(Re)writing the fiction: how Dutch sovereign citizens narrate legality

Abstract

How should sociolegal scholarship understand sovereign citizens who contest state authority while remaining deeply invested in law? This article examines how Dutch sovereign citizens construct, enact, and negotiate understandings of legality in lived experience and institutional encounters. Drawing on in-depth interviews with four participants and six courtroom observations, and combining legal consciousness scholarship with narrative and relational perspectives, we identify three interrelated narrative stances through which sovereign legality is constructed and negotiated: legitimacy under contestation, re-authoring the normative order, and strategic navigation of institutional reality. These stances show that sovereign legality is neither a coherent alternative doctrine nor a straightforward rejection of state law. Rather, participants reinterpret legal authority, relocate legality in alternative normative foundations such as consent, natural law, and humanity, and adapt claims and strategies in response to institutional constraints. We conceptualize this configuration as counter-nomic legal consciousness: a narrative and relational mode of legal meaning-making through which individuals contest state authority while remaining invested in law’s language, procedures, and symbolic force. This study of Dutch sovereign citizens thus extends legal consciousness scholarship by showing how sovereign legality cuts across conventional distinctions between compliance and resistance and serves interpretive, practical, and affective functions.