCF counterparts.
2. Where they deviated from the practices of LCF texts, design choices in PCF texts were
often identical to the default settings of popular word processing programs. Microsoft
Word, for example, has text set to be single spaced and left aligned by default and thesewere the predominant spacing and alignment choices significantly more frequently in
the PCF corpus than in the LCF corpus (see Table 5.1 on page 154).
This latter point does not necessarily mean these factors were not considered in the design of
the PCF texts examined. However, given that other departures in PCF texts from what is
expected of LCF texts generally have a more readily identifiable (and often explicitly stated in
the document itself) purpose behind them, it does raise that lack of consideration as a possibility
and therefore serves as a warning against automatically reading intentionality into every
difference between the LCF and PCF corpora. These likely unconsidered features stand as asort of mirror image to more clearly purposeful deviations from LCF texts, insomuch as they
reveal not the areas of particular import to Sovereign Citizens, but rather the ones that matterso little to them that they may not have been considered at all.
In terms of emphasizing text within the bodies of the documents themselves, with the
exception of italicization on its own, which was significantly more common in the LCF corpus
than the PCF corpus, every other combination of bolding, italics, underlining, andcapitalization in LCF and PCF texts occurred either at a statistically similar rate in the two
corpora, or at a significantly higher rate in the PCF corpus. Similarly, when looking at theformatting of headings in LCF and PCF texts, there was a clear preference for the combinationof bolding, underlining, capitalization, and centering in LCF texts, with every other examinedcategory either occurring at a statistically similar rate or significantly more frequently in the
PCF texts. In other words, there is a very clear “house style” of italicization for in-paragraphemphasis and for the bolding, italics, underlining, and capitalization in the formatting of section
headings in LCF texts. In contrast, there was no such clear or consistent system of textual
emphasis in the PCF corpus; some texts, such as the one shown in Figure 5.11 on page 175,
would even make use of multiple forms of textual emphasis on the same page, variously
underlining, bolding, and italicizing different things with no clear internal logic as to which
method was used in any given location. At the same time, what PCF texts lacked in consistency,
they more than made up for in volume, with more than three times as many instances of inparagraph emphasis than the LCF corpus. Similarly, PCF texts were much more likely to vary
both the font size and the font used within a text (e.g. from Times New Roman to Helvetica)239

than LCF texts were. As with the “shouting” quality of PCF texts noted in Section 6.2.2, here
again PCF texts seemed to prioritize communicating the strength of their pseudolegal
convictions over getting across any particular points of (pseudo)law or fact, clearly tying into
their efforts at magically heightening features of LCF texts discussed more below in Section
6.5.

6.3.2 The Use of Images
Turning to the use of graphic elements in the two corpora, again it was found that LCF texts
were much more consistent both in the features they used and in the ways that they used themthan PCF texts. This was particularly evident in their use of legal captions (see Section 5.3.2)
and list formatting. A caption in a legitimate courtroom filing firmly establishes the place ofthat filing in the legitimate legal system and, generally speaking, its acquiescence to thejurisdiction of the court in which it has been filed. The inclusion of a caption is therefore apersuasive sign of a text possessing legitimate legal authority. All LCF texts save one were
found to have a properly formatted caption; by way of contrast, almost a quarter of PCF texts
had nothing resembling one, and even many of those that did have a caption had modified its
contents such that it was clearly of a different kind than those found in LCF texts. This possibly
stems from the rejection of government authority fundamental to Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal conspiracy theories and the related desire of many Sovereign Citizens to avoid
accidentally granting the government jurisdiction (or, in more magical terms, power) overthemselves (Wessinger 1999).
In the case of list formatting, it seems to be yet another instance in which LCF texts areboth more considered and more purposeful in their use of a feature than PCF texts. Lists areamong the most common graphic features in both corpora, though they are significantly morecommon in the PCF corpus than the LCF corpus. An examination of the heatmaps in Figure5.24 on page 185 shows that LCF texts are strikingly consistent with their use of lists in thatthey generally appear in the same place on the page and that they are usually limited to a single
level. PCF texts, by way of contrast, have a much broader hotspot on that heatmap, indicating
both that they are much more likely to use multi-level lists and to have multiple discrete lists
on the same page. Though not as clearly talismanic as the use of legal technical terminology in
PCF texts, this more frequent use of a feature in more places, especially when combined withthe clear function of a list to impose structure on a document, seems to be yet another way in240

6. Conclusion
which PCF texts attempt to increase their authority and power over the legitimate legal systemby heightening a feature of LCF texts.
List formatting aside, the graphic features that were found to be significantly morecommon in the LCF corpus than in the PCF corpus tended to be those which contributed to amore organized document overall, such as the use of tables and footnotes. The graphic features
which were significantly more common in the PCF corpus were those which placed greater
emphasis on the identity of the authors of PCF texts and on the legal power and authority they
were claiming. This focus on authorial power and identity was particularly evident in theirheavy use of seals (especially notary seals) and the much greater frequency with which
Sovereign Citizens would sign or otherwise hand write portions of their texts (at a rate nearlyseven times that of LCF texts in the latter case). Once again, such a premium is placed on theseidentity-related features of PCF texts that their overall chances of parasitic success arejeopardized by featuring them too frequently.
Perhaps the most remarked upon features of PCF texts are those which bear little to no
relation to those found in LCF texts. The uniquely Sovereign Citizen graphic features found in
the PCF corpus fell into three categories:
1. Illustrations, particularly of modified versions of the American flag.
2. Postage stamps, seemingly legitimately purchased from the U.S. Postal Service.
3. Thumbprints, often accompanying handwritten signatures and seeming to serve assome sort of personal seal.
As shown in the heatmaps in Figure 5.42 on page 201, these three features typically occurredin distinct locations on a page, which seems to imply that these three features all serve different
purposes in Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal discourse, even if those exact purposes are notimmediately clear from the texts in which they appear.
A close reading of a prototype text from each corpus further emphasized the above
points: the prototypical LCF text (see Appendix 5.1) was straightforwardly presented, withwhat minimal deviations there were from its standard design choices clearly working in service
of enhancing clarity and maintaining the reader’s focus on the legal issues at hand. The
prototype PCF text (see Appendix 5.2) could not have been more different. It was a quantum
grammar text, meaning that it belonged to a particularly infamous school of Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal thought (Conti 2018; Hay 2020). Where the LCF text made sparing use of methodsof textual emphasis and graphic features, this quantum grammar text went in the entirely
opposite direction, with almost every element being capitalized, bolded, underlined or
involving some sort of graphic element. At the same time, despite such a stark difference in its
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visual character, many of the individual elements of the prototype PCF text could be clearly
mapped onto legitimate legal features (see, for example, the comparison of the “quantum
grammar” caption to a legitimate legal caption in Figure 5.61 on page 222). While the PCF
prototype text did include a number of distinctly Sovereign Citizen graphic elements,
particularly thumbprints, it is best understood as the ultimate expression of the Sovereign
Citizen strategy of heightening and exaggerating existing legal features. As with their use oflegal English, when it comes to the presence of graphic elements, PCF texts have a clear
preference for a greater variety of features used at a higher frequency than their LCF text
counterparts. The multimodal design ethos of the authors of PCF texts can be effectively
summarized as “more is more,” clearly relating to their efforts to magically overwhelm thelegal system and its representatives.

6.4 The Nature of a Parasitic Genre
This thesis’s third and final research question asks what the relationship between legitimate
courtroom filings and Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings reveals about theoperation of parasitic genres. Genre was defined for the purposes of this thesis as “a class ofcommunicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes”(Swales 1990, p.58). In Chapter 2 (see Section 2.4.3), it was proposed that PCFs belong to a“parasitic” genre preying upon a “host” genre of LCFs. A parasitic genre was defined as a genre
whose existence is both dependent upon the preexistence of a host genre and whose functioning
actively interferes with the operation of that host genre. By mimicking the appearance of LCFs,
it was suggested, Sovereign Citizen authors are both attempting to imbue their own writings
with the authority of the legal system and to disrupt that system’s intended functioning. Thoughmany commentators have noted that there is clearly a relationship between the LCF and PCF
genres (Rooke 2012; Netolitzky 2016a), prior to this thesis there had not been an attempt toquantify just how similar they are. In light of the findings discussed in the prior chapters andsummarized in the sections above, it is now possible to more specifically evaluate the conceptof parasitic genre and how it applies to texts in the LCF and PCF genres.
To the extent that both LCFs and PCFs exist to support the case of a given litigant (i.e.
that they share, in this sense, a communicative purpose), it was suggested in Section 2.4.3 that
PCFs could potentially be interpreted simply as LCF texts written by authors who lacked genre
competence. However, given the explicit anti-government stance of Sovereign Citizen
pseudolegal theories, at anything except the most superficial of levels, the purposes of LCF

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6. Conclusion
and PCF texts are fundamentally at odds. Furthermore, this thesis has demonstrated that while
PCF texts are clearly designed to appear similar to LCF texts in some ways, in many others
their authors appear to have intentionally made choices in the design of their texts which
differentiate the two genres. At this point, any suggestion that PCF texts may simply be
inexpertly written or otherwise “heterodox” versions of LCF texts can be resoundingly rejected.
PCF texts ultimately meet both parts of the proposed definition of parasitic genre: they depend
upon the preexistience of a “host genre” (after all, PCF texts could not imitate a genre which
did not yet exist) and, given the ways in which PCF texts heighten or otherwise distort featurescharacteristic of LCF texts in their quest for magical supremacy, they are also clearly intended
to disrupt the intended functioning of LCF texts by breaking the genre chain (Swales 2004,
pp.18–20).
Based on the analyses of the use of legal English and the presence of multimodal
features in the LCF and PCF corpora discussed above, it is clear that the authors of PCF texts
are generally adept at identifying the distinctive features of LCF texts. In the case of the featuresof legal English this thesis examined, for example, the only category of feature in Table 6.2
that appeared significantly less frequently in PCF texts than in LCF texts was the use of
nominalizations. In fact, throughout the analyses in Chapters 4 and 5, though there werecertainly specific instances of features that appeared more frequently in the LCF corpus than
the PCF corpus (e.g. italicization as a means of textual emphasis) there were surprisingly few
where, at the larger categorical level, the PCF corpus made significantly less frequent use of agiven class of feature (e.g. textual emphasis via some combination of bolding, italicization, andunderlining). On top of that, there were also relatively few instances in which PCF texts were
found to include features which either occurred infrequently or not at all in the LCF corpus,
with the use of first- and second-person pronouns and the presence of illustrations, postage
stamps and thumbprints being the notable exceptions to that trend. To the extent that genre
parasitism involves ensuring that the features that would be expected of the host genre arepresent in the parasitic genre, then, PCF texts can generally be said to be successful in theirefforts.
PCF texts can be considered less imitatively successful, however, when it comes tomimicking the expected frequency of appearance of the features which characterize LCF texts.
The use of legal technical terminology, for example, is often said to be one of the most clearly
distinguishing features of legal English (Tiersma 2006). Like the LCF corpus, the PCF corpus
does frequently use legal technical terminology, but based on a combination of lockword andkeyword analyses, it appears to do so at a significantly higher rate than the LCF corpus in terms
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of both types and tokens. Similarly, PCF texts make significantly more frequent use of graphic
features such as notary seals than would be expected in an LCF text. At the same time, theyoften miss some of the more subtle elements of LCF text design, either through a potential lackof attention to detail, as in the typical document layout of a PCF text (which was found to hew
closer to default word processor settings than to the typical layout of an LCF text) or througha lack of genre competence, as may be indicated by their underuse of nominalizations relative
to legitimate courtroom filings. Overall, there is a clear trend in PCF texts to not just use but
overuse the most visually impactful features of LCF texts in ways that appear to interfere with
their chances of successfully passing themselves off as legitimate legal texts. In that sense, if
the goal of PCF texts were to appear like LCF texts, then they could largely be judged to havefailed. Though they are undeniably similar genres, there is often relatively little difficulty
involved in telling apart an LCF text from a PCF text. As has been discussed elsewhere in thisthesis, however, the true purpose of a PCF text is not to merely imitate an LCF text, but tomagically overwhelm the legitimate legal system and its representatives. This purposefulinterference with the operation of the legal system, and by extension, of the LCF genre, is is
the way in which PCF texts meet the second parasitic genre criterion.

6.5 The Magic of Sovereign Citizen Pseudolegal Courtroom Filings
Not only do religious studies scholars describe Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal texts as instancesof magic practice (e.g. Wessinger 2000), but if given the chance, many Sovereign Citizens
themselves will do so as well (e.g. Hume 2022b). Magic is generally said to be practiced via
the use of “words of power” (Luhrmann 1989); in the case of PCF texts, these words of power
can be understood to be analogous to the features characteristic of LCF texts. As Wessinger(2000) explains, when Sovereign Citizens observe representatives of the legal system wielding
real-world power over them via traffic tickets or mortgage foreclosures, they assume this isbecause of the power inherent in the words used and that, if Sovereign Citizens are able toclaim those words for themselves, then they will then be able to master that power. However,
it is not enough for the Sovereign Citizens to simply copy legal “words of power,” as that would
merely place them on par with the representatives of the legal system. Instead, they mustenhance the power of those words by heightening those aspects which they view as the mostmagically salient. This magical nature of PCF texts has proven to be a factor in every elementof their design.

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6. Conclusion
The primary way in which PCF texts appear to magically heighten the features whichcharacterize LCF texts is by using them much more often. The logic behind that choice seems
to be that if a small amount of a characteristically legal feature imparts a degree of legitimate
legal authority, then a greater amount will impart even more (Wessinger 2000). In some cases,
this heightening can involve a more profound modification of an existing LCF feature, as in
the Sovereign Citizen-style caption of the quantum grammar multimodal prototype discussed
in Section 5.6.3. In modifying the clearly established format of the standard legal caption, theSovereign Citizen prototype text’s overall chances of parasitic success are lessened in an
apparent effort to increase its ultimate magical power. This tradeoff can be used to explain evensome of the more seemingly outlandish features of PCF texts: postage stamps and thumbprints,
for example, can be understood in this light not as random additions to PCF texts, but asmagically heightened versions of the notary stamps and personal signatures that accompany
courtroom filings. In particular, this impulse to heighten graphic features (through either
increased frequency or visual emphasis) which emphasize the identity of a text’s author at theexpense of its similarity to LCF texts appears to underly many of the most striking differences
between the two genres and can also be seen in the PCF corpus’ much more frequent use offeatures such as first-person pronouns and handwritten signatures. Overall, it appears that PCF
texts want to use the supposed magical powers of the legal system to emphasize the identity of
their authors as individuals and increase their personal power over that system.
PCF texts’ constant emphasis on the identity and power of their authors suggests that, attheir core, these documents reflect a degree of powerlessness felt by their authors in the faceof the legal system. These qualities can make interactions with the legal system seem alienating
to those without legal training and, while most laypeople will seek legal representation to help
them navigate these interactions, Sovereign Citizens instead fight the system on their own as
fiercely as they can. Individual motivations for this may vary (e.g. lack of money to seek legal
representation, a conflation of the court with the opposing party, or a preexisting tendency forconspiratorial thinking) but assigning such motives to individual Sovereign Citizen authors isbeyond the scope of this thesis. Most conspiracy movements have a clear central thesis but are
somewhat vague about its implications: a given movement may assert that the US never landedon the moon, for example (Swami et al. 2013), or that the earth is flat (Mohammed 2019), orthat ancient aliens built the pyramids (Halmhofer 2021), but individual movement members
will often disagree about the specific implications of their chosen conspiracy. Beyond a vague
assertion that the government lacks the authority it claims to have (the explanation for which
can vary significantly between movement members), however, the Sovereign Citizen
245movement has no such central tenet. It is, conversely, very clear about what its implications
are: namely, that individual Sovereign Citizens have, by themselves, the power and authority
to stand up to the government and the legal system. In this way it can perhaps be consideredless of a movement and more of a method, offering individuals who feel unheard by the legal
system a way to assert their own authority, regardless of their particular circumstances or theultimate legal failure that is essentially guaranteed. Considering it more method than movement
would also align with reports that Sovereign Citizen-style arguments have become increasingly
popular in other conspiracy movements, particularly QAnon and certain anti-vax factions(Kelley 2019a; Merlan 2020; Gilbert 2021a).
To be clear, this thesis is not suggesting that the rise of the Sovereign Citizen movement(or method, as the case may be) is the result of any failure on the part of the legal system toproperly “market” or otherwise explain itself. Sovereign Citizens attempt to demonstrate theirown personal authority by usurping that of the legitimate legal system which, to them, appears
to require overusing and heightening the most markedly formal features of LCF texts. This isclearly magical thinking and is therefore unlikely to be addressable through a strictly rational
explanation of how the legal system actually works. It does suggest, however, that attempts by
the legal system to ameliorate the problems posed by Sovereign Citizens should keep in mind
the importance which Sovereign Citizens seem to place on their own power and identity. If theSovereign Citizen movement is attractive to those feel unheard and powerless in the face of thelegal system, then addressing those issues (without, of course, validating any of the myriad
Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal conspiracy theories) should be of the utmost importance.

