Law Commons^™

Attachment Issues: Assessing The Relationship Between Newcomers And The Constitution, Ashley Mantha-Hollands

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Are you attached to the principles of the U.S. Constitution? How do you prove it—do you feel it, or just know it? What role does it play in your daily life as a citizen? Ever since one of the first acts of the U.S. Congress, the Naturalization Act of 1795, applicants for citizenship have been required to demonstrate that they are “attached to the principles of the [C]onstitution of the United States.” This requirement has been at the forefront of fierce debates in U.S. constitutional history and, although it has had limited usage after WWII, it has recently been brought …

America’S Hidden Citizens: The Untold Stories Of The Unconscionable Deportations Of Its International Adoptees, Halley Cody

Seattle University Law Review

This Note addresses how the U.S. should rectify the harms it has perpetrated on non-citizen adoptees by amending the current deportation statutes to prevent their deportation. Part I addresses the history of adoption in the U.S. and related effects on immigration law. Part II highlights the stories of Adam Crapser and Philip Clay, who were adopted by American families who failed to naturalize them as minors, and who were subsequently deported after they sustained criminal records. Part III examines the policy goals behind deportation as a consequence of criminal convictions, as well as remedies instituted to prevent unwarranted deportation and …

The "Irish Born" One American Citizenship Amendment, Kevin C. Walsh

Law Faculty Publications

Our Constitution has a deferred maintenance problem because we have fallen out of the habit of tending to its upkeep ourselves. The silver lining is a double benefit from any constitutional maintenance projects that we undertake now. These projects are good not only for what they do to our Constitution, but also for making us exercise self-government muscles that have atrophied from civic sloth.

Fortunately, the time has never been better to repeal one of our Constitution’s most pointlessly exclusionary provisions. The President of the United States is married to a naturalized citizen. And nobody can legitimately question the patriotism …

The Alien-Citizen Paradox And Other Consequences Of U.S. Colonialism, Ediberto Román

Ediberto Roman

This Article examines the United States' 100-year-old failed promise. In addition to detailing the unequal citizenship status of the people of Puerto Rico, this Article examines the role that racial and ethnic-based prejudice has played in this issue. 34 Essentially, this Article seeks to compare the traditional legal and political rhetoric of American inclusiveness and the virtues of U.S. citizenship to the reality of colonialism and the impact white supremacy has had on U.S. colonial history. By addressing the subordinated status of "aliencitizens," this Article illustrates the incompatibility of equality under colonialism. As Congress addresses the question of Puerto Rico's …

Immigration Exceptionalism, David S. Rubenstein, Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Northwestern University Law Review

The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence is littered with special immigration doctrines that depart from mainstream constitutional norms. This Article reconciles these doctrines of “immigration exceptionalism” across constitutional dimensions. Historically, courts and commentators have considered whether immigration warrants exceptional treatment as pertains to rights, federalism, or separation of powers—as if developments in each doctrinal setting can be siloed. This Article rejects that approach, beginning with its underlying premise. Using contemporary examples, we demonstrate how the Court’s immigration doctrines dynamically interact with each other, and with politics, in ways that affect the whole system. This intervention provides a far more accurate rendering of …

The Uneasy Case For The Affordable Care Act, Stephen E. Sachs

Stephen E. Sachs

The constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is sometimes said to be an "easy" question, with the Act's opponents relying more on fringe political ideology than mainstream legal arguments. This essay disagrees. While the mandate may win in the end, it won't be easy, and the arguments against it sound in law rather than politics. Written to accompany and respond to Erwin Chemerinsky's essay in the same symposium, this essay argues that each substantive defense of the mandate is subject to doubt. While Congress could have avoided the issue by using its taxing power, it chose not to do so. …

Reclaiming The Immigration Constitution Of The Early Republic, James Pfander

Faculty Working Papers

In contrast to the view that national immigration policy began in 1875, this article explores evidence that immigration policy dates from the early republic period. Built around the naturalization clause, which regulates the ability of aliens to own land and shaped their willingness to immigrate to America, this early republic immigration policy included strong norms of prospectivity, uniformity, and transparency. Drawing on these norms, which readily apply in both the naturalization and immigration contexts, the paper argues against the plenary power doctrine, particularly as it purports to authorize Congress to change the rules of immigration midstream and apply them to …

John Mccain's Citizenship: A Tentative Defense, Stephen E. Sachs

Stephen E. Sachs

Sen. John McCain was born a U.S. citizen and is eligible to be president. The most serious challenge to his status, recently posed by Prof. Gabriel Chin, contends that the statute granting citizenship to Americans born abroad did not include the Panama Canal Zone, where McCain was born in 1936. When Congress amended the law in 1937, he concludes, it was too late for McCain to be "natural born." Even assuming, however, that McCain's citizenship depended on this statute - and ignoring his claim to citizenship at common law - Chin's argument may be based on a misreading. When the …

The Impossibility Of Citizenship, Peter J. Spiro

Michigan Law Review

These are interesting times at the constitutional margins. Questions about where the Constitution takes up and leaves off are more frequently in play; one can no longer so readily assume the Constitution to supply an authoritative metric as we confront prominent cases of nonapplication. At the same time, the increasing robustness of international norms has prompted a vigorous reconsideration of their relationship to domestic ones. Where the twentieth century was marked by deep segmentation among national legal regimes, with minimal transboundary interpenetration, recent years have seen the advent of complex, overlapping regimes: subnational, national, regional, and global, public, and private. …

The Gestation Of Birthright Citizenship, 1868-1898: States' Rights, The Law Of Nations, And Mutual Consent, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article considers the inheritance of the seventeenth-century English common law conception of the subject in nineteenth-century America and, ultimately, in the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). It examines the claims for birthright citizenship derived from British common law and the three principal arguments against them. These latter included: objections to the assertion of a federal common law of citizenship from the perspective of state sovereignty; arguments that the United States should embrace citizenship by blood rather than by birth in order to conform to the practice of the law of nations and other …

The Alien-Citizen Paradox And Other Consequences Of U.S. Colonialism, Ediberto Román

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the United States' 100-year-old failed promise. In addition to detailing the unequal citizenship status of the people of Puerto Rico, this Article examines the role that racial and ethnic-based prejudice has played in this issue. 34 Essentially, this Article seeks to compare the traditional legal and political rhetoric of American inclusiveness and the virtues of U.S. citizenship to the reality of colonialism and the impact white supremacy has had on U.S. colonial history. By addressing the subordinated status of "aliencitizens," this Article illustrates the incompatibility of equality under colonialism. As Congress addresses the question of Puerto Rico's …

Aliens - Deportation - Activity Consituting Membership In Communist Party, Mark Shaevsky

Michigan Law Review

Petitioner, an alien who had resided in the United States since 1914, joined the Communist Party in 1935 and during that year paid dues, attended meetings, and worked briefly at an official outlet for communist literature. He terminated his relationship with the party after approximately one year. At a hearing to consider his possible deportation, the petitioner disclaimed that he had held any belief in the forcible overthrow of government, stating that he had regarded the Communist Party solely as an instrument for securing economic necessities. The Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the hearing officer's finding that petitioner had been …

Naturalization--Requirement Of Willingness To Bear Arms, William O. Gilbreath

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.