Jurisdiction
Jurisdiction is the legal authority of a tribunal to adjudicate a matter. In federal practice it has two principal dimensions:
Subject-matter jurisdiction is the authority of the court to hear cases of a particular type. For federal courts, this comes from Article III of the Constitution as implemented by Title 28 of the U.S. Code. Tax cases sit within the federal question and statutory jurisdiction provisions.
Personal jurisdiction is the authority of the court to bind a particular person. For domestic individuals, this is rarely contested in federal tax cases because U.S. citizens and residents are within the personal jurisdiction of federal courts as a matter of constitutional design. The minimum-contacts analysis of International Shoe Co. v. Washington (1945) governs the question in cases involving non-residents.
Neither form of jurisdiction depends on the consent of the person being haled into court. This is the point at which alternate-tax-theory arguments consistently fail. Sovereign-citizen filings that purport to “withdraw consent to jurisdiction” or “rebut the presumption of citizenship” misunderstand the underlying doctrine. Jurisdiction is conferred by law and contact, not by the defendant’s agreement.
The frequency of the confusion is itself worth noting. The alternate-tax community has built an extensive vocabulary around jurisdictional concepts that sound technical and resemble actual law without functioning as it. The similarity is the source of the persistent reach of these arguments.