6.6 The Authority of Legal Texts
As discussed in Section 2.7.1, law is only binding on society because it has the authority of thestate behind it (Bourdieu 1991a, pp.107–109; Hobbes 2005 [1651], pp.128–129). The
legitimate courtroom filings examined in this thesis attempt to demonstrate their access to that
authority (i.e. their status authorized acts (Bourdieu 1991a)) via the use of certain signs (in thesemiotic sense; see Section 2.7.2), which can be found in both the language and graphic
elements they contain. This thesis has sought to identify those signs and the ways in which PCF
texts attempt to appropriate the authority which they indicate, paying particular attention towhat that attempted appropriation reveals about the ritual and magic natures of texts in bothgenres. The related findings can be summarized in three points:

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6. Conclusion
1. The more clearly legal a given feature is, the more frequently it tends to appear inpseudolegal courtroom filings. It has been suggested (e.g. Danet 1980; Tiersma 2006),
that legal English is most clearly distinguished from more standard varieties of English
by its frequent use of legal technical terminology (see Sections 2.5.3 and 4.3). It isparticularly notable, therefore, that the analysis in Chapter 4 found that PCF texts makesignificantly more frequent use of legal technical terminology than LCF texts. In manycases, these legal technical terms are used in PCF texts in ways that are inconsistent
with their actual legal meanings; the improper (from the perspective of the legal system)
use of legal technical terms can be understood as “talismanic” in the sense that theauthors of PCF appear to be using them not because they comprehend their meanings,
but because they believe their very appearance in a text imparts some degree of
legitimate legal authority. The significantly higher presence of features such as stamps
and seals in the PCF corpus as compared to the LCF corpus (see Sections 5.5.1 and5.5.2) can be similarly explained. The most notable exception to this is the use of
nominalizations, which were used significantly more in the LCF corpus than in
COCA-W but still appeared significantly less in the PCF corpus than in the LCF corpus.
Nominalizations, it can therefore be assumed, do not register to Sovereign Citizens asparticularly indicative of authority; this leads to the second point.
2. The less visually impactful a given feature of LCF texts is, the more likely it is to beheightened when found in PCF texts. As seen in Sections 5.4 and 5.5, PCF texts were
found to emphasize text (e.g. via bolding or variation in font size) significantly morethan their LCF counterparts. This penchant for emphasis can also be seen in the use oflists, which both appear significantly more frequently in PCF texts than in LCF texts
and, as seen in the heatmap in Figure 5.24 on page 185, are generally used with a greaternumber of levels. With their use of these features, it becomes clear that PCF texts value
a high degree of visual emphasis in their texts, particularly in cases where they canheighten a given feature beyond its use in the LCF corpus. Even the use of illustrations,
thumbprints, and postage stamps, though they lack direct analogues in the LCF corpus,
can be understood as different methods of heightening existing legal features such as
the use of notary seals and attorney registration stamps; compare Figure 5.49 on page
206 with Figure 5.27 on page 190, for example. These heightened features are all inservice of the same message, which is summarized in the final point.
3. PCF texts are structured to emphasize the power and identity of their authors. The mostclearly non-legal aspect of the PCF corpus is its significantly more frequent use of first247

and second person pronouns than the LCF corpus (see Section 4.2.3). As shown in
Table 4.10 on page 108 and Table 4.13 on page 111, PCF texts are most often referringto their authors when using first person pronouns and to the court when using second
person pronouns; PCF texts are clearly not intended to be read as impersonal, objective
statements of the law in the same way that LCF texts are. This can also be seen in theappositive statements in PCF texts (e.g. “I, the Affiant, the living woman…” in Table
4.12 on page 110) and the other “personal touches” in the PCF corpus, such as thefrequent use of thumbprints and handwritten signatures (see Section 5.5). LCF texts
draw their power from the legal system itself, and generally signal that relationshipthrough their use of references to statutes and caselaw. While PCF texts are, in a sense,
engaging with the legal system, they are ultimately rejecting its authority and therefore
need to point to this alternative source of magic power and authority for their texts.
Based on the contents of the pseudolegal courtroom filings examined in this thesis, Sovereign
Citizens appear to find the authority of legitimate courtroom filings in those features which
either directly reference the legal system itself or which are used to impose order on thecontents of a document. Where the use of these features in legitimate courtroom filings isrelatively understated, they are heightened in pseudolegal courtroom filings in an effort tomagically enhance their authoritative powers. Insomuch as their invocations of the legal system
are relatively understated, the lawyers who have authored the legitimate courtroom filings
examined here seem to largely take for granted that readers will understand that the source of
their authority is the legitimate legal system itself. Because, in contrast, Sovereign citizen
authors are rejecting the authority of that legal system, their documents are instead structured
in such a way as to emphasize the source of the power and authority they are magicallyclaiming: themselves.

6.7 Limitations of this Thesis
The primary limitation of this thesis stems from the lack of prior research on legal English andthe LCF genre in general. Without the foundation which this research would have provided, it
was necessary to determine a number of things (e.g. regarding the differences between legal
English and standard English) which, had they been previously established, would haveallowed for a more detailed examination of the relationship between the LCF and PCF genres.
It is also possible that some of the more distinctive features of PCF texts relative to LCF texts(e.g. the use of first person pronouns) may characterize pro se legal filings in general, rather

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than Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal courtroom filings specifically; unfortunately, this thesis
was not able to consider this question and, as with the lack of research on the register of legal
English more generally, the subject of pro se legal writings appears to be understudied in theexisting literature.
There are a number of practical limitations to the methodology used in this thesis thatmust similarly be acknowledged. The lack of access to the original hard copies of the texts
examined in the LCF and PCF corpora, for example, complicated or foreclosed multiple
potentially fruitful avenues of analysis. Because the .pdf files received were generally ingreyscale, it was not possible to determine how LCF and PCF texts made use of color in theirwritten or graphic contents. This is particularly worth highlighting because Sovereign Citizens
have been noted to make frequent use of red ink or even blood in their texts, particularly insignatures and thumbprints (Anti-Defamation League 2016; Conti 2018). Color was therefore
ignored as factor in the analysis, even for those few documents which were not in greyscale.
Due to the format in which the component texts of the LCF and PCF corpora were received,with multiple filings often contained in the same .pdf file, it was at times not possible todetermine the intended endpoint of a given text. This meant that the divisions imposed upon
those texts may not be the same as when they were filed, with relevant material either being
inadvertently excluded or material included that was actually part of a separate text.
In its examination of legal English, this thesis only looked at a subset of those features
which had been previously noted as part of the register’s “consensus” description. It is possible
some of the other features of the consensus which this thesis did not examine (e.g. averagesentence length or the use of words which are formal but not technical legal terms) would havealso proven valuable. Similarly, given the lack of prior quantitative research into thecharacteristics of legal English, it is also possible there are other distinctive features of legal
English not previously noted in the literature which could have been explored. Because theanalysis in this thesis focused on the use of legal English in and the multimodal contents of the
LCF and PCF corpora, it is possible it excluded some features falling outside of thosecategories (e.g. features which characterize spoken English) which would also have been
relevant. Relatedly, while the presence of exclusively chancery cases in the LCF and PCF
corpora served to enhance their comparability, an examination of cases from other areas of law
may also have granted additional insight.
The LCF and PCF corpora each represent a relatively narrow genre, meaning that while
this was the most comprehensive review of legal English and Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal
writings to date, it is difficult to know how truly generalizable these findings are to those larger
249

discursive levels without further research. It is possible, for example, given the movement’s
international reach, that the Chicago Sovereign Citizen community is particularly idiosyncratic
and that the PCF corpus does not contain features which would have been better captured
elsewhere. It is doubtlessly true that the use of legal English can vary greatly even in otherwritten legal contexts (e.g. in the Supreme Court opinions studied in Goźdź-Roszkowski(2011)).
As discussed in Section 3.5.6, the way that heatmaps examined in Chapter 5 weregenerated for this thesis focused on the center point of the rectangle drawn around each instanceof a feature in UAM Image tool (O’Donnell 2011) during the annotation process. While thiswas a relatively minor issue for smaller features such as thumbprints, the more vertical or
horizontal space a given feature occupied, the less useful the resultant heatmap became. At the
moment, there do not appear to be any corpus tools available which can generate feature-based
heatmaps like those examined in this thesis; given the interesting results gleaned from theirlimited use in this thesis, it is hoped that a more effective way to do so will be developed in the
future.

6.8 Avenues for Future Study
The findings of this thesis indicate a number of areas that may provide fruitful avenues for
future research. Perhaps most obvious is the need for further quantitative study of the registerof legal English, in both written and spoken contexts. By expanding the range of legal genres
analyzed (including writings by pro se litigants) and making more in-depth comparisons tomore standard varieties of English than were possible in this thesis, such future research canestablish a much clearer and more empirically grounded picture of the register of legal English
than currently exists, doing away with the need for ad hoc agglomerations such as the“consensus” description entirely.
Relatedly, research into lay perceptions of legal English may shed even more light on
the sorts of features that Sovereign Citizens pick for their magical heightening; it seems
possible that the features that seem most salient to laypeople in legal English would also be
those that most appeal to the authors of Sovereign Citizen texts. As noted multiple times
throughout this thesis, given some of the trends observed in Chapter 4, a more directcomparison of the features of PCF texts to those of spoken English is also likely to shedadditional light on the nature of this pseudolegal genre. An examination of other varieties of250

6. Conclusion
Sovereign Citizen document, such as materials distributed as part of their “common law”
seminars or other meetings (e.g. Hume 2022c), may also be similarly worthwhile.
Looking in a different direction, the ways in which PCF texts compare to other instancesof magical practices, either historical or contemporary are also worthy of attention; acomparison of PCF texts to politically oriented contemporary magical practice was at one point
planned for this thesis but ultimately not possible due to time constraints. Given the increaseof such practices in recent years (e.g. “A Spell to Bind Donald Trump and All Those Who AbetHim” in Hughes (2018)), as well as the lack of linguistic engagement with such magicalpractices, this is yet another area of potential study which could grant insight into
manifestations of power and authority in contemporary language. Similarly, there has been
relatively little linguistic examination of conspiracy theories in any broader sense. A
comparison of the pseudolegal writings of the Sovereign Citizen movement to thepseudoscientific writings of the flat earth movement or other similar groups would also likely
prove worthwhile.
Based on the findings of this thesis, the authors of pseudolegal courtroom filings are
essentially “shouting” at courts to recognize their authority. While acquiescing to theirdemands would obviously be a mistake, such shouting does seem to indicate both thatSovereign Citizens do not understand the functioning of the legal system and that they feel
“unheard” by it. In order to combat the spread of pseudolegal theories such as those theSovereign Citizen movement promulgates, it would behoove the representatives of the legal
system to seriously consider the ways in which they help non-lawyers understand the nature oflegal proceedings. If those attempts to help are instead furthering lay perceptions of
powerlessness in the face of the legal system, then they are likely counterproductive at best.
Instead, a strategy which emphasizes the personhood and dignity of everyone before the law
could at least help to stem the spread of the movement before it becomes even more of aconcern than it already is.

251

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Appendix 3.1:
Contents of the Legitimate Courtroom Filing Corpus
The columns in this table indicate the following:•“L (#)” indicates the number associated with a given legitimate courtroom filing in theelectronic copy of the LCF corpus submitted alongside this thesis (document reference
numbers are occasionally nonconsecutive because they were assigned to files prior to
the determination of the final contents of the LCF corpus).

•“Pages” gives the number of individual pages in a document.

•“Words” lists the total wordcount of a document as determined by AntConc (Anthony2019).

•“Title” provides a document’s title as given in that document.

•“Topic” presents a brief word or phrase summarizing the primary legal or factual issue
addressed by a document.

L (#)

Pages Wordcount

1

4

837

2

2

382

3

2

267

4
5

3
4

669
803

6

8

2133

7

6

1877

8

12

3442

9

7

1811

10

4

801

11

10

2134

Title
Plaintiff's Response to Defendant Skindy LLC's
Motion to Vacate Judgment
Motion to Amend Complaint On Its Face
Emergency Motion for Immediate Discharge ofCounselAnswer to Complaint to Foreclose Mortgage
Motion to Allow Supplemental Briefing
Defendants' Response to Plaintiff's 2-619.1
MotionDefendants' Sur-Response to Plaintiff's 2-619.1
MotionDefendants' Answer, Affirmative Defense andCounter-claim
Plaintiff's Reply in Support of its Combined
Motion to Strike Defendant's Affirmative
Defenses and Counterclaim and Motion for
Partial Summary Judgment on Defendant's
Affirmative Defense
Plaintiff's Sur-Reply in Support of its
Combined Motion to Strike Defendant's
Affirmative Defenses and Counterclaim andMotion for Partial Summary Judgment on
Defendant's Affirmative Defense
Complaint to Foreclose Mortgage and for Other
Relief279

Topic
foreclosure
foreclosure
discharge ofcounselforeclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure

foreclosure

foreclosure

foreclosureL (#)

Pages Wordcount

12

3

461

14

2

244

15
16

3
12

511
3099

17

4

922

18

11

3020

19

23

5954

20
21

2
5

139
1356

22

5

1361

23

1

219

24

1

300

25

4

1092

26

1

113

27

1

207

28

2

189

29

1

214

30

1

220

31

1

217

32

1

300

33
34

4
3

1125
690

35

4

813

37

8

1717

38

7

1616

39

7

1242

40

5

1338

41

10

2854

42

5

1432

Title
Motion for Extension of Time to File
Responsive Pleadings
Motion for Additional Time to Answer orOtherwise Plead
Motion for Entry of an Order of Default
Response to Motion to Dismiss Counterclaims
Reply Brief in Support of Motion to Striuke
Jury Demand
Reply Brief in Support of Motion to Strike
Affirmative Defenses Pursuant to 5/2-615
Defendants' Answer to Complaint to Foreclose
Mortgage and for Other Relief, Affirmative
Defenses of Certain Defendants and CounterComplaint of Certain Defendants
Stipulation to Dismiss Action
Complaint to Foreclose Mortgage
First Amended Complaint to Foreclose
Mortgage
Affidavit as to Unknown Owners andNonrecord Claimants
Motion for the Appointment of Special Process
ServerComplaint to Foreclose Mortgage
Motion for Entry of a Judgment for Foreclosureand SaleAffidavit to Allow Service by Publication
Pursuant to 735 ILCS 5/2-206
Motion of Plaintiff Seeking Appointment of a
Guardian Ad Litem by the Court
Affidavit of Unknown Heirs and Legatees
Affidavit as to Unknown Owners andNonrecord Claimants
Affidavit as to Military Service
Motion for the Appointment of Special Process
ServerComplaint to Foreclose Mortgage
Answer to Complaint to Foreclose Mortgage
Motion of Plaintiff Seeking Appointment of a
Guardian Ad Litem by the Court
Complaint
Plaintiffs' Motion to Strike and Response to
Defendants' Motion for Leave to Amend
Pleadings and File Counterclaim
Counterclaim
Defendants' Reply in Support of Motion for
Leave
Response to Plaintiffs' Renewed Motion to
Stay Defendants' Demand for Arbitration
Sur-Reply in Opposition to Plaintiffs' Renewed
Motion to Stay Arbitration

280

Topic
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
malpracticemalpracticeforeclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
arbitration
arbitration
arbitration
arbitration
arbitration
arbitration

Appendix 3.1
L (#)

Pages Wordcount

43

7

1615

44

7

1645

45

1

299

46
47

1
4

215
1048

48

2

204

49
50

24
12

6135
3254

51

5

1198

52
53
54
55
56

21
12
27
6
34

5397
3170
6958
1412
9183

57

5

1111

58

29

8089

59

16

4630

60

26

8442

62

13

3863

63

26

5513

64

5

1153

65

18

4494

66

11

2710

67

14

4088

68

15

4257

Title
Plaintiffs' Motion to Strike and Response to
Defendants' Motion for Leave to Amend
Pleadings and File Counterclaim
Plaintiff's Renewed Motion to Stay Arbitration
Motion for the Appointment of Special Process
ServerAffidavit of Unknown Heirs and Legatees
Complaint to Foreclose Mortgage
Application to Appoint Standing Special
Process Servers
Class Action Complaint
Motion for Class Certification
Plaintiff's Motion for Leave to File an
Amended ComplaintFirst Amended Class Action Complaint
Amended Motion for Class Certification
Class Action Settlement Agreement
Complaint to Foreclose Mortgage
Class Action Complaint
Defendant's Rule 201(c)(1) Motion to Stay
Discovery
City of Chicago's Memorandum in Support ofits Section 2-619.1 Motion to Dismiss
Plaintiffs' Class Action Complaint
City of Chicago's Reply in Support of its
Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs' Class Action
Complaint
Plaintiffs' Response to Defenfant's Section 2619.1 Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs' Class
Action Complaint
Plaintiff's Motion for Temporary Restraining
Order
Verified Answer, Affirmative Defenses andCounterclaim
Plaintiff's Motion to Strike Defendant's
Affirmative Defenses and Dismiss Defendant's
Counterclaims
Plaintiff/Counter-Defendant Rachael D.
Siciliano's Verified Answer toDefendant/Counter-Plaintiff Feline Friends's
Counterclaims and Affirmative Defenses
Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive
ReliefDefendant's Reply in Support of its 735 ILCS
5/2-619(a)(9) Motion to Dismiss Plaintiff's
Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive
ReliefPlaintiff's Response in Opposition to
Defendant's 735 ILCS 5/2-619(a)(9) Motion toDismiss Plaintiff's Complaint for Declaratory
and Injunctive Relief

281

Topic
arbitration
arbitration
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
class action
class action
class action
class action
class action
class action
foreclosure
class action
class action
class action

class action

class action
temporary
restraining orderbreach ofcontract
breach ofcontract
breach ofcontract
injunction

injunction

injunction

L (#)

Pages Wordcount

69

15

4532

71

14

3450

72

5

1029

73

6

1615

74

17

5038

76

5

1396

78

12

3099

79

4

376

80

4

774

81

10

2673

82

5

974

83

4

275

84

7

1396

85

25

6738

86

13

3145

87

14

3328

88

18

5078

89

15

866

90

21

5736

91

31

8634

92

11

2266

93

6

1653

Title
Defendant's 735 ILCS 5/2-619(a)(9) Motion toDismiss Plaintiff's Complaint for Declaratory
and Injunctive Relief
Verified Counterclaim
Plaintiffs' Response in Opposition to
Defendants' Motions in Limine to Bar
Plaintiffs' 213(f)(3) Experts
Plaintiffs' Response in Opposition to
Defendants' Motion for Judgment on the
Pleadings As to Counts I, II, VI and VII of theSecond Amended Complaint
Defendants' Cross-Motion for Partial Summary
Judgment with Respect to Proxies
Plaintiffs' Response in Opposition to
Defendants' Motion to Compel and for
Judgment Pursuant to Supreme Court Rule 219
Plaintiff's Answer and Affirmative Defenses to
Verified Counterclaim
Motion to Continue Trial
Motion to Modify Confidentiality Order or for
Other Relief
Motion for Summary Judgment on Counter III- Section 19
Motion to Quash Subpoenas
Motion to Reconsider Summary Judgment on
Derivative Standing
Motion to Reconsider Certain Questions of
Law
Plaintiffs' Objections to Ballots and Proxies
Relied Upon by Defendants with Respect toAugust 28, 2018 Unit Owners' Vote
Plaintiff's Motion for Class Certification or,
Alternatively, for a Deferred Class Certification
Ruling Pending Discovery
Class Action Complaint
Defendant's Reply Memorandum in Support ofIts § 2-606 and § 2-619.1 Motion to Dismiss
Plaintiff's Memorandum of Law in Opposition
to Defendant Coffee Meets Bagel, Inc.'s
Motion to Dismiss Plaintiff's Class Action
Complaint
Defendant's Memorandum in Support of § 2606 and § 2-619.1 Motion to Dismiss
Plaintiffs' Verified Second Amended
Complaint for Declaratory Judgment, Writ ofMandamus and Injunctive Relief
Verified Complaint for Accounting, Injunction
and Other Relief
Defendant Roy Otake's Reply to Plaintiff Dean
Otake's Response to Defendant's Motion toDismiss Pursuant to 2-619

282

Topic
injunction
class action
class action

class action

class action
class action
class action
class action
class action
class action
subpoenaclass action
class action
class action

class action
class action
class action

class action

class action
injunction
injunction
injunction

Appendix 3.1
L (#)

