Book Launch: Outlawed: Responding to the Global Rise of Sovereign Citizens

When: Thursday, November 5, 2026, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Where: Room 3.1 Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS), Queen Mary, University of London, 67-69 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3JB

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Your debts aren't real, your mortgage is unlawful, tax is optional, and the right form of words can release you from the system altogether. Across the world, a growing number of people believe exactly that.

Join the Criminal Justice Centre for the UK launch of Outlawed (Icon Books), a new account of pseudolaw and the sovereign citizen movement. Its adherents go by many names, including sovereign citizens, freemen, state nationals and constitutional warriors, and its critics simply call it a scam. The book follows these ideas from aggrieved New Zealand ratepayers and North American farm foreclosures to Australian pandemic protests, German coup plots and ordinary family courts. Along the way it shows how legal conspiracy theories travel, change shape and draw in ordinary people.

The authors argue that pseudolaw is not a fringe curiosity. It is sold as a product by charismatic gurus, performed for online audiences, and is a sign of collapsing trust in law, democracy and institutions. They also argue that defeating it means tackling the social, economic and legal failures that make it attractive in the first place. The book's central question is this: if so many people are turning to fake law for justice, what has gone wrong with the real thing?

Event outline

• 6:00 pm: Welcome and introduction, [Dr Kate Leader].
• 6:05 pm: Dr Harry Hobbs and Dr Stephen Young in conversation.
• 6:50 pm: Audience Q&A, in the room and online.
• 7:15 pm: Drinks reception and book signing (in person).
• 8:00 pm: Close.

Speakers

Dr Harry Hobbs is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales and Director of the Pseudolaw Project at the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law. His research focuses on public law, Indigenous rights, treaty-making and the rise of sovereign citizen movements and pseudolaw. He is the author or co-author of several books, including Outlawed: Responding to the Global Rise of Sovereign Citizens and Legal Conspiracies, How To Rule Your Own Country and Treaty. He regularly speaks with courts, governments, legal professionals and the media.

Dr Stephen Young is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Otago. His 2020 book, Indigenous Peoples, Consent and Rights: Troubling Subjects, won the Law Society of Australia and New Zealand's Early Career Research Award. He is also the author of The Structural Limits of the Law: The Event Horizon of Legality (Routledge), which looks at how law responds to crises by focusing on single "events" and so hides their deeper structural causes.

Dr Kate Leader (Chair) is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary University of London, where she researches litigants in person, pseudolaw, conspiracy theories and criminal law and justice. Recently she has been looking into the impact of generative AI on criminal evidence and on how litigants in person understand their legal problems. Her book Litigants in Person in the Civil Justice System: In Their Own Words (Hart, 2024) draws on the experiences of people who go to court without lawyers.