Spread of 'pseudolaw' scammers and victims thwarts court system

LAWRENCE — We’ve entered the golden age of legal nonsense.

“It’s a problem partly because of a lack of knowledge, but partly just a feeling people have that the courts won’t help them. And they’re looking for anything to fix that,” said Colin McRoberts, a lecturer with the University of Kansas School of Business.

McRoberts’ article “Tinfoil Hats and Powdered Wigs: Thoughts on Pseudolaw” can be found in this month’s Washburn Law Journal. The piece probes why a rise in legal scams and frauds is gumming up the court system and harming those gullible enough to be duped.

“For a long time, we’ve had weird, unusual, damaging and predatory legal ideas. But for a long time they grew in tiny little communities that communicated by word of mouth or newsletter. Now it’s online. And now you get much weirder ideas building on top of weird ideas that have always been there.”

A Harvard Law School graduate and former litigator, McRoberts became immersed in the wacky underground community of pseudolaw when he embarked on the 2016 Conspira-Sea Cruise.

“This a cruise by conspiracy theorists for conspiracy theorists,” said McRoberts, who joined writers from Popular Mechanics and Jezebel as the other observing skeptics.

“You spend a couple thousand bucks, which I crowdfunded, and get to listen to a week’s worth of people talking about psychic vampires, Hillary Clinton is a shape-shifting alien, secret ways to avoid paying income tax and all kinds of that stuff.”

The trip also introduced him to Winston Shrout, whose unforgettable name is matched by the unforgettable tales McRoberts divulges about the man in his article. In “Tinfoil Hats,” he describes Shrout as “a prolific lecturer and self-declared Earth delegate to the interdimensional Galactic Round Table. He is also a felon and currently a fugitive from justice.”

This convicted tax dodger capped a weeklong excursion on the Pacific Ocean by telling a room full of rapt theorists that he worked with the Queen of the Fairies to move the international dateline from London to France because it would disrupt international transactions.

McRoberts said, “It was bizarre because I’d watched him sell consulting services, DVDs and books to people on this cruise the whole week. And here was the finale where all the speakers provide their quick high points. And I thought, ‘This is the end of a scam.’ Because the people who are paying to have a private consulting side are now seeing him talk about the Queen of the Fairies. How can they go home and keep sending in money?

“But when I looked around the room, people were nodding and into it.”

The nature of how and why individuals could be so susceptible to this type of wild misinformation became the real revelation for McRoberts. He equates it to the “boiled frog” concept, where progressive exposure to distorted reality takes people to places they never would have gone previously.

McRoberts reveals the informal legal term that embodies this skewed subset: “replacement law.”

“It’s the idea that there is an alternative universe of law,” he said. “That’s the universe where my birth certificate makes me a literal vessel, like a ship, instead of a person. And there is a law saying that. There’s not. It’s the attempt to take that fake universal law and staple it to the real world, without ever bothering to find out whether it’s true.”

While the tinfoil crowd is unquestionably hilarious on the surface, there is plenty of genuine erosion beneath. This type of pseudolaw leaves a trail of casualties.

“If somebody goes to court for not paying taxes because they fell for pseudolaw, and they defend themselves in the tax fraud charges using pseudolaw, they get hurt. And we think of them as the villain in the case — but maybe they were just desperate and fell for some professional guru’s sales pitch. Yet that person never gets in trouble,” he said.

McRoberts contends this is because people viewed as “goofballs” are considered a low priority for law enforcement. In fact, in order for litigious perpetrators to be held accountable, they typically have to stop paying taxes.

That’s what happened to Shrout.

The self-proclaimed “sovereign citizen” mailed more than 1 quadrillion dollars in fake “International Bills of Exchange” to a bank, claiming the U.S. Treasury would honor them. Instead, the government brought him to trial and sentenced him to 10 years for numerous charges, primarily tax evasion. In March, he neglected to turn himself into authorities and is now a wanted man (which hasn’t stopped him from posting his seminars online).

“The reason pseudolaw has grown to be a problem is that people try it, and it fails. But they don’t understand why it failed because the court never explained it or because they don’t have any access to legal understanding and education. So they only know it failed, but not why. And they attribute that to the same shadowy conspiracies that have been plaguing them the whole time,” McRoberts said.

The lawyer wonders why, rather than indulge in pseudolaw, they can’t simply study actual law.

“Why don’t they take the same classes lawyers and judges take?” he said. “And I have yet to find anybody who would even consider taking one of those classes.”

McRoberts started at KU less than a month ago, but his wife has worked nearly four years as a professor in anthropology at the university. Prior to his higher education career, he was a consultant with his own firm, Vasher McRoberts, and with the SAB Group. The Texas native was also a litigator with the Chicago office of Steptoe & Johnson.

His academic expertise is in legal persuasion.

McRoberts admits sometimes it’s tricky to determine what appears more absurd: a tinfoil hat or a powdered wig.

He said, “If you give an average person a page of real law and a page of pseudolaw, it’s kind of hard to tell the difference. They both look ridiculous.”