Pages Wordcount

94

12

3587

95

7

2184

96

11

3527

97

12

3129

98

16

4697

99

19

5389

100

11

2786

101

36

13762

102

3

661

103
104
105
106
107

1
2
3
2
3

186
488
805
345
619

108

23

5956

109

16

5207

110

2

368

111

2

386

112

1

197

Title
Plaintiff's Response to Defendant's Motion toDismiss Pursuant to 2-619
Defendant Roy Otake's Section 2-619 Motion
to Dismiss Dean Otake's 3-Count Complaint
for Accounting, Injunction, and Other Relief
Plaintiff's Motion for Entry of Preliminary
Injunction and to Remove Roy Otake as
Successor Trustee
Complaint for Review of Final Administrative
Decision
Pipeline Westlake Hospital LLC and SRC
Hospital Investments II LLC's Opposition to
Plaintiff's Emergency Motion to Stay Decisionof Administrative Agency Pending Judicial
Review
Plaintiff Village of Melrose Park's Emergency
Motion to Stay Decision of Adminitrative
Agency Pending Judicial Review
Mary Harrington, as Plenary Guardian of theEstate and Person of Daniel Harrington,
Travelers Casualty and Surety Company ofAmerica, and Western Surety Company's Joint
Motion to Dismiss "Kleronomos' Amended
Petition Objecting to All Receiver's Reports
and for Equitable Relief Aginast Daniel A.
Harrington For Breach of His Receiver
Statutory, Court Ordered and Fiduciary Duties"
Kleronomos' Amended Petition Objecting to
All Receiver's Reports and for Equitable Relief
Against Daniel A. Harrington for Breach of his
Receiver Statutory, Court Ordered andFiduciary Duties
Motion to Vacate and Void the Order ofDefault, Judgment of Foreclosure and Sale and
the Judicial Sale
Amended Motion for Order of Default
Affidavit
Affidavit
Defendant's Affidavit
Motion to Strike Jury Demand
Defendant's Answer to Complaint to Foreclose
Mortgage and for Other Relief, Affirmative
Defenses of Certain Defendants and CoutnerComplaint of Certain Defendants
Motion to Dismiss Counterclaims Pursuant to
735 ILCS 5/2-619.1
Affidavit of Karl Leinberger
Affidavit for Service by Publication as to
Unknown Ownders and Non-Record Claimants
Affidavit to Allow Service by Publication
Pursuant to 735 ILCS 5/2-206

283

Topic
injunction
injunction

injunction
admin review

admin review

admin review

breach ofcontract

breach ofcontract

foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure

foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosureL (#)

Pages Wordcount

113

3

420

114

3

605

115

2

235

116

2

275

117

3

442

118

8

1715

119

9

2211

120

6

1205

121

1

299

122

8

1848

123

2

134

124
125
126

4
4
3

816
710
381

127

2

357

128

3

722

129

11

2270

130

15

4594

131

23

6309

132

10

2207

133

3

492

134

12

2495

135

11

2653

136

6

1233

137

4

803

138

2

419

139

4

929

Title
Plaintiff's Motion to Appointa Guardian Ad
Litem for Disabled Mortgagor and to File First
Amended Complaint
Affidavit of Amounts Due and Owing
Motion for Entry of an Order of Default andJudgment of Foreclosure and Sale
Plaintiff's Motion to Appoint a Special Selling
Officer
Motion for Leave to Amend Pleadings and FileCounterclaim
Complaint
Plaintiffs' Motion for Attnorney's Fees andCosts and for Judgment in their Favor on the
Complaint
First Amended Demand for Arbitration
Motion for the Appointment of Special Process
ServerPlaintiffs' First Set of Requests for Productionof Documents to Defendant
Affidavit in Support of Motion to Continue
Trial
Affidavit of Christine Nyborg
Affidavit of Kelly C. Elmore
Affidavit of Kelly C. Elmore
Affidavit of David J. Bloomberg in Support of
Plaintiffs' Motion for Sumamry Judgment on
Count III - Section 19
Declaration of Eugene Y. Turin
Verified Complaint for Accounting, Injunction
and Other Relief
Plaintiff's Emergency Motion for a Temporary
Restraining Order, Preliminary Injunction, andExpedited Discovery
Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial
The People's Verified Emergency Motion to
Intervene as an Additional Plaintiff
Affidavit of Joseph Ottolino
The People's Verified Complaint for
Declaratory and Injunctive Relief
Reply to Plaintiff's Response to Defendant
Skindy LLC's Motion to Vacate Judgment
Reply to Plaintiff's Response to Defendant
Scott E. Kindybalyk's Motion to Vacate
Judgment
Plaintiff's Response to Defendant' Scott E.
Kindybalyk's Motion to Vacate Judgment
Plaintiff's Motion for Service by Special Orderof the Court Pursuant to 735 ILCS 5/2-203.1
Complaint to Foreclose Mortgage

284

Topic
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
arbitration
arbitration
arbitration
arbitration
foreclosure
class action
class action
class action
class action
class action
class action
class action
injunction
temporary
restraining order
fraud
fraud
administrative
review
fraud
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosureAppendix 3.1
L (#)

Pages Wordcount

140

6

1652

141

2

264

142

5

1000

143

3

524

144

5

1596

Title
Plaintiff's Combined Motion to Strike
Defendant's Affirmative Defenses andCounterclaim and Motion for Partial Summary
Judgment on Defendant's Affirmative Defense
Motion of Plaintiff Seeking Appointment of a
Guardian Ad Litem by the Court
Feline Friends' Motion in Limine to Exclude
Testimony of Toni McNaughton
Motion to Vacate Judgment of Foreclosure andSale as a Result of Plaintiff's Failure to Comply
with Said Judgment and Vacate the Judicial
Sale
Kleronomos' Response to Respondents Joint
Motion to Dismiss Kleronomos' Amended
Petition Objecting to All Receiver's Reports
and for Equitable Relief Against Daniel A.
Harrington for Breach of his Receiver
Statutory, Court Ordered and Fiduciary Duties

285

Topic
foreclosure

foreclosure
breach ofcontract
foreclosure

breach ofcontractAppendix 3.2:
Contents of the Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Corpus
The columns in this table indicate the following:•“S (#)” indicates the number associated with a given Sovereign Citizen pseudolegal
courtroom filing document in the electronic copy of the PCF corpus submitted
alongside this thesis (document reference numbers are occasionally nonconsecutive
because they were assigned to files prior to the determination of the final contents of
the PCF corpus).

•“Pages” gives the number of individual pages in a document.

•“Words” lists the total wordcount of a document as determined by AntConc (Anthony2019).

•“Title” provides a document’s title as given in that document. “Untitled” indicates thatno title was included.

•“Topic” presents a brief explanation of the primary subject discussed in a given
pseudolegal courtroom filing document.

S (#)
4

Pages
6

Words
1628

6

4

1799

9

13

1129

10
15

1
12

297
3787

16

1

277

18

7

1729

20

20

5115

21

17

6306

Title
Affidavit in Support of Petition for Relief from Judgment
Notorial Protest and Notice of Administrative Judgment
Certificate of Dishonor
Petitioner's Reply to Plaintiff's Response to Petition for
Relief and Emergency Petition to Stay Order ofPossession
Motion for Reconsideration
2-1401(f) Petition to Vacate Orders as Void
Motion for Extension of Time to File Amendments andLeave to File Counterclaim
Defendants (Amended) 2-1305 Emergency Motion to
Stay Enforcement of Order of Possession Judgment &Waive Bond
Motion to Reinstate Default & Summary Judgment Due
to Judge Valderrama Trespassing Upon the Laws
Committing Treason Making the Order "Void" a"Nullity" w/ Affidavit
Motion to Vacate (January 12, 2018) Order due toError/Fraud "Trespassing Upon the Laws" Obstruction of
Justice Making the Order Void a Nullity w/ Affidavit &Reinstate Motion Pursunt to the Implementation of the
Judicial Conductand Disability Act of 1980

286

Topic
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure

treasonforeclosureAppendix 3.2
S (#)

Pages

Words

22

9

2453

25

13

4465

27

3

611

30

3

521

34
39
47
48

8
2
12
3

2119
308
2978
641

49

6

1386

51
53
58
60
61

1
3
1
1
2

162
1421
231
394
499

66

2

691

69
70
73
74

1
1
2
4

195
203
451
1029

75

2

473

79
86
88
89
90

6
4
2
6
7

1360
950
253
1411
1834

96

4

1166

98

4

1023

100

13

3889

Title
Motion to Reinstate Case Due to Judge Fredrenna Lyle &Numerous Judges Trespassing Upon the Laws
Committing Treason et al.
Respondent's Motion for Disqualification of Judge for"Cause" Using Her Robe Engaging in a Criminal
Conspiracy & Reconsideration Vacate (October 29th2018) Order Due to Civil Rights Violations "Fraud"
Trespassing Upon the Laws Making the Order a Nullity
w/ Affidavit
Defendant's Response Motion to Deny Plaintiff's Motion
for an Extension of Time to File a Third Amended
Complaint
Defendant's Objections to the Report of Special
Representative and Motion for Discharge (and Claim forFees) Instanter
Untitled
Motion to Dismiss
Memorandum in Support of Motion for a New Trial
In re Self-Incrimination Claim
Defendant's Reply to Plaintiff's Response to Defendant's"In Re Self-Incrimination Claim"
Emergency Motion to Rescind Order
Affidavit of Fact and Default
Motion to Intervene
Affirmative Defense - Fraudulent Mortgage
Agreement to Rescind Contract of Sale
Defendants Motion to Stay Proceedings Pending Motion
to Compel Discovery
Lis Pendens
Motion to Stay Sale
Testimony in the Form of an Affidavit
Motion for a Leave of Court to File a Motion to Dismiss
Motion for a Leave of Court to File a Motion to Stay
Order of Possession
Standard of Review for Pro Se Pleadings
First Notice of Fault and Demand for Payment
Declaration of Homestead
Notice of Claim Dispute
Notice of Claim Dispute
Defendant in Error Verified Reply to Plaintiff's Response
to Motion to Quash
Vashan Kyles (Petitioner) Motion for Clarification andMotion for Declaratory Judgment Supported withMemorandum of Law
Defendant in Error's Reply to Plaintiff's Response to
Motion to Dismiss, Request for Judicial Notice/Judicial
Estoppel and Declaratory Judgment/Strike the Responseof the alleged Plaintiff Ocwen by Affidavit

287

Topic
foreclosure

foreclosure

foreclosure

foreclosure
foreclosure
injunction
injunction
injunction
injunction
injunction
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure

foreclosure

S (#)

Pages

Words

101

8

2309

102

7

1839

103

3

726

107

16

5217

108

4

770

111
112
114

3
3
2

406
2493
393

116

7

1755

118

13

10330

120

5

1989

122
125
129
130
135
138
139
140

2
27
5
3
4
4
1
4

347
1641
1075
696
573
1348
183
1143

142

4

1399

144

1

548

147

1

229

150

3

744

152

8

1869

155
157
159
160

6
1
1
2

2927
350
283
233

165

2

491

169

3

1008

174

8

1977

Title
Reply in Support of Petitioners' Amended Petition forIntervention and Motion to Dismiss by Affidavit
Petitioner's Reply in Support of Motion for Clarificationand Motion for Declaratory Judgment/Strike Alleged
Plaintiffs Response By Affidavit
Motion to Reconsider Petition to Intervene by Affidavit
Motion for Leave to File Defendants 1st Amended Cross
Motion for Summary Judgment
Motion for Extension of Time to Respond to Residential
Credit Solutions, Inc. Reply in Support of Its Motion for
Summary Judgment and Response to Defendants
Amended Cross-Motion for Summary Judgment
Untitled
Untitled
Notice of Appeal
Motion to Stay the Enforcement of the Order ofPossession
Untitled
Motion to Approve a Performance Schedule to Avoid
Foreclosure and to Settle a Debt
Verified Answer to Complaint to Foreclose Mortgage
Affidavit of Notice of Conditional Acceptance
Defendant's Motion for Clarification
Motion to Intervene
Default Judgment
Good Faith Fiduciary Appointment & Authorization
Motion for Dismissal
Notice of Motion to Stay
De Jure Order: For Default Judgment, to Vacate andDismiss with Prejudice/Affidavit of Fact in the Nature of
a 'Motion'
Lawful Order and Notice
Withdrawal of the Order on the Nature of a 'Motion' for
Default Judgment
Amended Motion to Vacate Judgment and Sale
Defendant's Motion to Vacate the November 26, 2014
Sale, Confirmation of the Sale and Dismiss theForeclosure Complaint Pursuant 735 ILCS 5/2-1203 and735 ILCS 5/1508(b)(iv)
Durable Power of Attorney
Notice of Assumed Name Certification
Petition to Vacate All Orders and Judgments
Judicial Notice to Clerk of Court
Notice of Acceptance, Standing and Status; Request for
RemedyDemand to Dismiss
Notice of Filing Demand for Judge Anna M. Loftus
Oaths of Office and Demand Challenging the Jurisdictionof the Court

288

Topic
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure

foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosureAppendix 3.2
S (#)
177
179
180
181
184

Pages
3
4
1
1
1

Words
683
1478
184
227
232

187

16

7749

188
191

15
2

7227
673

192

5

1659

194

6

3156

197

2

301

199

6

1396

203

11

3522

205
206

2
1

251
101

208

10

1494

210

5

808

211

6

804

214
216
223

13
3
2

4051
255
453

224

2

555

226

6

1636

228

26

11193

231

1

367

232

15

4289

236

2

394

237
239
241

2
3
1

354
680
192

242

2

638

Title
Motion to Dismiss
Motion to Dismiss Foreclosure and Judgment of Default
Special Appearance and Power of Attorney
Special Appearance
Special Appearance
Demand to Reconsider the Judgment for Foreclosure andSale
Respond Demand for Dismissal
Facts and Evidence
Motion for Rule 60 Relief from Judgment to Vacate Void
Judgment
Notice of Recission of Mortage Contract/Transaction
Alleged Defendant's Motion for Extension of Time toFile Response
Alleged Defendant's Response to Plaintiff's Motion forApproval and Confirm the Sale
Defendant's Amended Answer & Affirmative Defenses
to Plaintiff's Complaint to Foreclose Mortgage
Motion to Dismiss
Motion for Enlargement of TimeDefendant Richard A. Wikar, Amended Response
Motion to Civil Action Filed by Plaintiff(Alleged) Defendant's Motion to Remove Action to
Tribal Court Under Applicable Federal Indian Law
Richard A Wikar Response to Motion on November 30,
2016, and Motion for; Sumamry Judgment, Order ofDefault, Judgment of Foreclosure and Sale, Dismiss
Party Defendants, Appoint Foreclosure Sales Officer, andSubstitute Attorney
Affidavit of Truth and Fact
Affidavit for Amount Owed
Defendant's Motion to Dismiss with Prejudice
Notice of Intent to Preserve an Interest in Property
Adverse Claim
Plaintiff's Re-Amended Third-Party Complaint
Defendant's Second Amended Answer, Affirmative
Defenses and Counterclaim
Defendant's Motion for Extension of Time for Response
to Summary Judgment
Defendant's Opposition to Plaintiff's Motion for
Summary Judgment of Foreclosure, Etc
Defendant's Response in Opposition to Plaintiff's Motion
for Extension of TimeDefendant's Motion to Dismiss with PrejudiceDeclaration of Truth and Damages
Full Settlement and Closure
Amended Motion to Dismiss for Lack of Standing andJurisdiction

289

Topic
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure

foreclosure

foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure

S (#)

Pages

Words

244

11

3373

245

3

1077

249

6

943

250

4

795

251

1

353

255

2

380

256

2

383

258
263
266
267
268
269
272
278

2
1
2
4
2
2
1
1

801
384
406
1225
743
331
179
300

282

4

1078

285

3

1074

290

3

797

293
294
296
298

2
2
2
1

865
584
381
100

302

1

218

303

11

2622

308
309
310
311

1
1
1
3

436
141
214
655

316

34

11114

318

12

4561

319

6

2311

320
321

2
5

672
1324

Title
Motion to Vacate Order for Summary Judgment andObjection to Order of Summary Judgment
Objection to Entry of Final Order
Defendant Richard A. Wikar's Notice of Appeal to theIllinois Appellate Court for the First District
Defendant Richard A Wikar's Written Response to
Plaintiff's Motion for Judgment for Foreclosure and Sale
Untitled
Notice of Original Non-Statutory Common Law
Demurrer
Demand for Removal of Custodian and Designation of
Successor Custodian
Notice of Writ and Error
Affidavit of Want of Authority
Untitled
Motion to Void Judgment
Untitled
Show Cause Hearing
1535 Substitution
3137 Vacate Motion
Emergency Motion to Vacate Default Judgment & Stay
Foreclosure Sale
Notiec & Demand for Abatement
Amended Motion to Dismiss, Reinstate and Right toSubrogation
Untitled
Amended Motion to Dismiss
Writ of Conditional Acceptance
Motion to Stay/Vacate Judgment
Petitioner's Motion to Compel Arbitration and Dismiss,Vacate Judgment, or in the Alternative to Stay
Memorandum of Law in Support of Petitioner's Motion
to Compel Arbitration and Dismiss, Void Judgment or in
the Alternative to Stay
Grant and Deed of Trust
Claim of Life Estate
Deed of Re-Conveyance
Motion to Dismiss
Bill of Complaint in Equity Presentment to Void
Proceedings and Jurisdiction
Emergency Motion to Cancel Sale, Vacate Final
Judgement, Dismiss Complaint and Request for Leave toFile Countercomplaint
Emergency Motion to Cancel Sale, Vacate Final
Judgement, Dismiss Complaint and Request for Leave toFile Countercomplaint
Motion to Vacate Judgement
Constructive Notice of Conditional Acceptance

290

Topic
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
replevin
replevin
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure

foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosureAppendix 3.2
S (#)

Pages

Words

325

4

919

328

8

1215

337

2

630

340

2

440

342

4

1491

346

4

897

347

17

6233

352

1

177

353

8

3001

356
365

2
1

526
293

368

3

1299

370
372
374
379

2
2
4
2

791
1259
1114
527

380

2

362

382

3

483

384

9

1679

386

2

347

388

4

523

389

2

79

390
395

2
2

153
439

397

9

2441

398
399

3
1

841
410

Title
Notice of, Certificate of Acceptance and Declaration ofLand Patent"Void Judicial Sale!"
Notice & Demand for Mandatory Judicial Notice via
Rules 201(d) and 902(3) of the Federal Rules of
Evidence
Petition for Relief from Judgment and Memorandum
Equity Under the Law is Paramount and Mandatory by
Law
Defendants 2-1305 Emergency Motion to Stay
Enforcement of Order of Possession Judgment & Waive
Bond
Respondent's Response Motion Reply Objecting Judge
Lyle's Court Order Due to Her & Plaintiffs' Attorneys"Trespassing Upon the Laws" Judge Acting as a Private
Citizen Entering Court Orders Void a Nullity w/
Affidavit
Affidavit
Respondent's Motion Striking Petitioner's Response
Motion for Disqualification of Judge as Frivolous For"Cause" Due to "Perjury" "Fraud" & Impose Sanctions
Pursuant to Supreme Court Rule 137 Making the
Response a Nullity w/ Affidavit
Memo
Motion for a Leave of Court
Affidavit of Negative Averment, Opportunity to Cure,and Counterclaim
Untitled
Affidavit in Support of Simeon Lewis
Affidavit of Fact
Answer to affidavit of Amounts Due and Owing
Answer to Plaintiff's Affidavit in Support of Motion on
Count for Reformation
Affidavit of Interest of Clinton Eugene Ford & Linda
Ann Ford
Defendants' Emergency Motion for Rule 60 Relief from
Judgment
Judicial and Administrative Notice of Fraud Upon the
Court
Motion to Disqualify and Substitute Honorable
Freddrenna M. Lyle, Judge for Equity and Cause
Motion to Disqualify and Substitute Judge for Equity andCause
Untitled
Affidavit of VaShan Kyles; re: 11 Ch 35040
Amended Verified Motion to Dismiss, Request for
Judicial Notice/Estoppel and Declaratory Judgment by
Affidavit
Commercial Affidavit of VaShan Kyles; re 11 CH 35040
Notary Certificate of Dishonor and Non-Response

