Sovereignty and jurisdiction are related concepts, but very different. Sovereignty refers to the possession of ultimate legal authority over a defined territory. Jurisdiction refers to the power to exercise legal authority. Sovereignty is a normative concept, a product of moral philosophy and legal theory, used to claim how political and legal systems should be organized, while jurisdiction is an empirical concept used to describe how such systems are actually organized. Constitutional sovereigns: These people use the Constitution to claim that the federal government is illegitimate and overrides its powers. They have used this belief to justify extreme and illegal acts against the federal government and its various agencies. The Bundy family is an example of this particular ideology. Claiming that the government was tyrannically encroaching on their rights, they refused to pay their grazing rights, which were $1 million in arrears, justifying their use of armed occupation and protest as resistance to perceived tyranny. In addition, Congress may waive the sovereign immunity of states when acting in exercise of the powers conferred on it by amendments ratified under the Eleventh Amendment. The doctrine of repeal adopted by the Supreme Court in Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer (1976) is most often implicated in cases involving Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which expressly allows Congress to enforce its safeguards against states. Sovereign immunity stemmed from British common law doctrine, which was based on the idea that the king could do nothing wrong.
In the United States, sovereign immunity generally applies to federal and state governments, but not to municipalities. However, the Federation and the Länder have the possibility to waive their sovereign immunity. This is what the federal government did when it passed the Federal Tort Claims Act, which lifted federal immunity for many types of tort claims. Ryan Bundy is partnered with Julie Embry of North Richland Hills, Texas. Embry helped him complete several laws using sovereign citizen terminology. Embry was a member of a group of false marshals, the Continental Marshals for the Republic, whose members were often recruited by the sovereign group called the Superior Court of the United States Continental (CuSA), which coordinated the common law courts in various states. At the time of King Juan Carlos` abdication in June 2014, the Spanish constitution did not specify whether an abdicated monarch retained his legal immunity,[35] but the government planned to make changes to make this possible. [36] Laws have been passed, although the new laws, unlike his previous immunity, do not fully protect the former sovereign. Juan Carlos must answer before the Supreme Court, in the same kind of protection granted to many senior officials and politicians in Spain.
The law stipulates that all outstanding legal issues concerning the former king will be suspended and “immediately” referred to the Supreme Court. [37] In a previous blog, we discussed the history and controversy surrounding qualified immunity. While qualified immunity raises concerns, many have also raised questions about sovereign immunity. Knowing how sovereign immunity came into being and how it relates to qualified immunity can help keep the public informed about their legal rights and what a government actor can or cannot do. There are many difficulties when a person wants to take legal action against a government agency of any kind. Sovereign, qualified and/or absolute immunities lead to complications that require the lawyer of an experienced civil lawyer to determine liability. At Feldman & Feldman, our lawyers are skilled in proceedings involving government agencies, and we know how to handle the complexity of your case, both in court and on appeal. If you have questions or concerns about pursuing a claim against an official, government agency, or state, contact us today to find out how we can help. The weapon of choice for sovereign citizens is paper. A simple traffic violation or pet license case can end up causing dozens of court records containing hundreds of pages of pseudo-legal nonsense.
For example, Donna Lee Wray — the wife of Jerry Kane, who was half of the team that killed the two police officers in West Memphis, Arkansas, in 2010 — was embroiled in a lengthy legal battle over having to pay dog license fees. She submitted 10 sovereign documents to the court over a two-month period, then declared victory when the beleaguered prosecutor decided to drop the case. The battle was fought for a three-year dog license, which costs just $20 in Pinellas County, Florida, where the monarch lives. we understood that the Eleventh Amendment meant that it represented not so much what it says, but the premise of our constitutional structure, which it states: that the states entered the federal system with intact sovereignty; that the judicial authority referred to in Article III is limited by this sovereignty and that, therefore, a State may be sued in a federal court only if it has expressly consented to a claim or in the “Plan of the Convention”.