But they’re growing. Common Law courts have sprung up in at least 11 states in the farm belt and the West over the last year, organized by a cross section of people bent on directly challenging government. In living rooms, bingo halls and convention centers, dozens gather weekly to form juries, present evidence and issue kangaroo-court indictments, liens, arrest warrants-and even death sentences. None of this has the force of law.
The movement is based on a mixture of crackpot conspiracy theories and bizarre interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, the Bible and the Magna Charta. In brief, its leaders preach that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “bank holiday” edict of 1933, which temporarily shut down the nation’s banks, stripped the country of its safeguards against tyranny. “When you get to digging into what’s going on today, you have a government operating outside the Constitution,” says David Schechter, a court organizer.
Court members keep in touch on the Inter-net, swapping information, posting meetings and organizing court sessions. They also vent their views in a Texas magazine called the AntiShyster. Mostly white men form Common Law courts; many come from the militia movement. Some are closely aligned with white-supremacy and anti-Jewish groups. “The basic idea behind the movement,” says University of Oregon history professor Richard Brown, “is ‘popular sovereignty,’ that people are above the law. These people are alienated from the legal system. To some extent it sounds like they’re also trying to settle personal scores.”
Nuisance filings: At times, the movement spills out of its bogus courts and into real ones. Followers have tied up courts and IRS offices with thousands of pages of nuisance filings. Common Law court “marshals” have even burst into federal courtrooms wearing official-looking badges and uniforms to serve their papers. Last year in Garfield County, Mont., 36 men and women formed a Common Law court and briefly occupied a courthouse. Another court offered $1 million bounties for the arrest of local officials and threatened to hang them. Garfield County Attorney Nick Murnion charged some members of the Common Law court with “criminal syndicalism,” alleging that the group had advocated acts of violence for political purposes. One court member was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Others received smaller sentences.
Some members try to use the rump courts to reverse real ones. Favorite targets are divorce decrees and foreclosure notices. “People who don’t want to or can’t pay their bills are turning to something that tells them they don’t have to,” says Kansas City attorney Berry E Laws III, who has been targeted by Common Law courts because he forecloses on farm mortgages for the Farmers Home Administration.
This is a serious business, but it has elements of unintended burlesque. William Ell-wood of Columbus, Ohio, joined up after his small business collapsed and he found that he still owed the Internal Revenue Service $5,100. Frustrated and annoyed, he took to researching the Constitution and concluded that he was living in a land that infringed on his personal liberty. One thing led to another until he found himself ticketed by a police officer for weaving on a highway. His reading of the Constitution made the ticket null and void. “What we’re saying,” he patiently explains, “is the motor-vehicle laws are laws of commerce. I don’t use the laws for private gain, so why do I have to be stopped?” Ell-wood eventually paid the ticket, but not before he and a small group of like-minded citizens reached out to organizer Schechter. Now they meet every Tuesday to have their day in a court of their own making.