291

Topic
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure

foreclosure

foreclosure

foreclosure

treasonforeclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure

S (#)
400

Pages
2

Words
381

401

4

932

403

22

6916

405

2

620

407
411
413
417
418

1
4
1
2
1

265
2369
259
291
239

420

16

6406

422

31

11786

423

7

1356

427

2

527

428
436
437
438
440

2
6
3
3
4

698
2325
1096
908
1163

442

2

1022

443
445
446
447
451
452

2
1
4
4
2
2

606
538
2352
1130
139
147

454

3

775

457

2

592

458

3

864

462

4

894

463
466

5
2

1866
274

Title
Affidavit of VaShan Kyles; re: 11 Ch 35040
Amended Petition for Intervention and Motion toDismiss
Defendant's in Error Verified Asnwer to Alleged
Plaintiffs Complaint Affirmative Defenses andCounterclaim
Counter-Affidavit in Support of Cross Motion for
Summary Judgment
Affidavit of Facts
Untitled
Affidavit of Facts
Motion to Seal
Notice of Pro Per Status of Defendant
Motion to Vacate a Void Judgement - Due to Fraud Upon
the Court Mandatory Counterclaim
Motion to Vacate a Void Judgement - Due to Fraud Upon
the Court With Memorandum of Points & Authorities in
Support Thereof
Application for an Order to Show Cause
Notice of Advisement "Fraud," "Conspiracy to Commit
Fraud," "Aiding and Abetting in a Criminal Crime and/or
Activities"
Facts and Evidence
Affidavit of Mortgage/Bank and/or Deed Fraud
Truth Affidavit
Lawful Order and NoticeJudgment for Default in Favor of Heir/'Counter Plaintiff'
Averment of Jurisdiction - Quo Warranto Third and Final
Attempt
Lawful Order and NoticeLawful Order and Notice
Default Judgment Affidavit of Fact
Judgment for Default in Favor of Heir/'Counter Plaintiff'
Judicial Notice of Disclaiming Trusteeship
Judicial Notice of Return of Trust Res
Demand Challenging the Jurisdiction of the Court and
Demanding a Copy of the Judge's Anna M. Loftus Oathof OfficeNotice of Fraud and Intent to Litigate
Notice to the Court, Plaintiff Counsel and the Sheriff ofCook County of No Enforcement to Evict Can Be Issued
by the Court for Lack of Jurisdiction or Standing
Affidavit of Deutsche Bank National Trust Company
Lack of Interest in Property and Lack ofStanding/Capacity to Foreclose Subject Matter
Jurisdiction and Statute of Fraud
Affidavit of Non Abandonment
Affidavit by: Claudia Ione Muhammad

292

Topic
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure

foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosureAppendix 3.2
S (#)
467

Pages
1

Words
108

469

1

252

472
476
479

1
2
3

251
258
1023

482

2

323

483
484

6
11

1632
2701

488

2

309

489

23

8729

494

10

4558

495
498
504
505
508
514
519

2
1
4
1
2
3
2

606
333
1578
161
523
1009
537

520

1

175

522

2

560

523

2

312

524

1

310

526
527

3
5

1014
1275

529

1

319

530

2

715

533

2

364

535

12

1893

536

5

801

537

15

3424

538

6

944

539

2

548

Title
Special Appearance
Memorial [of record] upon Certificate of Title(Originating from Birth Record) For: Lloyd, Sharon
Renee (Affidavit of Beneficial Interest Owner)
Addendum 11132017
Notice of Reservation of Rights UCC 1-308/UCC 1-207
Affidavit
Motion for Leave to File Defendant's / Third-Party
Plaintiff's Amended Answer Amended Third-Party
Complaint and Opposition to Plaintiff's Motion toDismiss and/or Strike
Amended Third-Party Complaint
Amended Third-Party Complaint
Motion for Leave to File Defendant's Corrected / ReAmended Answer to Wells Fargo Complaint
Defendant's Corrected / Re-Amended Answer,
Affirmative Defenses and Counterclaim
Affidavit of Denial of U.S. Citizenship and Denial of
Existence of Fictitious Corporations
Reservation of Rights
Affidavit of Truth
Will & Testament
Public Notice
Answer to Affidavit of Attorney's Fees and Costs
Notice of Rescission of Signatures
Amended Response to Affidavit of Maria Isabel Martinez
Amended Response to Motion to Dismiss Party
Defendant
Amended Response to Affidavit of Amounts Due andOwing
Amended Response to Loss Mitigation Affidavit
Amended Response to Plaintiff's Affidavit in Suport ofMotion on Count for Reformation
Notice of Rescission of Signatures
Declaration of Truth Rebuttal of Presumptions
Warranty Deed Acceptance and Acknowledgement byGrantee
Declaration of Homestead
Notice of Disclaimer of All Voluntary Implied
Trusteeships - Nunc Pro Tunc Ab Initio
Order to Show Cause(Alleged) Defendant's Motion to Remove Action to
Tribal Court Under Applicable Federal Indian Law
Notice of Removal from State Court to Federal Court,
Rule 11, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and 28 UnitedStates Code 1446
Defendant Richard A. Wikar's Notice of Appeal to theIllinois Appellate Court for the First District
Affidavit of Richard A. Wikar

293

Topic
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure

S (#)

Pages

Words

541

10

1456

543
548
549
553
554
556
557
558
561
565
566
569

2
2
2
2
2
1
2
6
1
1
2
3

532
500
781
540
317
231
734
2517
420
221
477
862

570

3

999

574
578
581
583

10
3
2
3

4384
681
629
886

586

1

209

587

2

462

588

11

3797

590

5

1388

592

5

1673

593

5

1558

596

2

676

597

2

349

609

2

726

614

5

1069

Title
Defendant Richard A. Wikar's Response Motion to Civil
Action Filed by Plaintiff; Defendant Richard A. Wikar's
Prayer for Relief Against Mortgage Fraud Under Color ofLaw
Affidavit of Silver Surety
Statement of Truth and Fact
Notice of and Writ of Error
Writ of Mandate
Summons in Mandate
Affidavit to Proceed Exparte and Under Seal
Averment of Jurisdiction - Quo Warranto
Writ in the Nature of Request Discovery and Disclosure
Lawful Order and Notice
Full Reconveyance
Notice of Default
Act of State
Judicial Notice; In the Nature of Writ of Error Coram
Nobis & A Demand to State the Proper Jurisdiction
Writ of Quo Warranto
Mandatory Notice Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act
Notice of Emancipation
Truth Affidavit
Affidavit of Acknowledgment and Acceptance ofWarranty Deed
Affidavit of Interest of Renato D Garcia
Respondent's Motion for Reconsideration Vacate(September 1st 2017) Order Due to Error "Fraud"
Trespassing Upon the Laws Making the Order a Nullity
w/ Affidavit
Motion Moving for Default & Summary Judgment w/
Affidavit
Motion for Default Judgment
Respondent's Motion for Summary Judgment Due to"Fraud" on the Court Pursuant to Supreme Court Rule137 w/ Affidavit
Verified Complaint for Writ of Mandamus/Prohibition
Under 28 U.S.C. Sect. 1333 and 1337, 28 U.S.C. Sect.
1516, Within the Admiralty/Common Law
Affidavit for Verified Summons and Verified Complaintfor Writ of Mandamus/Prohibition Under 28 U.S.C. Sect.
1333 and 1337, 28 U.S.C. Sect. 1516, Within theAdmiralty/Common Law
Memorandum In Support of Motion to Dismiss and Right
to Subrogation
Defendant's Motion to Dismiss Plaintiff's Second
Amended Complaint

294

Topic
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure
foreclosure

treasonforeclosure
foreclosure

foreclosure

foreclosure

foreclosure
foreclosureAppendix 3.3:
Legitimate Courtroom Filing Corpus Keywords
Keywords were generated in AntConc (Anthony 2019) following the procedure described in
Section 3.5.3. The full list of LCF keywords is given below. The columns in this table indicate
the following:•“Rank” indicates where in the overall list of keywords a given item falls based on%DIFF score.

•“Keyword” lists the keyword itself.

•“Tokens” indicates how many times that word appears in the legitimate courtroom
filing corpus.

•“Norm.” gives the frequency of the keyword normalized per hundred thousand words
and rounded to the nearest integer.

•“LL” gives the log likelihood score that the keyword is significant, with a score of over
6.63 indicating greater than 99% confidence.

•“%DIFF” gives the observed effect size of that keyword.

•“Legal” shows whether a given keyword met the criteria for legal technical terminology
outlined in Chapter 3, with an “x” indicating legal status.

Rank
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16

Keyword
roy
cmb
meyer
fest
harrington
markoff
felinewestlake
pipelinebeyercatimpoundment
kikue
rrapo
siciliano
kleronomos

Tokens
446
424
397
363
357
344
306
301
273
223
215
197
190
190
178
167

Norm.
147
140
131
120
118
114
101
99
90
74
71
65
63
63
59
55

295

LL
698.29663.83621.54568.28558.89538.53479.02471.19427.34349.06336.53308.35297.39297.39278.6
261.38%DIFF
105761.8100539.9
94131.22
86061.04
84636.89
81551.23
72531.62
71344.83
64698.852830.88
50932.0246659.57
44998.06
44998.06
42149.76
39538.82

Legal

Rank
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61

Keywordplanning
drsa
pokemonzoo
skindyproxies
subscription
refundpremiumcomplmelroseotake
deanmarguleschang
foia
mugnoloreggiepeta
condominium
mlballotsround
subclass
nyborgballotniantic
proxywarriors
impoundedcharity
doah
julia
mcc
vote
chuhakdatingleinberger
rentalelmorediscontinuation
friends
vehiclesivc
raeTokens
144
140
139
122
120
228
113
112
110
108
107
105
209
101
97
97
96
93
92
89
88
87
86
85
84
83
82
159
77
70
66
66
65
63
249
61
61
61
56
54
52
312
103
51
51

Norm.
48
46
46
40
40
75
37
37
36
36
35
35
69
33
32
32
32
31
30
29
29
29
28
28
28
27
27
53
25
23
22
22
21
21
82
20
20
20
18
18
17
103
34
17
17

296

LL
225.38219.12217.55190.94187.81345.24176.85175.29172.16169.03167.46164.33315.67158.07151.81151.81150.24145.55143.98139.29137.72
136.16134.59133.03131.46129.9
128.33237.94120.51109.55103.29103.29101.7298.59
368.89
95.46
95.46
95.46
87.64
84.51
81.38
458.18151.14
79.81
79.81

%DIFF
34079.58
33130.15
32892.79
28857.7
28382.99
26958.84
26721.48
26484.12
26009.4
25534.69
25297.33
24822.61
24703.93
23873.18
22923.75
22923.75
22686.39
21974.31
21736.9621024.88
20787.52
20550.1720312.81
20075.45
19838.09
19600.73
19363.37
18769.98
18176.58
16515.08
15565.64
15565.64
15328.28
14853.57
14675.55
14378.85
14378.85
14378.85
13192.06
12717.34
12242.63
12242.63
12123.95
12005.27
12005.27

Legal

x

x

x

x

x

x
x

Appendix 3.3
Rank
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106

Keywordmusic
towingmoraitis
outdoors
bagel
coffeedocx
traffic
tickets
trainers
zoologicalmunicipalities
attendancecps
renaissanceselection
advertised
eric
loggins
lsc
attendees
criv
defer
invoices
shen
cast
ver
cats
lodging
marketingpatients
jiang
jonathanogden
promotions
adr
detective
hsv
mcnaughton
mtd
pepperdan
dawoudigooch
morandTokens
49
49
46
46
45
45
45
45
44
44
44
42
41
41
41
79
39
39
39
39
38
38
38
38
38
37
37
36
36
36
36
35
33
66
33
32
32
32
32
32
32
31
31
31
31

Norm.
16
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
14
14
14
14
26
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
11
22
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
10
10
10
10

297

LL
76.68
76.68
71.99
71.99
70.42
70.42
70.42
70.42
68.86
68.86
68.86
65.73
64.16
64.16
64.16
114.11
61.03
61.03
61.03
61.03
59.47
59.47
59.47
59.47
59.47
57.9
57.9
56.34
56.34
56.34
56.34
54.77
51.64
94.12
51.64
50.08
50.08
50.08
50.08
50.08
50.08
48.51
48.51
48.51
48.51

%DIFF
11530.55
11530.55
10818.48
10818.48
10581.12
10581.12
10581.12
10581.1210343.76
10343.76
10343.76
9869.046
9631.687
9631.687
9631.687
9275.659156.971
9156.971
9156.971
9156.971
8919.613
8919.613
8919.613
8919.613
8919.613
8682.254
8682.254
8444.896
8444.896
8444.896
8444.896
8207.538
7732.821
7732.821
7732.821
7495.463
7495.463
7495.463
7495.463
7495.463
7495.463
7258.105
7258.105
7258.105
7258.105

Legal

x

x

x
x
x

x

Rank
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151

Keywordproximatetabulationbus
icfa
putative
resp
src
tecsontoon
facilities
accommodations
jessiekindybalyk
patient
pavilion
discontinuanceexpertfacebook
paternorestates
shufflin
xiaosongbob
cslegaldebreczenyi
elana
fengyunhz
indoors
matches
meiting
olsen
peimingraphaelastappas
toole
uic
xie
attorneyzim
ernestinumerosity
stingray
video
admin
bowl

Tokens
31
31
30
30
30
30
30
30
30
59
29
29
29
29
29
28
28
28
28
28
28
28
27
27
27
27
27
27
27
27
27
27
27
27
27
27
27
27
26
26
26
26
26
25
25

Norm.
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
19
10
10
10
10
10
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
8
8

298

LL
48.51
48.51
46.95
46.95
46.95
46.95
46.95
46.95
46.95
83.38
45.38
45.38
45.38
45.38
45.38
43.82
43.82
43.82
43.82
43.82
43.82
43.82
42.25
42.25
42.25
42.25
42.25
42.25
42.25
42.25
42.25
42.25
42.25
42.25
42.25
42.25
42.25
42.25
40.69
40.69
40.69
40.69
40.69
39.12
39.12

%DIFF
7258.105
7258.105
7020.747
7020.747
7020.747
7020.747
7020.747
7020.747
7020.747
6902.068
6783.389
6783.389
6783.389
6783.389
6783.389
6546.036546.036546.036546.036546.036546.036546.036308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6308.672
6071.314
6071.314
6071.314
6071.314
6071.314
5833.956
5833.956

Legal
x

x

x

x
x
x

x

Appendix 3.3
Rank
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196

Keywordefficientihsa
predominate
prohibits
animalsdaniels
edelsonfleischermcknight
residents
designating
preempted
subpoenas
nortonbees
collectively
donahue
drivingnihad
rewards
shuffletortiousvehicleimanagelocksmithpeckarrsm
storagetrtribunetwg
gifts
accountant
alsafweh
animalcounteddeferral
gauthierkarl
lorch
notingseaworld
stevenbloomberg
discontinue

Tokens
25
25
25
25
24
96
24
24
24
24
23
23
23
45
22
44
22
22
22
44
22
44
218
21
21
21
21
42
21
21
21
41
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
39
19

Norm.
8
8
8
8
8
32
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
15
7
15
7
7
7
15
7
15
72
7
7
7
7
14
7
7
7
14
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
13
6

299

LL
39.12
39.12
39.12
39.12
37.56
133.16
37.56
37.56
37.56
37.56
35.99
35.99
35.99
62.01
34.43
60.49
34.43
34.43
34.43
60.49
34.43
60.49
299.47
32.86
32.86
32.86
32.86
57.45
32.86
32.86
32.86
55.93
31.3
31.3
31.3
31.3
31.3
31.3
31.3
31.3
31.3
31.3
31.3
52.9
29.73

%DIFF
5833.956
5833.956
5833.956
5833.956
5596.597
5596.597
5596.597
5596.597
5596.597
5596.597
5359.239
5359.239
5359.239
5240.565121.881
5121.881
5121.881
5121.881
5121.881
5121.881
5121.881
5121.881
5074.409
4884.523
4884.523
4884.523
4884.523
4884.523
4884.523
4884.523
4884.523
4765.844
4647.165
4647.165
4647.165
4647.165
4647.165
4647.165
4647.165
4647.165
4647.165
4647.165
4647.165
4528.485
4409.806

Legal

x
x

x
x
x

x

x

x

x
x
x

Rank
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241

Keywordjosselllintzerismcgrathtro
societyhospital
class
adopteransarullah
dentaleo
ios
thorntonreceivercondo
boxingadoptsnicholasucl
zimmermanardc
adequately
alternatively
arbitrator
eleanorenjoiningfacility
highway
opt
orzanoparkingprerequisites
rachaelretentionroughstrategy
tuitionsoftwarearguingarl
clra
excessive
fortgang
fsbw
harmonTokens
19
19
19
38
224
255
871
18
18
18
18
18
18
317
35
103
17
17
17
17
33
32
16
16
16
16
64
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
31
15
15
15
30
15
15
15

Norm.
6
6
6
13
74
84
288
6
6
6
6
6
6
105
12
34
6
6
6
6
11
11
5
5
5
5
21
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
10
5
5
5
10
5
5
5

300

LL
29.73
29.73
29.73
51.39
302.35343.181172.59
28.17
28.17
28.17
28.17
28.17
28.17
424.8746.86
137.56
26.6
26.6
26.6
26.6
43.84
42.34
25.04
25.04
25.04
25.04
84.68
25.04
25.04
25.04
25.04
25.04
25.04
25.04
25.04
25.04
25.04
40.84
23.47
23.47
23.47
39.33
23.47
23.47
23.47

