Christopher Armitage

Christopher Armitage founded The Existentialist Republic in 2024 as a publication on how states, cities and their residents can lawfully oppose a federal government that has broken from the Constitution. He writes the articles, drafts the model legislation, and runs the campaigns that grow out of them.

His scholarship works within a framework he developed and named, oppositional federalism: a four-tier account of how a state can lawfully oppose a federal government that has broken from the Constitution, from declining to assist federal enforcement to direct legal action against federal officials. One of those tiers, soft secession, became the subject of his most widely read work after he wrote the first systematic legal treatment of the idea in 2025. He also coined the term stochastic activism, for campaigns built so that many people acting on their own produce a result no one of them could.

His legal commentary has run in JURIST, a legal news service run out of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law; in Verfassungsblog, a German forum on constitutional law; and in the Brennan Center’s State Court Report. His working papers are archived with permanent identifiers and indexed on Google Scholar. The Brookings Institution has cited his work, and Mother Jones, PBS and The Nation have covered it.

He is the author of The American Reformation: How States Can Use the Constitution to Break Authoritarian Capture and Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism, and he owns and edits Gavel Grab, a news site on the courts.

He enlisted in the Air Force at 18 and served eight years, including as a military police officer, and later worked as a corrections officer and with young people in the social work field. He holds a master’s degree in homeland security. He lives in Spokane, Washington.

He files some of the complaints The Existentialist Republic then reports on, among them the New York misconduct complaint against U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and the complaint against Chief Justice John Roberts filed with the District of Columbia Office of Disciplinary Counsel, and the article on each complaint states that he filed it.

Tips, corrections, media requests and speaking invitations reach him through the contact form.