%DIFF
4409.806
4409.806
4409.806
4409.806
4330.687
4223.311
4207.063
4172.448
4172.448
4172.448
4172.448
4172.448
4172.448
4080.142
4053.769
3974.653935.093935.093935.093935.093816.411
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3697.732
3579.053
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373

Legal

x
x
x

x

x

x
x

x
x
x

x
x

Appendix 3.3
Rank
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286

Keywordhostelhourlymicrochip
navar
posts
preemption
prof
psychiatricrenewedrestrictive
speakstriblerturin
updatesuspension
hospitals
impositionbinclinicconnectivity
enact
engagement
expedited
expensivegoers
ksn
medicallymorrissey
preempt
projects
randallrcw
reallegetally
travelers
underserved
kaiserlitem
meets
partners
users
brock
cullendetention
earphoria

Tokens
15
15
15
15
15
15
30
15
15
15
30
15
15
15
118
29
29
28
14
14
14
84
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
28
14
14
14
14
14
27
27
54
27
53
13
13
13
13

Norm.
5
5
5
5
5
5
10
5
5
5
10
5
5
5
39
10
10
9
5
5
5
28
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
9
5
5
5
5
5
9
9
18
9
18
4
4
4
4

301

LL
23.47
23.47
23.47
23.47
23.47
23.47
39.33
23.47
23.47
23.47
39.33
23.47
23.47
23.47
154.36
37.84
37.84
36.34
21.91
21.91
21.91
109.03
21.91
21.91
21.91
21.91
21.91
21.91
21.91
21.91
36.34
21.91
21.91
21.91
21.91
21.91
34.85
34.85
69.7
34.85
68.2
20.34
20.34
20.34
20.34

%DIFF
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3460.373
3401.034
3341.694
3341.694
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3223.015
3104.336
3104.336
3104.336
3104.336
3044.997
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657

Legal

x
x

x
x

x
x

x
x
x

x

x
x
x

Rank
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331

Keywordenacting
expenditures
fireflyjeanesjudgmental
logic
miner
mobileopioidrda
store
subpoena
super
teachers
wcpa
similarly
spent
drbrookfield
cappelenguardianship
importantly
impoundments
mcguirepromoters
schwartz
bylawsfeaturesattendedadequacy
adjudications
adopt
applicants
cellularchip
chriscommonality
contingent
daphnedecl
distinguishable
expertisegen
generic
hao

Tokens
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
26
13
26
13
13
77
51
224
12
12
24
12
12
12
12
12
23
23
45
11
11
44
11
11
11
11
11
22
11
11
11
11
11
11
11

Norm.
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
9
4
9
4
4
25
17
74
4
4
8
4
4
4
4
4
8
8
15
4
4
15
4
4
4
4
4
7
4
4
4
4
4
4
4

302

LL
20.34
20.34
20.34
20.34
20.34
20.34
20.34
20.34
20.34
20.34
33.36
20.34
33.36
20.34
20.34
98.59
65.23
285.4
18.78
18.78
30.38
18.78
18.78
18.78
18.78
18.78
28.9
28.9
56.33
17.21
17.21
54.85
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
27.42
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21

%DIFF
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2985.657
2946.097
2926.317
2853.791
2748.299
2748.299
2748.299
2748.299
2748.299
2748.299
2748.299
2748.299
2629.622629.622570.282510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941

Legal
x
x

x
x

x

x
x

x

x
x

Appendix 3.3
Rank
Keyword332
jianjun333
keating334
legalserve335
lihong
336
lin
337
link
338
litigating339
maebetty
340
mike
341
miles
342
mom
343
nianticlabs
344
nuisance345
ottolino346
persuasive347
planned348
potentially349
prizes350
productions
351
roommate352
selves
353
servs
354
siciliana355
supplemental
356
uniformly
357
unilaterally
358
unplayable359
unsettled
360
voter
361
waiting362
honesty363
abramson364
directory
365
game
366
kenneth
367
anese
368
attendee369
bargained
370
beans
371
blog
372
boxers373 coffeemeetsbagel374
commingled375
dbloomberg
376
eshaghi

Tokens
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
22
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
43
21
21
146
41
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10

Norm.
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
7
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
14
7
7
48
14
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3

303

LL
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
27.42
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
17.21
53.37
25.95
25.95
180.2
50.43
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65

%DIFF
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2510.941
2451.601
2392.261
2392.261
2375.307
2332.922
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582

Legal

x
x

x
x
x
x

x

x

x

Rank
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421

Keywordgeraldine
guidance
increases
jstevenslessmeisterlowmcginnmedicaid
missionopp
outflows
pandi
pertainreasonablenesssteinberg
stevensstingrayssuggestedtorreyvickery
ordinance
safetyexemption
experiencekelly
streetsuser
contacted
pp
refunds
satisfies
votes
expenserent
disbursed
exact
motherplayers
profilematchannounced
arbitrable
attendreceivershipweeks

Tokens
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
259
58
152
19
19
19
38
18
36
18
18
53
52
52
17
17
68
17
17
67
16
16
80
64
16

Norm.
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
86
19
50
6
6
6
13
6
12
6
6
18
17
17
6
6
22
6
6
22
5
5
26
21
5

304

LL
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
15.65
316.8770.51
184.15
23.01
23.01
23.01
46.03
21.56
43.11
21.56
21.56
63.21
61.76
61.76
20.1
20.1
80.41
20.1
20.1
78.96
18.65
18.65
93.28
74.62
18.65

%DIFF
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2273.582
2264.453
2194.463
2154.903
2154.903
2154.903
2154.903
2154.903
2036.224
2036.224
2036.224
2036.224
1996.664
1957.105
1957.105
1917.545
1917.545
1917.545
1917.545
1917.545
1887.875
1798.866
1798.866
1798.866
1798.866
1798.866

Legal

x

x
x

x
x

x
x

x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x

Appendix 3.3
Rank
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466

Keywordllp
votingcalifornia
redmeeting
levelspublishingstudents
ticketmedicalhealthcare
units
cite
floridainterpreting
litigate
litigatedrescuesubscriptions
unrelated
processing
thousands
westernlabel
msrehearingboard
affirmatively
loyaltyprevailing
reasoning
hearings
municipality
adams
defamation
adoption
httpsmembers
donaldbackground
cites
town
troy
expenses
travelTokens
31
31
46
46
214
15
30
15
15
59
29
174
28
56
14
14
14
14
14
14
41
41
27
39
216
38
519
63
50
25
25
37
37
36
48
106
46
448
34
33
33
33
33
219
76

Norm.
10
10
15
15
71
5
10
5
5
19
10
57
9
18
5
5
5
5
5
5
14
14
9
13
71
13
171
21
17
8
8
12
12
12
16
35
15
148
11
11
11
11
11
72
25

305

LL
35.87
35.87
53.08
53.08
246.82
17.21
34.43
17.21
17.21
67.43
33
198.02
31.57
63.14
15.78
15.78
15.78
15.78
15.78
15.78
45.93
45.93
30.14
43.08
237.1341.67
569.41
68.98
54.62
27.31
27.31
40.26
40.26
38.85
51.8
113.7649477.33
36.05
34.66
34.66
34.66
34.66
229.7279.48%DIFF
1739.526
1739.526
1719.746
1719.746
1714.095
1680.187
1680.187
1680.187
1680.187
1650.517
1620.847
1620.847
1561.508
1561.508
1561.508
1561.508
1561.508
1561.508
1561.508
1561.508
1521.948
1521.948
1502.168
1442.829
1407.923
1403.269
1402.304
1395.357
1383.489
1383.489
1383.489
1363.709
1363.709
1324.149
1324.149
1297.776
1264.811263.288
1245.031205.471205.471205.471205.47
1199.536
1188.516

Legal
x
x

x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x

x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x

x

x

Rank
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511

Keywordunreasonableid
approved
net
play
tom
apple
arrangefew
success
ultimately
reportscomments
voted
area
preliminary
accessed
litigation
combined
impracticableinterpreted
purchasing
succeedleon
malpractice
forum
mark
significant
six
community
injunction
properties
applicationass
awardedgov
reliesresponsive
seekomissionssuggestwackertemporarycount
countsTokens
54
407
96
64
64
32
21
21
21
42
21
142
20
30
59
59
29
192
19
19
19
19
19
28
65
109
27
36
36
89
62
97
360
61
26
26
26
60
120
34
17
17
42
218
50

Norm.
18
134
32
21
21
11
7
7
7
14
7
47
7
10
19
19
10
63
6
6
6
6
6
9
21
36
9
12
12
29
20
32
119
20
9
9
9
20
40
11
6
6
14
72
17

306

LL
56.37
423.95
99.82
66.54
66.54
33.27
21.72
21.72
21.72
43.44
21.72
145.15
20.34
30.51
59.65
59.65
29.14
192.47
18.97
18.97
18.97
18.97
18.97
27.77
64.35
107.03
26.41
35.22
35.22
86.7
60.28
94.16
349.01
58.94
25.06
25.06
25.06
57.59
115.19
32.52
16.26
16.26
39.98
207.4347.45%DIFF
1181.734
1171.1161165.911
1165.911
1165.911
1165.911
1146.131
1146.131
1146.131
1146.131
1146.131
1103.745
1086.791
1086.791
1067.011
1067.011
1047.231
1039.32
1027.452
1027.452
1027.452
1027.452
1027.452
1007.672
1002.02
978.0019
968.112968.112968.112956.2441
951.1579
946.534
942.0605
934.2037
928.5523
928.5523
928.5523
917.2495
917.2495
908.7725
908.7725
908.7725
896.9045
895.0787
888.9926

Legal
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x

x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x

x
x
x

Appendix 3.3
Rank
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556

Keywordlawsuit
frank
pled
wife
care
began
restraining
unablepoa
factualansweringarbitrate
promisedcollegebetterconsumers
maintainsreimbursementfoundedvillagevii
healthalarm
approvalcriticaljoinder
unpaidarguesmotor
adjudication
fees
base
daughtergorequiringunit
ordinances
plain
production
assessed
movementoakopinions
adequate
situated

Tokens
133
58
33
33
262
32
39
85
61
83
30
45
30
37
59
22
22
22
29
193
50
171
21
126
21
21
42
41
34
67
455
20
20
140
60
251
33
46
92
26
26
26
26
45
51

Norm.
44
19
11
11
87
11
13
28
20
27
10
15
10
12
19
7
7
7
10
64
17
56
7
42
7
7
14
14
11
22
150
7
7
46
20
83
11
15
30
9
9
9
9
15
17

307

LL
126.09
54.91
31.18
31.18
246.89
29.85
35.99
78.12
55.73
75.48
27.21
40.81
27.21
33.35
53.1
19.75
19.75
19.75
25.9
171.25
44.34
151.5
18.45
110.69
18.45
18.45
36.89
35.6
29.45
57.61
391.22
17.15
17.15
120.1
51.46
214.36
28.16
39.17
78.35
22.02
22.02
22.02
22.02
37.89
42.76

%DIFF
886.5201
883.3412
879.1027
879.1027
871.6852
849.4329
825.6971
817.0659
804.9282
795.4878
790.0933
790.0933
790.0933
778.2254
775.2585
770.3135
770.3135
770.3135
760.4236
748.3359
747.7079
745.5887
730.7538
730.7538
730.7538
730.7538
730.7538
710.9739
707.018695.1501
694.1029
691.1941
691.1941
691.1941
691.1941
683.9068
683.2821
679.8913
679.8913
671.4142
671.4142
671.4142
671.4142
662.9372
656.5793

Legal
x

x
x

x
x

x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x
x

Rank
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
591
592
593
594
595
596
597
598
599
600
601

Keywordapprove
substantially
close
email
citationsmoreoverinconsistentchoiceliu
category
certifying
effectuatereviewingcomcrew
partialmoore
citationdiscussed
likelihood
prayerunnecessary
jacksonfairness
ninth
proposedinterested
impactreliedreviewed
warningavers
paulschoolassemblyscheduledaward
individuallyfunctiondefregardlessprebreachedchangegovernmental

Tokens
38
25
81
86
24
48
65
29
29
23
23
23
23
293
28
28
50
22
22
33
38
27
43
48
32
85
37
21
42
21
21
26
26
88
36
41
112
56
131
25
25
114
44
127
161

Norm.
13
8
27
28
8
16
21
10
10
8
8
8
8
97
9
9
17
7
7
11
13
9
14
16
11
28
12
7
14
7
7
9
9
29
12
14
37
18
43
8
8
38
15
42
53

308

LL
31.75
20.74
67.1
70.71
19.48
38.96
52.32
23.1
23.1
18.23
18.23
18.23
18.23
232.23
21.86
21.86
38.85
16.99
16.99
25.49
29.12
20.63
32.76
36.4
24.26
64.3
27.9
15.77
31.54
15.77
15.77
19.41
19.41
65.51
26.69
30.33
82.5
41.25
95.86
18.2
18.2
82.54
31.57
91.07
115.37%DIFF
651.6344
641.7445
639.4622
629.0288
612.0747
612.0747
601.2857
588.3389
588.3389
582.4049
582.4049
582.4049
582.4049
581.8231
564.603564.603559.3284552.7351
552.7351
552.7351
544.258
540.8672
537.9002
532.9553
532.9553
530.4828
527.3039
523.0653
523.0653
523.0653
523.0653
517.1314
517.1314
514.3389
510.3497
508.2305
504.1846
504.1846
497.9601
493.3956
493.3956
488.2356
480.209479.7018
479.0102

Legal
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x

x
x

x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x

Appendix 3.3
Rank
602
603
604
605
606
607
608
609
610
611
612
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621
622
623
624
625
626
627
628
629
630
631
632
633
634
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646

Keywordpet
paragraphs
agree
collected
indeedinterference
penalties
obtainpotential
imposelasallerely
collectingparkfindinggamaintained
available
context
incomeevent
injunctive
services
receipts
short
individuals
deems
rejectedpromises
harrisonplaintiffs
arounddisbursements
finallytechnical
settlement
amounts
awarding
maintenancehearing
citingaff
allegesargueddetailed

Tokens
34
97
58
29
53
53
213
123
47
42
28
37
32
187
72
27
36
111
31
101
153
87
274
26
26
73
90
30
47
34
1159
38
25
50
29
410
62
41
45
339
65
28
104
36
28

Norm.
11
32
19
10
18
18
70
41
16
14
9
12
11
62
24
9
12
37
10
33
51
29
90
9
9
24
30
10
16
11
383
13
8
17
10
135
20
14
15
112
21
9
34
12
9

309

LL
24.29
69.23
41.29
20.65
37.66
37.66
149.56
86.32
32.83
29.2
19.46
25.56
21.93
127.96
48.79
18.29
24.39
74.49
20.76
67.24
101.5257.51
181.16
17.14
17.14
47.79
58.84
19.61
30.65
22.09
751.64
24.56
15.99
31.99
18.47
261.25
39.42
25.9
28.38
213.65
40.77
17.35
64.44
22.3
17.35

%DIFF
476.4414
475.5937
473.6157
473.6157
471.8175
471.8175
461.7478
461.4435
457.7918
453.8359
453.8359
448.8909
442.5331
441.2925
434.056434.056434.056426.9353
425.5789
421.1561
418.7973
416.2541
416.1599
414.2762
414.2762
409.6221408.6248
408.6248
407.0835
404.3862
402.004
401.0896
394.4963
394.4963
391.6706
391.4994
390.5403
386.5844
385.5055
384.7255
382.1339
374.7165
374.7165
374.7165
374.7165

Legal

x

x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x

Rank
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659
660
661
662
663
664
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691

Keywordremainriver
underlying
languagecosts
reasonable
representations
enrichment
eventsexpressly
farlimitsriveraquestionsdetermination
arbitration
analysis
local
specificallyassociation
remaining
aforesaidcharges
despiteimposeddistrict
frontageconsistentparagraphappropriate
bodyunfairaccordingly
predecessor
permitemphasishudallegations
borrowers
deficiency
least
list
mr
city
danielTokens
40
28
104
123
221
213
63
47
35
62
27
27
27
88
57
280
45
75
142
399
41
93
85
55
33
384
29
47
242
130
68
68
75
32
71
124
60
303
42
28
63
42
234
478
31

Norm.
13
9
34
41
73
70
21
16
12
20
9
9
9
29
19
92
15
25
47
132
14
31
28
18
11
127
10
16
80
43
22
22
25
11
23
41
20
100
14
9
21
14
77
158
10

310

LL
24.78
17.35
64.44
75.71
135.46130.51
38.53
28.62
21.19
37.42
16.23
16.23
16.23
52.56
33.85
165.73
26.42
44.03
83.13
233.27
23.94
54.23
49.28
31.67
19
220.71
16.53
26.72
137.53
73.85
38.31
38.31
42.18
17.92
39.71
69.24
33.38
168.38
23.19
15.46
34.78
23.19
128.97263.34
16.86%DIFF
374.7165
374.7165
374.7165
370.8881
368.3586
368.1232
367.299364.8265
361.5299
359.8816
357.7623
357.7623
357.7623
354.0766
350.9806
349.0561
345.0467
345.0467
343.4851
342.5511
342.3494
341.4863
338.5967
335.1567
335.1567
334.0265
330.2118
329.0706
328.6619
328.5635
324.7463
324.7463
323.854321.9702
321.3108320.4631
318.8675
318.1369
315.3769
315.3769
315.3769
315.3769
314.4912
314.0775
308.7836

Legal

x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x

Appendix 3.3
Rank
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713
714
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722
723
724
725
726
727
728
729
730
731
732
733
734
735
736

Keyword
instructions
chargedlegislature
reviewcal
likelyprofitinsufficientadministrative
freedomsufferedarguments
effortgoverning
requirement
omittedheretodelawarepolicepunitive
decidedprovidescomplyargument
referral
substantial
accounting
three
incurredfirm
dismissal
abilityfeedefendants
apply
limit
websitesuite
policyadded
regulations
connection
monthsmemberreportTokens
31
54
37
262
60
40
43
49
410
39
55
42
42
48
80
35
183
41
44
71
40
135
95
147
49
55
155
205
84
125
71
62
85
1186
101
46
37
102
115
128
111
83
47
110
121

Norm.
10
18
12
87
20
13
14
16
135
13
18
14
14
16
26
12
60
14
15
23
13
45
31
49
16
18
51
68
28
41
23
20
28
392
33
15
12
34
38
42
37
27
16
36
40

311

LL
16.86
28.81
19.67
139.19
31.63
21.08
22.49
25.32
211.18
20.05
28.15
21.46
21.46
24.29
40.49
17.61
91.31
20.44
21.86
34.62
19.44
65.41
45.97
71.08
23.69
26.53
74.34
97.47
39.72
58.6
33.06
28.8
39.17
545.66
45.73
20.74
16.49
45.22
50.38
55.55
48.01
35.77
20.24
47.07
51.77

%DIFF
308.7836
300.542299.1934
298.6401
295.597295.597292.554287.6851
286.1781
285.7071
283.9618
283.4248
283.4248
279.7732
279.7732
277.6154
274.4531
274.2957
272.9915
266.3573
265.1665
264.1291
263.6941
263.4548
263.4548
262.6306
260.6914
257.7826
256.0373
253.2116251.0924
250.386247.8526
246.6833
242.474
241.2024
237.779
236.2575
232.8804
230.2375
229.3345
228.3455
228.1128226.3676
226.3676

Legal
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x
x

Rank
737
738
739
740
741
742
743
744
745
746
747
748
749
750
751
752
753
754
755
756
757
758
759
760
761
762
763
764
765
766
767
768
769
770
771
772
773
774
775
776
777
778
779
780
781

Keywordscope
determined
insteadpurchasedrecords
varioussimplyexoctober
pray
later
took
relevant
violates
affirmative
work
unjustmunicipal
counterclaim
howeversimilarwaivedfebruary
novemberprovision
includepurchase
able
amend
il
emergency
faceii
thoughdistsumresultforth
becauseadministratorhighbreachmortgagor
basedcommonly

Tokens
55
63
82
41
294
51
67
212
208
42
60
60
104
39
197
67
59
82
142
189
55
40
102
199
113
88
102
80
53
414
69
133
193
70
331
65
188
301
533
53
46
172
55
236
64

Norm.
18
21
27
14
97
17
22
70
69
14
20
20
34
13
65
22
19
27
47
62
18
13
34
66
37
29
34
26
18
137
23
44
64
23
109
21
62
99
176
18
15
57
18
78
21

312

LL
23.53
26.82
34.83
17.41
122.9
21.18
27.77
86.67
84.34
16.96
24.04
24.04
41.49
15.56
78.29
26.42
23.12
32.1
54.82
72.37
20.83
15.15
38.38
73.61
41.78
32.31
37.12
29.04
19.07
148.86
24.38
46.89
67.16
24.04
113.5822.16
64.08
102.25180.22
17.87
15.46
57.58
18.39
78.91
21.31

%DIFF
226.3676
225.0776
224.3896
224.3896
220.107
218.5597
218.06214.4996
212.4716
211.5327
209.5977
209.5977
208.5657
208.5657
207.6288
205.8269
204.4377
204.1152200.9363
199.0714
196.6978196.6978195.2505
191.5697
191.5378
190.1045
188.2207187.7069
185.9088
185.6579
182.3744
181.8629
179.3301
176.9179
176.6393
175.5051
175.4528
174.7878
173.8354
173.478172.962172.1708
171.973
171.925
171.2665

Legal
x
x
x

x

x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x

x
x
x
x

Appendix 3.3
Rank
782
783
784
785
786
787
788
789
790
791
792
793
794
795
796
797
798
799
800
801
802
803
804
805
806
807
808
809
810
811
812
813
814
815
816
817
818
819
820
821
822
823
824
825
826

Keywordsecondredemption
denyrelated
seeks
while
seq
attorneys
ownershipwould
allegeadmitspresencesoughtnumerous
ilcs
additionsectionterms
about
seeking
control
prior
interests
agreement
decisionprovidingremovalappdeniesallegation
continue
instant
actionsatagreedperiodthose
hisaugustcounselissueswere
fully
parties

Tokens
102
54
175
163
78
115
106
328
165
595
98
50
56
155
60
589
102
775
315
153
100
104
163
68
601
164
55
59
683
67
64
66
60
189
1502
108
81
265
818
163
313
140
592
136
511

Norm.
34
18
58
54
26
38
35
108
54
196
32
17
18
51
20
194
34
256
104
51
33
34
54
22
198
54
18
19
226
22
21
22
20
62
496
36
27
88
270
54
103
46
195
45
169

313

LL
33.54
17.55
56.64
52.37
24.98
36.39
33.46
103.0751.78
185.19
30.25
15.39
16.97
46.96
18.03
174.9730.24
227.66
91.57
44.31
28.66
29.73
45.95
19.12
168.85
45.71
15.15
16.22
187.73
18.35
17.06
17.59
15.99
49.91
396.79
27.83
20.17
65.45
202.27
40.14
75.49
33.57
142.0332.51
121.83%DIFF
169.006
167.028
166.2672
164.9958
164.4849
162.4634
162.083161.2533
161.094159.6106158.4567
157.9981
155.6166
155.4898
154.3124
152.3538
152.1931
150.6167
149.2261
148.7384
147.2482
146.8526
144.8696
144.5509
144.2676
143.2922
141.7537
141.4506
141.2436
140.9546
137.3582
137.3582
137.3582
136.109135.7884
133.0426
128.8811
127.8983
127.8862
127.5847
125.1307124.5281
124.4666
124.1717
123.7824

Legal
x
x
x

x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x

Rank
827
828
829
830
831
832
833
834
835
836
837
838
839
840
841
842
843
844
845
846
847
848
849
850
851
852
853
854
855
856
857
858
859
860
861
862
863
864
865
866
867
868
869
870
871

Keywordjanuary
extentwhether
serviceadmit
dutiesdirectfollows
throughrequests
limitedset
chicago
here
could
iii
individual
disputedamages
each
granting
favor
discoveryevenstatuteshouldincludingenforcement
behalfreliefcountercode
sthad
letterstatutory
violations
itsrequirements
found
trial
wherefore
ill
conduct
july

Tokens
171
71
275
327
139
140
69
163
362
123
159
348
504
104
153
130
157
87
237
208
90
134
107
142
184
414
248
94
186
445
264
298
316
443
95
103
103
840
105
106
166
138
736
201
138

Norm.
56
23
91
108
46
46
23
54
120
41
53
115
166
34
51
43
52
29
78
69
30
44
35
47
61
137
82
31
61
147
87
98
104
146
31
34
34
277
35
35
55
46
243
66
46

314

LL
40.46
16.6
63.61
75.64
31.11
30.94
15.21
35.73
79.29
26.89
33.85
73.12
105
21.49
31.46
26.66
30.13
16.68
45.4
39.84
17.07
24.6
19.55
25.9
32.93
73.95
44.1
16.61
32.71
77.12
45.28
51.02
53.43
74.48
15.79
17.1
17.1
139.66
16.91
16.82
25.62
20.72
107.88
29.3
20.08

%DIFF
123.0124
121.7426
120.5186
120.5004
117.0579
115.7802115.4963
114.9411
114.8092
114.6696
112.0222
110.716109.8746
109.1971
108.7115
108.4903
102.5285
102.4526
102.3522
102.3382
101.5306
98.7875
98.4166
98.263996.729396.5326
96.216195.7164
95.3479
94.162593.40393.2589
92.32191.87991.0935
90.9992
90.9992
90.9779
88.8077
87.76185.85684.019382.3545
82.095481.9746

Legal
x
x
x
x

x
x

x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x

Appendix 3.3
Rank
872
873
874
875
876
877
878
879
880
881
882
883
884
885
886
887
888
889
890
891
892
893
894
895
896
897
898
899
900
901
902
903
904
905
906
907
908
909
910
911
912
913
914

Keyword
out
only
llc
some
fiduciary
two
defensestay
furtherthus
attached
dismissed
amendedruleclaimscomplaint
didownersactionprovidedamountrequiredexhibitover
information
homedefendant
he
these
filed
from
see
act
their
that
plaintiff
on
was
an
for
as
the
to

Tokens
183
387
510
117
134
142
149
146
375
129
333
130
187
373
371
769
370
163
627
208
203
227
416
198
235
257
1244
507
356
368
998
542
584
723
4437
1607
2000
1371
1533
3330
3071
20992
9630

Norm.
60
128
168
39
44
47
49
48
124
43
110
43
62
123
123
254
122
54
207
69
67
75
137
65
78
85
411
167
118
122
330
179
193
239
1465
531
660
453
506
1100
1014
6931
3180

315

LL
26.21
55.32
67.84
15.36
17.29
17.99
18.75
18.34
46.47
15.83
40.75
15.78
22.4
43.75
43.3
82.29
39.07
16
59.96
19.51
18.7
18.61
33.98
15.21
15.22
16.22
75.18
26.76
17.21
17.57
43.59
20.2
19.53
21.1
127.26
43.35
38.73
22.02
22.89
45.7
29.29
68.93
26.91

%DIFF
80.9856
80.822176.461775.765374.758373.736473.364673.271572.4987
72.01871.8267
71.425470.7153
69.6065
69.34665.034864.461761.2058
60.025459.259758.4991
53.9438
53.802251.60346.0188
45.2406
43.8955
40.257138.071137.7726
35.672132.3541
30.279327.8763
27.4085
26.5543
21.8471
19.63918.834117.9002
14.61127.95657.4539

Legal

x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x

x
x

x

Appendix 3.4:
Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Corpus Keywords
Keywords were generated in AntConc (Anthony 2019) following the procedure described in
Section 3.5.3. The full list of PCF keywords is given below. The columns in this table indicate
the following:•“Rank” indicates where in the overall list of keywords a given word falls based on%DIFF score.

•“Keyword” lists the keyword itself.

•“Tokens” indicates how many times that word appears in the pseudolegal courtroom
filing corpus.

•“Norm.” gives the frequency of the keyword normalized per hundred thousand words
and rounded to the nearest integer.

•“LL” gives the log likelihood score that the keyword is significant, with a score of over
6.63 indicating greater than 99% confidence.

•“%DIFF” gives the observed effect size of that keyword.

•“Legal” shows whether a given keyword item met the criteria for legal technicalterminology outlined in Chapter 3, with an “x” indicating legal status.

Rank
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16

Keywordkyles
vashanmers
beverly
affiants
wikar
ucc
ginnieusc
syntax
remic
ocwen
us
grammarcitimortgage
ann

Tokens
447
260
246
453
205
199
181
179
179
175
158
155
284
139
131
492

Norm.
124
72
68
126
57
55
50
50
50
49
44
43
79
39
36
137

316

LL
546.65317.9
300.78541.32250.64243.3
221.29218.84218.84213.95193.17189.5
335.52169.93160.15578.81%DIFF
75229.18
43715.6341356.33
38070.15
34446.94
33435.8130402.4230065.38
30065.38
29391.29
26526.42
26020.86
23830.0723324.51
21976.34
20628.16

Legal

x
x
x
x
x
x

Appendix 3.4
Rank
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61

Keywordjones
creditor
pnc
congress
republiclyle
admiralty
anselmomuhammadindigenous
lindburg
juris
woman
claudiasecuritization
treasonneheh
alihollandspreckava
ione
reservedrussellteverbaugh
personareneesecuritizedtbw
elainepropriahodgescarr
simmonssui
em
loftusneser
bessmaritime
freddiemacolivercalumetemily

Tokens
238
114
226
112
110
108
107
107
104
100
99
98
98
88
88
86
83
82
82
81
80
78
78
76
76
75
74
71
70
69
69
68
67
66
66
65
130
65
64
64
63
63
63
61
60

Norm.
66
32
63
31
31
30
30
30
29
28
28
27
27
24
24
24
23
23
23
23
22
22
22
21
21
21
21
20
19
19
19
19
19
18
18
18
36
18
18
18
18
18
18
17
17

317

LL
279.61139.37265.04136.92134.48132.03130.81130.81
127.14122.25121.03119.8
119.8
107.58107.58105.13101.46100.24100.24
99.02
97.8
95.35
95.35
92.91
92.91
91.68
90.46
86.79
85.57
84.35
84.35
83.13
81.9
80.68
80.68
79.46
148.75
79.46
78.24
78.24
77.01
77.01
77.01
74.57
73.35

%DIFF
19954.08
19111.47
18942.95
18774.42
18437.38
18100.34
17931.82
17931.82
17426.25
16752.17
16583.64
16415.12
16415.1214729.91
14729.91
14392.86
13887.3
13718.78
13718.78
13550.25
13381.73
13044.69
13044.69
12707.65
12707.65
12539.12
12370.6
11865.0411696.52
11527.99
11527.99
11359.47
11190.95
11022.43
11022.43
10853.91
10853.91
10853.91
10685.39
10685.39
10516.86
10516.86
10516.86
10179.82
10011.3

Legal
x
x
x
x

x

x
x

x

x
x

x

x

x
x
x

Rank
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106

Keywordfreedmandba
noticedinvestors
vesselbias
debtordomestic
fictitious
tenderwarranto
darrylrescission
silverss
clintonhenry
parsebradleymonzellavassalees
autographdishonor
fictionindianleslie
lyles
coin
linda
trustoryhwhnewbn
converted
territorytex
ratreatyfelonygloriainfantirs
romel
validation
von
wages
courtroom

Tokens
60
59
58
57
57
55
55
55
55
110
55
54
54
54
54
53
53
105
51
51
51
50
50
50
50
50
50
49
49
49
49
94
47
46
45
45
44
44
43
43
43
42
84
42
41

Norm.
17
16
16
16
16
15
15
15
15
31
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
29
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
26
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
12
12
12
23
12
11

318

LL
73.35
72.12
70.9
69.68
69.68
67.23
67.23
67.23
67.23
124.63
67.23
66.01
66.01
66.01
66.01
64.79
64.79
118.61
62.34
62.34
62.34
61.12
61.12
61.12
61.12
61.12
61.12
59.9
59.9
59.9
59.9
105.38
57.45
56.23
55.01
55.01
53.79
53.79
52.56
52.56
52.56
51.34
93.38
51.34
50.12

%DIFF
10011.3
9842.777
9674.2569505.734
9505.734
9168.691
9168.691
9168.691
9168.691
9168.691
9168.691
9000.169
9000.169
9000.169
9000.169
8831.648
8831.648
8747.387
8494.604
8494.604
8494.604
8326.083
8326.083
8326.083
8326.083
8326.083
8326.083
8157.561
8157.561
8157.561
8157.561
7820.518
7820.518
7651.996
7483.474
7483.474
7314.953
7314.953
7146.431
7146.431
7146.431
6977.909
6977.909
6977.909
6809.388

Legal

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x

Appendix 3.4
Rank
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151

Keywordnationssubrogation
endorsement
springs
collusion
provident
quesecurities
amen
issuer
trespassing
cestuipostaliisia
negotiabletribalbirthdeclarespg
wynn
calendarcountrywide
god
shapirotortfeasor
adverbappellant
convention
corruption
czerwonka
karol
kreismanmaepoolingbey
englandnotarized
stationtreaties
validateaffirmation
cmi
fdcpa
firsthandtreasury

Tokens
82
41
40
40
39
39
39
154
38
38
38
37
147
36
72
36
35
35
35
35
68
34
33
33
33
32
32
32
32
32
32
32
192
32
31
31
31
31
31
31
30
30
30
30
30

Norm.
23
11
11
11
11
11
11
43
11
11
11
10
41
10
20
10
10
10
10
10
19
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
53
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
8
8
8
8
8

319

LL
90.98
50.12
48.9
48.9
47.67
47.67
47.67
170
46.45
46.45
46.45
45.23
161.63
44.01
79.01
44.01
42.78
42.78
42.78
42.78
74.24
41.56
40.34
40.34
40.34
39.12
39.12
39.12
39.12
39.12
39.12
39.12
208.43
39.12
37.89
37.89
37.89
37.89
37.89
37.89
36.67
36.67
36.67
36.67
36.67

%DIFF
6809.388
6809.388
6640.866
6640.866
6472.344
6472.344
6472.344
6388.084
6303.823
6303.823
6303.823
6135.301
6093.1715966.779
5966.779
5966.779
5798.258
5798.258
5798.258
5798.258
5629.736
5629.736
5461.215
5461.215
5461.215
5292.693
5292.693
5292.693
5292.693
5292.693
5292.693
5292.693
5292.693
5292.693
5124.1715124.1715124.1715124.1715124.1715124.1714955.654955.654955.654955.654955.65

Legal
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x

x
x

x

x
x
x

x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x

Rank
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196

Keywordvalderramaverbvonspreck
perjuryanoa
canon
quafinrescindvassaleesovereigncrimeshainesnameholder
nullityoaths
ryszardaccredited
breathingdemocratic
homesteadink
simko
trespassers
wet
lenderslloyd
averment
codes
doc
ernestservants
backedlawfully
wise
acceptor
clarrisaglenn
lakesidemillicentmyselfpatentusca
adhesionbaccollectors

Tokens
30
30
30
119
29
29
29
29
29
57
28
28
28
56
28
28
27
27
27
27
27
27
27
27
53
53
26
26
26
26
26
51
51
51
25
25
25
25
25
25
25
25
24
24
24

Norm.
8
8
8
33
8
8
8
8
8
16
8
8
8
16
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
15
15
7
7
7
7
7
14
14
14
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
7

320

LL
36.67
36.67
36.67
128.23
35.45
35.45
35.45
35.45
35.45
61.14
34.23
34.23
34.23
59.95
34.23
34.23
33
33
33
33
33
33
33
33
56.39
56.39
31.78
31.78
31.78
31.78
31.78
54.03
54.03
54.03
30.56
30.56
30.56
30.56
30.56
30.56
30.56
30.56
29.34
29.34
29.34

%DIFF
4955.654955.654955.65
4913.519
4787.1284787.1284787.1284787.1284787.128
4702.867
4618.606
4618.606
4618.606
4618.606
4618.606
4618.606
4450.085
4450.085
4450.085
4450.085
4450.085
4450.085
4450.085
4450.085
4365.824
4365.824
4281.563
4281.563
4281.563
4281.563
4281.563
4197.302
4197.302
4197.302
4113.041
4113.041
4113.041
4113.041
4113.041
4113.041
4113.041
4113.041
3944.52
3944.52
3944.52

Legal

x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x

x
x

x

x
x
x

Appendix 3.4
Rank
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241

Keywordcolonial
nativespronounsteal
beneficial
artificial
bancorpbench
counterfeit
creditors
ditechkernerlewis
lodial
madam
maria
robo
grantorblood
cert
chartercongressional
convicted
democrats
makermarciatitlesunschooled
war
articlescbi
copyclaim
debtors
germaneguaranty
ledgermaddocks
tautgesnationaidinganthony
assignments
continental
disqualification
fault

Tokens
24
24
24
24
47
23
23
23
23
23
23
23
23
23
23
23
23
137
22
22
22
22
22
22
22
22
22
22
22
21
21
21
21
21
21
21
21
21
41
20
20
40
20
20
40

Norm.
7
7
7
7
13
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
38
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
11
6
6
11
6
6
11

321

LL
29.34
29.34
29.34
29.34
49.3
28.12
28.12
28.12
28.12
28.12
28.12
28.12
28.12
28.12
28.12
28.12
28.12
143.19
26.89
26.89
26.89
26.89
26.89
26.89
26.89
26.89
26.89
26.89
26.89
25.67
25.67
25.67
25.67
25.67
25.67
25.67
25.67
25.67
42.23
24.45
24.45
41.06
24.45
24.45
41.06

%DIFF
3944.52
3944.52
3944.52
3944.52
3860.259
3775.998
3775.998
3775.998
3775.998
3775.998
3775.998
3775.998
3775.998
3775.998
3775.998
3775.998
3775.998
3747.911
3607.476
3607.476
3607.476
3607.476
3607.476
3607.476
3607.476
3607.476
3607.476
3607.476
3607.476
3438.955
3438.955
3438.955
3438.955
3438.955
3438.955
3438.955
3438.955
3438.955
3354.694
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433

Legal
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x

Rank
Keyword242
freddrenna
243
judiciary
244
jurat
245
libellees
246
louis
247
native248
sealed249
select250
tara251
territories
252
unaltered
253
valuable254
vitiates
255
vs256
adjective
257
bean
258
defraud259
deutsche260
disqualified
261
drawer
262
flesh
263
gop
264
indorsement
265
jbw
266
jur
267
lp
268
racketeering269
repurchased270
supremacy
271
therese272
criminal273
lending274
committing
275 acknowledgement276
appearing277
bramlett278
docketing279
indorser
280
nunc
281
renato282
reservation
283
tacit
284
terrorist
285
volition286
african

Tokens
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
118
19
19
19
38
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
151
37
73
36
36
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
17

Norm.
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
33
5
5
5
11
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
42
10
20
10
10
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5

322

LL
24.45
24.45
24.45
24.45
24.45
24.45
24.45
24.45
24.45
24.45
24.45
24.45
24.45
120.84
23.23
23.23
23.23
38.72
23.23
23.23
23.23
23.23
23.23
23.23
23.23
23.23
23.23
23.23
23.23
23.23
153.71
37.55
73.93
36.38
36.38
22
22
22
22
22
22
22
22
22
20.78

%DIFF
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3270.433
3214.259
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3101.911
3080.846
3017.651
2975.52
2933.392933.392933.392933.392933.392933.392933.392933.392933.392933.392933.392764.868

Legal
x
x

x
x

x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x

Appendix 3.4
Rank
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331

Keywordbondedclean
codliscorrection
deceitdisrespect
duresshrol
lismillardpendens
prose
ratified
rebuttalrogatorystyledterritorial
testimonial
tila
tribe
unsecured
warranty
expressed
peoples
abetting
affixedauthentic
cc
confession
divineevangelevictionexonerationindenturelindberg
marinomattesonnc
powellracistrecipientreconsideration
respa
substantiatedtrespass

Tokens
17
17
17
34
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
33
65
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
32
16

Norm.
5
5
5
9
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
9
18
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
9
4

323

LL
20.78
20.78
20.78
34.04
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
20.78
32.88
64.6
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
19.56
31.72
19.56

%DIFF
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2764.868
2680.607
2638.477
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346

Legal
x

x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x
x
x

Rank
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376

Keywordtrinsey
unalienable
wentworthcertificates
garciaaboriginal
allongeclarification
constitutionallydelegation
derivatives
indians
initiated
manifestation
maturity
organic
pagliaro
retiredsolemnly
sommersvilletyrants
foreignyoung
notarynomineeaccuracy
acknowledgmentamericansblackscollections
dart
desistinstitutions
lands
liberties
marie
moral
notarial
pooledreconveyancetribesvalidating
writs
acknowledgedman

Tokens
16
16
16
31
31
15
15
30
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
119
414
294
57
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
28
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
55
109

Norm.
4
4
4
9
9
4
4
8
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
33
115
82
16
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
8
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
15
30

324

LL
19.56
19.56
19.56
30.56
30.56
18.34
18.34
29.4
18.34
18.34
18.34
18.34
18.34
18.34
18.34
18.34
18.34
18.34
18.34
18.34
18.34
116.46404.87287.17
55.34
17.11
17.11
17.11
17.11
17.11
17.11
17.11
17.11
27.09
17.11
17.11
17.11
17.11
17.11
17.11
17.11
17.11
17.11
53.03
104.93%DIFF
2596.346
2596.346
2596.346
2512.086
2512.086
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2427.825
2406.762391.713
2377.268
2301.434
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2259.303
2217.173
2196.108

Legal
x
x

x
x
x
x

x

x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

Appendix 3.4
Rank
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421

Keywordcomplainant
gold
holders
judgesjay
atkinsbellwood
beyerscognizanceconcealment
enemy
epa
fixed
heavnerheredes
intervener
magistrate
mihlarministryquit
shrewberry
strawman
trespassed
victimchanceryford
petitioner
lawfulhonor
counsels
reserves
revocation
fargo
fidelity
bayview
constructive
annadeclaredreserve
exercising
stephanie
executor
contribution
paper
americanTokens
27
54
27
242
105
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
26
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
231
102
254
201
50
24
23
23
613
90
22
87
129
43
43
21
42
62
41
61
221

Norm.
8
15
8
67
29
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
7
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
64
28
71
56
14
7
6
6
171
25
6
24
36
12
12
6
12
17
11
17
61

325

LL
25.94
51.88
25.94
232.38100.33
15.89
15.89
15.89
15.89
15.89
15.89
15.89
24.79
15.89
15.89
15.89
15.89
15.89
15.89
15.89
15.89
15.89
15.89
15.89
219.7596.89
241.12190.36
47.3
22.51
21.37
21.37
568.2
83.2
20.23
79.8
118
39.33
39.33
19.1
38.2
56.17
37.07
55.04
198.87%DIFF
2175.042
2175.042
2175.042
2165.68
2111.847
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2090.782
2062.695
2048.651
2040.2252017.053
2006.521
1922.26
1837.999
1837.999
1813.033
1795.869
1753.738
1732.673
1711.608
1711.608
1711.608
1669.477
1669.477
1641.39
1627.347
1613.304
1592.877

Legal
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x

x
x
x
x
x

Rank
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466

Keywordchapman
draft
gr
liens
morganquantumstockvoluntary
fraudulently
grace
joe
signature
whistleblower
livingdorothyrestatement
assignsoathdrawn
mortgages
stringent
upholdwrit
affiant
heir
chain
documented
hearsay
recourse
truth
land
stat
men
aka
registration
uniteddebts
editionjudgement
dec
secclaimant
conditionalseal
certificate

Tokens
20
40
20
20
20
20
40
20
38
19
19
171
19
149
37
37
73
199
18
54
18
18
142
440
86
34
34
34
34
136
269
83
33
65
81
714
62
31
62
122
166
120
45
120
148

Norm.
6
11
6
6
6
6
11
6
11
5
5
48
5
41
10
10
20
55
5
15
5
5
40
122
24
9
9
9
9
38
75
23
9
18
23
199
17
9
17
34
46
33
13
33
41

326

LL
17.97
35.94
17.97
17.97
17.97
17.97
35.94
17.97
33.7
16.85
16.85
151.6816.85
131.46
32.58
32.58
64.05
174.21
15.73
47.2
15.73
15.73
123.65382.39
74.22
29.24
29.24
29.24
29.24
116.99230.69
70.9
28.14
55.17
68.69
602.18
51.87
25.93
51.87
101.56137.73
99.37
37.26
99.37
122.03%DIFF
1585.217
1585.217
1585.217
1585.217
1585.217
1585.217
1585.217
1585.217
1500.956
1500.956
1500.956
1500.956
1500.956
1469.358
1458.825
1458.825
1437.76
1424.355
1416.695
1416.695
1416.695
1416.695
1395.631382.991
1349.286
1332.434
1332.434
1332.434
1332.434
1332.434
1316.635
1298.731290.304
1269.238
1265.025
1236.938
1206.043
1206.043
1206.043
1184.9781171.573
1163.912
1163.912
1163.912
1147.06

Legal
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

Appendix 3.4
Rank
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511

Keywordcurrencymeregards
investorsignatures
crime
investment
tryingdivision
instruments
settlorguiltycommittee
custodianauthenticatedholdersubscribedmastereljohnsoned
color
lawrencelove
parprivileges
judge
respondent
fraud
error
wade
want
commitsilencetoday
zipbankingbonddeedaccommodationdc
mistakewalkerznumbers

Tokens
74
381
73
29
58
43
43
43
200
85
55
40
26
26
51
279
63
25
85
109
133
48
24
60
96
24
890
166
683
200
47
47
35
23
23
34
45
101
155
22
22
33
44
22
54

Norm.
21
106
20
8
16
12
12
12
56
24
15
11
7
7
14
78
18
7
24
30
37
13
7
17
27
7
248
46
190
56
13
13
10
6
6
9
13
28
43
6
6
9
12
6
15

327

LL
61.01
313.22
59.92
23.75
47.5
35.08
35.08
35.08
163.01
69.07
44.24
31.83
20.5
20.5
39.93
218.09
49.11
19.43
65.35
83.72
102.09
36.73
18.37
45.92
73.47
18.37
678.88126.46519.26
151.9
35.67
35.67
26.49
17.31
17.31
25.43
33.56
75.25
114.85
16.25
16.25
24.38
32.51
16.25
39.59

%DIFF
1147.06
1134.745
1130.208
1121.782
1121.782
1107.739
1107.739
1107.739
1103.726
1093.695
1058.586
1023.478
995.3907
995.3907
974.3255
968.5805
961.6864
953.2603
923.1672
920.4922
918.79911.1299
911.1299
911.1299
911.1299
911.1299
899.8951
899.0926
892.2439
891.3038
890.0647
890.0647
883.043868.9995
868.9995
854.956847.9343
845.5937
832.8877
826.8691
826.8691
826.8691
826.8691
826.8691
810.0169

Legal
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x

x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x

Rank
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556

Keywordlenderescrowrichardcitizenpetitionspresentment
wherebymind
constitutionalmyassignment
conspiracy
equivalentknowscompetent
dollarnull
depositsheriff
stamp
charactertitle
national
box
complaints
contempt
petitioners
proamericaassoc
provenminor
citizens
liberty
sharonpresidingactingpointsndwells
hundredmentioned
substituteunion
committed

Tokens
235
32
74
116
21
42
21
31
82
642
210
69
49
49
78
39
48
67
38
38
47
554
244
28
28
28
28
163
242
26
52
43
60
34
84
25
116
57
145
611
32
48
24
24
95

Norm.
65
9
21
32
6
12
6
9
23
179
58
19
14
14
22
11
13
19
11
11
13
154
68
8
8
8
8
45
67
7
14
12
17
9
23
7
32
16
40
170
9
13
7
7
26

328

LL
171.52
23.34
53.76
84.18
15.21
30.42
15.21
22.3
58.77
456.01148.86
48.58
34.41
34.41
54.64
27.32
33.38
46.53
26.29
26.29
32.36
381.47167.89
19.21
19.21
19.21
19.21
110.2
162.79
17.19
34.37
28.31
39.43
22.25
54.62
16.19
74.88
36.45
92.17
388.23
20.26
30.39
15.19
15.19
59.8

%DIFF
800.0588
798.7821
790.7573
788.5687
784.7387
784.7387
784.7387
770.6952
763.6735
745.2414
742.6083
730.571725.7561
725.7561
721.543
721.543708.9039
706.4965
700.4778
700.4778
692.0518
691.1949
690.7554
686.4344
686.4344
686.4344
686.4344
663.0286
655.2267
630.2605
630.2605
624.6431
622.2356
616.217607.7909
602.1735
598.1611
586.1239
578.7678
577.4127574.0866
574.0866
574.0866
574.0866
567.0649

Legal
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x
x

x
x
x
x

Appendix 3.4
Rank
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
591
592
593
594
595
596
597
598
599
600
601

Keywordacceptancearticlethousandagentsassignfilings
litigant
theftdelivered
laws
south
instrument
naturallines
etctransfer
secureduage
profits
sentence
fraudulent
twentygrantee
officers
notes
debt
fide
matthew
tribunal
proof
nabeneficiarybona
pleasepresident
surcreditres
recordedconstitution
collection
banks
misleading
ave

Tokens
110
225
31
139
38
30
30
52
44
344
173
393
100
85
92
141
145
669
68
27
27
255
40
33
98
104
499
32
51
51
235
38
265
31
43
43
43
180
30
89
384
118
53
53
47

Norm.
31
63
9
39
11
8
8
14
12
96
48
109
28
24
26
39
40
186
19
8
8
71
11
9
27
29
139
9
14
14
65
11
74
9
12
12
12
50
8
25
107
33
15
15
13

329

LL
68.95
140.04
19.28
86.27
23.36
18.3
18.3
31.54
26.48
206.89103.06232.92
59.23
50.08
54.17
82.84
84.07
385.33
39.03
15.42
15.42
145.14
22.66
18.57
54.78
57.93
277.56
17.63
28.03
28.03
128.86
20.79
144.65
16.71
23.02
23.02
23.02
94.75
15.79
46.46
199.88
61.34
27.51
27.51
24.35

%DIFF
562.0493
553.7478
553.0214550.6808
540.3823
531.9562
531.9562
525.9376
517.9127516.7175
507.3801
502.0819
501.863496.8475
496.3074494.0388
481.8009
475.2091
472.9736
468.7606
468.7606
465.4345
461.7388
456.1214450.5041
447.6954
446.0539
439.2693
437.1628
437.1628
435.1701
433.6519
431.6457
422.4171417.6022
417.6022
417.6022
405.565405.565399.9476
397.787
397.1389
396.2026
396.2026
395.0324

Legal
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

Rank
602
603
604
605
606
607
608
609
610
611
612
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621
622
623
624
625
626
627
628
629
630
631
632
633
634
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646

Keywordfunding
clerk
bankruptcy
witness
affidavit
expires
live
security
affirmyou
countryohio
amofficial
servicingsue
accepted
lawyerextensiondischarge
your
chief
rightscharlesorganizationalsoldauthorities
lisa
obligation
therebyaffirmed
allegedsupdollarsverification
assignedmemorandum
recorderasset
forever
respond
corporate
black
note

Tokens
52
127
69
161
484
45
45
286
56
408
39
39
286
71
211
43
96
96
53
90
402
79
583
42
47
341
129
67
36
179
71
45
620
40
84
69
49
73
73
77
43
128
71
52
1230

Norm.
14
35
19
45
135
13
13
80
16
114
11
11
80
20
59
12
27
27
15
25
112
22
162
12
13
95
36
19
10
50
20
13
172
11
23
19
14
20
20
21
12
36
20
14
342

330

LL
26.6
64.93
35.17
82.07
242.7722.55
22.55
143.0127.96
203.5119.39
19.39
140.81
34.75
102.49
20.77
46.08
46.08
25.3
42.93
191.7237.52
276.47
19.89
22.16
159.4
60.21
31.24
16.75
82.92
32.64
20.43
281.76
18.16
37.74
30.93
21.85
32.35
32.35
33.77
18.73
55.36
30.66
22.43
529.95%DIFF
386.8403
386.4148
384.4997
384.4997
374.2121
373.9671
373.9671
372.5215
371.8606
370.9372
369.4532
369.4532
363.4345
360.1937
355.8727
352.9019
349.3911
349.3911
346.5824
346.0867
345.6954
343.7737342.5591
342.3693
340.0288
335.3476
334.7859
334.2673
333.3414
330.9339
327.3228321.3041
321.3041
321.3041
316.3476
315.2855
312.878
310.0694
310.0694
305.5052
302.5795
299.4587
298.8346
298.3239
297.0912

Legal
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x

Appendix 3.4
Rank
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659
660
661
662
663
664
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691

Keyworddonevidencehandchcorporations
capacityfederalclaiming
east
rebut
consent
promissory
pc
substance
declareherebyloan
registered
deeds
know
our
damageking
agreesappealstatescircuittrustsassumeddocument
cfr
commercial
backbelieves
word
summonsmaterial
civ
performanceoriginal
cash
prove
bank
judicial
exchange

Tokens
80
541
70
400
88
171
567
55
73
45
85
255
40
40
84
277
476
144
61
69
133
55
55
42
88
966
363
54
45
411
44
112
79
79
75
71
180
82
121
417
54
119
859
355
49

Norm.
22
151
19
111
24
48
158
15
20
13
24
71
11
11
23
77
132
40
17
19
37
15
15
12
24
269
101
15
13
114
12
31
22
22
21
20
50
23
34
116
15
33
239
99
14

331

LL
34.36
232.4429.82
169.9637.22
72.19
238.92
23.03
30.43
18.5
34.74
104.26
16.24
16.24
33.93
111.29189.98
57.39
24.27
27.16
52.08
21.22
21.22
16.08
33.6
368.6
138.0320.42
16.74
150.37
15.95
40.62
28.24
28.24
26.79
25.34
63.65
28.92
42.65
145.2
18.77
41.13
296.91120.35
16.56%DIFF
296.5215
296.3922
293.2172291.9108290.2607
289.4217
288.4219
286.1955
284.44279.1737276.9563
276.9563
274.4926
274.4926
272.5215
270.4801
267.9647
267.6836
267.1365
263.3748
261.5061
256.4881
256.4881
253.8955
253.093252.3635
251.571
250.0065
244.7034
239.5216
237.0433
237.0433
232.8303232.8303232.6085
232.3621
229.7163
229.0185
228.889
225.3404
225.006
223.4528
223.1252
218.2191
217.5985

Legal
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

Rank
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713
714
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722
723
724
725
726
727
728
729
730
731
732
733
734
735
736

Keywordsecretarybrown
accordingjurisdiction
page
commission
life
we
void
give
trust
agreementscommerceocourseloans
words
correspondence
appeared
acceptdone
internationalsigningmailrdpersonsaid
value
deemedsignedexistssworn
sebecomeprejudiceclistedtrustee
foreclose
avenuegthird
department
justicekimberly

Tokens
49
60
93
579
377
96
51
227
341
118
1026
53
53
197
105
56
59
55
79
58
95
54
54
189
56
492
385
100
122
195
115
73
120
63
170
1745
78
383
140
62
364
219
203
126
67

Norm.
14
17
26
161
105
27
14
63
95
33
285
15
15
55
29
16
16
15
22
16
26
15
15
53
16
137
107
28
34
54
32
20
33
18
47
485
22
107
39
17
101
61
56
35
19

332

LL
16.56
20.15
30.93
192.2
124.45
31.63
16.52
72.52
108.4337.32
324.93
16.5
16.5
60.99
32.28
17.21
17.93
16.5
23.67
17.22
27.99
15.79
15.79
53.91
15.82
138.22
107.31
27.39
33.18
52.7
31.04
19.51
31.83
16.65
44.88
457.34
20.31
99.45
36.29
15.98
93.13
56.01
51.68
32.03
16.79

%DIFF
217.5985
215.9781
213.4503
212.7373
211.4346
211.1169
206.9502
203.6065
202.452201.2963
201.2251
197.7216
197.7216
196.4175
194.9129194.9129
192.4346
189.6466
189.4176
187.4781
185.8849
184.3803
184.3803
179.3912
177.5651
176.3755
174.9188
171.8091
170.5216
169.3584
169.1665
167.4365
166.0868
165.4216
165.2656
163.5038
162.8938
162.3731
162.1448
161.2086
159.9232
159.9031
159.1659
158.9479
156.6125

Legal
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x

x
x

x
x

Appendix 3.4
Rank
737
738
739
740
741
742
743
744
745
746
747
748
749
750
751
752
753
754
755
756
757
758
759
760
761
762
763
764
765
766
767
768
769
770
771
772
773
774
775
776
777
778
779
780
781

Keywordmortgage
ct
john
name
transferredknowledge
TRUE
now
nor
washington
createdcertifiedcountytakep
FALSE
receipt
successor
day
m
lien
collector
nationstar
noticeth
officeanotherparty
none
courtspeoplevacatekpresented
real
penalty
government
being
via
stated
comes
given
f
estateevery

Tokens
1287
148
66
348
69
293
367
340
280
89
112
156
763
196
868
170
92
135
271
267
106
75
94
763
488
207
137
641
87
208
261
126
172
149
266
105
194
314
125
345
117
181
448
386
123

Norm.
358
41
18
97
19
82
102
95
78
25
31
43
212
55
241
47
26
38
75
74
29
21
26
212
136
58
38
178
24
58
73
35
48
41
74
29
54
87
35
96
33
50
125
107
34

333

LL
321.44
36.59
16.13
85.12
16.87
71.26
88.96
82.36
67.67
21.36
26.59
36.95
180.01
45.94
203.39
38.82
20.92
30.66
60.81
58.34
22.84
16.04
19.92
159.74
101.9
42.67
27.5
126.32
16.83
40.14
48.5
23.17
30.55
26.38
46.46
18.19
32.31
52.18
20.72
57
19.16
28.97
71.43
60
18.78

%DIFF
155.7634
154.5021
152.7825
152.7825
152.7825
151.9227
151.4124
151.3042
150.9897
149.9738
148.3477
148.013147.2731
146.4944
146.2572
142.7854
142.2499
142.0258
140.3651
136.8173135.0434
134.0578
132.9564
131.2626
131.0072
129.4999
126.3477
124.1128122.1422
121.8513
117.7433
116.6707
113.1303112.7943
111.447110.6521
106.919106.7023
106.5216
106.1701
105.3858
103.3495
102.9508
100.7696
99.3093

Legal
x

x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

Rank
782
783
784
785
786
787
788
789
790
791
792
793
794
795
796
797
798
799
800
801
802
803
804
805
806
807
808
809
810
811
812
813
814
815
816
817
818
819
820
821
822
823
824
825
826

Keywordrecordetdefaultrules
correctshow
standing
cook
entityiclaim
due
property
officerinterest
acts
foreclosuresummary
corporation
payment
noncontractw
facts
matter
civil
l
into
fact
upon
has
without
been
law
state
cause
e
can
case
legal
owner
or
n
judgmentright

Tokens
434
385
249
204
200
135
252
550
150
1344
718
458
680
150
503
152
460
187
245
208
271
556
252
441
453
192
362
343
486
562
1578
475
666
1283
867
283
636
324
778
516
347
4063
579
603
381

Norm.
121
107
69
57
56
38
70
153
42
374
200
127
189
42
140
42
128
52
68
58
75
155
70
123
126
53
101
95
135
156
439
132
185
357
241
79
177
90
216
144
97
1130
161
168
106

334

LL
65.86
57.76
36.56
29.66
27.67
18.19
33.97
73.74
19.95
177.9
94.6
59.84
87.23
19.18
62.1
17.87
50.49
20.12
24.31
19.82
25.51
51.77
23.39
40.49
39.8
16.46
28.54
26.47
36.9
42.41
118.99
33.98
47.32
88.38
56.97
16.8
37.58
18.85
45.22
29.12
17.96
208.72
28.29
28.28
16.73

%DIFF
98.7456
97.8074
96.0836
95.331991.501989.5869
89.5869
89.15788.6436
88.1172
87.8859
87.3372
86.0304
85.8695
83.47780.389476.181775.0753
70.6108
68.521767.902167.3179
67.1947
66.6324
64.5265
63.4149
59.6985
58.7992
58.11157.8486
57.7267
55.73555.450754.2177
52.513949.0363
48.8608
48.372348.3143
47.38544.745144.269643.0704
41.925440.1894

Legal
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x

Appendix 3.4
Rank
827
828
829
830
831
832
833
834
835
836
837
838

Keyword
all
this
v
they
is
are
no
it
any
court
by
of

Tokens
1402
2935
1424
660
4587
1646
1467
1534
1713
2448
2900
14557

Norm.
390
817
396
184
1276
458
408
427
477
681
807
4050

335

LL
56.19
116.9750.02
22.28
143.41
46.95
36.63
32.83
35.11
32.64
19.5
32

%DIFF
37.8456
37.621334.8173
34.0052
32.2287
30.5963
28.2268
25.7355
25.0769
19.5078
13.2853
7.1628

Legal

x

x

Appendix 3.5:
Legitimate Courtroom Filing and Pseudolegal Courtroom
Filing Corpus Lockwords
The lockwords of the LCF and PCF corpora were generated following the procedure generated
in Section 3.5.4. The full list of lockwords is given below. The columns in this table indicate
the following:•“Rank” indicates where in the overall list of lockwords items a given item falls basedon CV score.

•“Lockword” lists the word itself.

•“LCF Freq.” indicates how many times that word appears in the legitimate courtroom
filing corpus.

•“LCF Norm.” gives the frequency of the lockword normalized per hundred thousandwords and rounded to the nearest integer.

•“PCF Freq.” indicates how many times the word appears in the pseudolegal courtroom
filing corpus.

•“PCF Norm.” gives the frequency of the lockword normalized per hundred thousandwords and rounded to the nearest integer.

•“CV” lists its coefficient of variance between the two corpora.

•“Legal” shows whether that word met the criteria for legal technical terms outlined in
Chapter 3, with an “x” indicating legal status.

Rank

Lockword

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

injurypurposes
payments
northrespectfully
faith
grantedprotect
a
under

LCF
Freq.
49
56
57
88
150
70
103
53
5937
732

LCF
Norm.
16
18
19
29
50
23
34
18
1960
242

336

PCF
Freq.
56
63
67
105
180
84
124
64
7075
873

PCF
Norm.
16
18
19
29
50
23
34
18
1968
243

CV

Legal

0
0
0.0923120.260444
0.335918
0.465620.554594
0.569621
0.623002
0.76033

x
x
x

x
x

Appendix 3.5

Rank

Lockword

11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53

answer
within
b
first
where
publicmadepursuant
subject
bothcommon
which
april
use
and
grant
regardingappearanceorderproperly
mortgageeinbereasons
pendingcannotreferencestreet
fair
what
west
principal
herincentitled
illinoisshescontained
considered
below
will
him

LCF
Freq.
328
242
472
217
215
394
291
431
256
125
120
822
98
93
9351
92
94
85
500
81
76
5259
1752
70
69
193
66
125
64
120
63
117
370
304
119
987
223
3320
55
50
49
415
99

LCF
Norm.
108
80
156
72
71
130
96
142
85
41
40
271
32
31
3088
30
31
28
165
27
25
1736
578
23
23
64
22
41
21
40
21
39
122
100
39
326
74
1096
18
17
16
137
33

337

PCF
Freq.
383
285
553
261
258
460
352
520
297
145
148
1000
111
116
10750
112
108
103
615
94
95
6494
2164
80
79
242
75
154
72
151
72
146
416
342
133
1112
250
3723
60
65
62
463
111

PCF
Norm.
107
79
154
73
72
128
98
145
83
40
41
278
31
32
2991
31
30
29
171
26
26
1807
602
22
22
67
21
43
20
42
20
41
116
95
37
309
70
1036
17
18
17
129
31

CV

Legal

0.836813
0.924323
0.968639
0.968639
1.032273
1.149767
1.168772
1.240538
1.251516
1.262691
1.321695
1.556361
1.625533
1.782622
1.862693
1.911099
2.029972
2.465994
2.65582.668327
2.702319
2.87153.133991
3.16615
3.189955
3.449301
3.595458
3.646969
3.689253
3.702133.731434
3.78132
3.78132
3.822199
3.955842
4.063832
4.079462
4.119069
4.226385
4.373856
4.541469
4.714045
4.745683

x

x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x

x
x

x
x

Rank

Lockword

54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96

may
there
authority
intendedcurrent
hereinsale
equitableofnotproceedingtransaction
private
to
place
means
supportstatement
thecopy
response
undersigned
numberdocumentsd
duty
properseptemberbutequityprocessreceived
actualgeneralestablishedbroughteithermotionyear
natureissue
beneficiaries
force

LCF
Freq.
461
368
241
48
45
215
238
90
11446
2225
90
82
175
9630
86
78
209
114
20992
210
173
71
138
224
1103
121
121
101
300
119
172
116
94
186
60
58
79
633
51
76
139
56
49

LCF
Norm.
152
122
80
16
15
71
79
30
3779
735
30
27
58
3180
28
26
69
38
6931
69
57
23
46
74
364
40
40
33
99
39
57
38
31
61
20
19
26
209
17
25
46
18
16

338

PCF
Freq.
582
466
271
53
56
273
266
102
14557
2467
101
103
194
10636
95
101
230
147
23077
271
223
89
178
245
1436
159
158
107
391
154
227
150
100
196
66
62
104
672
67
99
147
57
64

PCF
Norm.
162
130
75
15
16
76
74
28
4050
686
28
29
54
2959
26
28
64
41
6420
75
62
25
50
68
400
44
44
30
109
43
63
42
28
55
18
17
29
187
19
28
41
16
18

CV

Legal

5.009476
5.01658
5.030799
5.142595
5.173952
5.189775
5.189775
5.237828
5.275402
5.359993
5.391435.439283
6.148755
6.202691
6.257582
6.33236.487218
6.52714
6.589526
6.690951
6.73435
6.73435
6.73435
6.765031
6.827238
7.001057
7.001057
7.020127
7.032001
7.209716
7.281858
7.294111
7.674027
7.703887
7.731464
7.856742
7.856742
7.905542
7.958778
8.072678
8.081228.092121
8.144685

x
x

x
x
x

x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x

Appendix 3.5

Rank

Lockword

97
such
98
date
99
against
100
best
101
manner102
neither103
by104
exhibits
105
unknown
106
t
107
must
108
once
109
with
110
defined
111
known
112
if
113
as
114 consideration
115
good
116 representative117
dismiss118
written119
so
120
persons121
r122
provide
123
same
124
entered125
j126
failed
127
have
128
bring
129
time
130
specific
131
for
132
h
133
held
134
purpose135
unless
136
do
137
like
138
copies
139
an

LCF
Freq.
546
216
369
53
47
46
2157
50
88
126
353
50
1536
73
193
519
3071
80
113
57
132
75
215
127
105
210
271
145
145
185
822
62
322
60
3330
68
132
82
64
208
59
47
1533

LCF
Norm.
180
71
122
18
16
15
712
17
29
42
117
17
507
24
64
171
1014
26
37
19
44
25
71
42
35
69
89
48
48
61
271
20
106
20
1100
22
44
27
21
69
19
16
506

339

PCF
Freq.
576
286
389
57
64
62
2900
54
120
133
369
53
2076
75
201
703
3180
107
114
79
184
105
297
128
149
211
272
147
147
187
1148
61
451
61
3352
92
187
114
91
293
56
68
1531

PCF
Norm.
160
80
108
16
18
17
807
15
33
37
103
15
578
21
56
196
885
30
32
22
51
29
83
36
41
59
76
41
41
52
319
17
125
17
933
26
52
32
25
82
16
19
426

CV
8.276568
8.286408
8.318903
8.318903
8.318903
8.421948
8.796544
8.838835
9.026895
9.263408
9.428099.428099.428099.448247
9.507318
9.555497
9.677841
9.801489.820928
9.842718
10.10153
10.27082
10.3183
10.47566
10.48513
10.50559
10.52918
10.68137
10.92952
10.93977
10.95182
11.17574
11.40495
11.52322
11.53912
11.5446
11.59191
11.78511
11.9271
12.05296
12.12183
12.36839
12.40538

Legal
x

x
x

x

x
x
x
x

x

x
x
x
x

x
x

x
x
x

Rank

Lockword

140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182

receivedeniedcourt
accounts
company
requestedwasforegoing
entities
agent
account
procedure
dated
protection
suitdescribed
other
until
named
on
practicesfilingone
assetsrequestleave
partcalledpower
therefore
any
who
respect
otherwise
showing
shallattorneyjune
itbusinessdays
constitute
how

LCF
Freq.
77
114
1726
53
72
111
1371
72
53
101
230
106
88
43
42
69
689
85
69
2000
68
119
302
81
241
80
192
63
160
217
1154
335
77
137
48
357
484
82
1028
179
179
46
57

LCF
Norm.
25
38
570
18
24
37
453
24
18
33
76
35
29
14
14
23
228
28
23
660
22
39
100
27
80
26
63
21
53
72
381
111
25
45
16
118
160
27
339
59
59
15
19

340

PCF
Freq.
76
114
2448
54
105
113
1360
105
53
145
226
103
86
61
62
68
674
84
99
1948
65
173
441
78
235
77
182
60
237
209
1713
501
72
131
71
531
460
124
1534
170
169
70
86

PCF
Norm.
21
32
681
15
29
31
378
29
15
40
63
29
24
17
17
19
188
23
28
542
18
48
123
22
65
21
51
17
66
58
477
139
20
36
20
148
128
34
427
47
47
19
24

CV

Legal

12.42393
12.4568
12.64744
12.85649
12.85649
12.85649
12.85649
13.01787
13.08303
13.23502
13.29602
13.34164
13.41633
13.54034
13.58143
13.76668
13.81614
13.86484
13.90474
14.01473
14.23298
14.25176
14.25176
14.58606
14.6069
14.69971
14.76115
14.77537
14.86049
14.87886
15.40233
15.56312
15.59399
15.71348
15.9099
15.93022
16.05324
16.17735
16.4065
16.47076
16.51112
16.56286
16.61786

x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x

x

x
x
x
x

x
x
x

Appendix 3.5

Rank

Lockword

183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225

address
closing
filedeclaration
plaintiffown
effectclause
funds
that
does
no
self
matters
theirsubmitted
agencyalso
marchstatuspetitionassociates
exceptpleadings
arewhen
remedyspecialactliability
beforeamendment
proceedings
paid
is
up
full
never
see
co
after
since
following

LCF
Freq.
80
59
157
131
1607
110
85
113
113
4437
380
964
56
96
723
178
110
354
68
60
90
134
61
119
1062
305
59
88
584
96
231
77
102
152
2923
77
111
128
542
99
244
107
170

LCF
Norm.
26
19
52
43
531
36
28
37
37
1465
125
318
18
32
239
59
36
117
22
20
30
44
20
39
351
101
19
29
193
32
76
25
34
50
965
25
37
42
179
33
81
35
56

341

PCF
Freq.
119
54
238
122
1507
166
79
105
105
4133
354
1467
52
146
671
165
100
328
61
94
140
121
92
109
1646
473
91
136
532
152
360
70
93
138
4587
67
177
201
486
158
218
170
152

PCF
Norm.
33
15
66
34
419
46
22
29
29
1150
98
408
14
41
187
46
28
91
17
26
39
34
26
30
458
132
25
38
148
42
100
19
26
38
1276
19
49
56
135
44
61
47
42

CV

Legal

16.80828
16.81233
16.9196617.1820317.22696
17.85623
17.88086
17.90144
17.93493
17.95827
18.07641
18.13094
18.17146
18.22935
18.29331
18.44626
18.54798
18.58681
18.62423
18.7548
18.77275
18.93042
19.17578
19.1929
19.2333
19.31986
19.41077
19.49417
19.61318
19.64186
19.66787
19.72011
20.31687
20.41913
20.6483
20.77834
20.95131
20.98009
21.14273
21.2132
21.29421
21.48805
21.65913

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x
x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x

Rank

Lockword

226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268

used
they
verifiedv
above
re
consumerissuedstatements
possession
demandfromliablebetween
this
all
make
violation
contrary
point
quo
david
per
allow
right
drive
filed
these
disclosewellhonorable
unlawful
years
pay
he
accordance
jury
judgmentnviolated
moresupreme
or

LCF
Freq.
122
415
62
890
178
100
57
59
127
132
242
998
40
125
1797
857
192
225
78
39
38
67
85
66
229
53
368
356
45
160
74
51
106
191
507
51
73
358
341
62
186
118
2373

LCF
Norm.
40
137
20
294
59
33
19
19
42
44
80
330
13
41
593
283
63
74
26
13
13
22
28
22
76
18
122
118
15
53
24
17
35
63
167
17
24
118
113
20
61
39
784

342

PCF
Freq.
107
660
97
1424
289
163
52
93
111
214
211
873
66
108
2935
1402
166
195
130
65
65
56
139
56
381
48
317
306
74
137
124
87
90
161
429
85
62
603
579
52
153
202
4063

PCF
Norm.
30
184
27
396
80
45
14
26
31
60
59
243
18
30
817
390
46
54
36
18
18
16
39
16
106
13
88
85
21
38
34
24
25
45
119
24
17
168
161
14
43
56
1130

CV

Legal

21.75713
21.75713
21.93165
22.64951
22.86719
22.87698
22.98097
23.02208
23.02208
23.0892
23.10667
23.27187
23.36527
23.40272
23.57023
23.60072
23.99364
24.38299
24.46244
24.47677
24.49819
24.63469
24.65143
24.87761
24.95671
24.98295
25.0620125.16085
25.25381
25.29488
25.42908
25.71297
25.82477
25.87282
25.92725
25.94887
25.97535
26.051326.08743
26.13949
26.15326
26.36669
26.36669

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x
x
x

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x

x

Appendix 3.5

Rank

Lockword

269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280

failuretimes
intent
lacks
most
them
form
insurance
owner
then
defendant
concerning

LCF
Freq.
157
61
90
71
71
128
122
40
202
138
1244
80

LCF
Norm.
52
20
30
23
23
42
40
13
67
46
411
26

343

PCF
Freq.
270
50
76
58
58
221
208
70
347
115
1026
63

PCF
Norm.
75
14
21
16
16
61
58
19
97
32
285
18

CV

Legal

26.44464
26.45702
26.4812926.60402
26.62745
27.02719
27.19641
27.19641
27.33354
27.37188
27.41843
27.42933

x
x
x

x
x
x
x

Appendix 4.1:
Legitimate Courtroom Filing Legal English Prototype344

Appendix 4.1

345

346

Appendix 4.1

347

348

Appendix 4.2:
Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Legal English Prototype349

Appendix 5.1:
Legitimate Courtroom Filing Image and TextualEmphasis Prototype

350

Appendix 5.1

351

352

Appendix 5.1

353

354

Appendix 5.2:
Pseudolegal Courtroom Filing Image and TextualEmphasis Prototype

355

356

Appendix 5.2

357

358

Appendix 5.2

359

360

Appendix 5.2

361

362

Appendix 5.2

363

364

Appendix 5.2

365

366

Appendix 5.2367