Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Law
Constituting Communities Through Words That Bind: Reflections On Loyalty Oaths, Sanford Levinson
Constituting Communities Through Words That Bind: Reflections On Loyalty Oaths, Sanford Levinson
Michigan Law Review
Preparation of this essay has not served to resolve my own ambivalences about what, after all, Duncan Kennedy once named the "fundamental contradiction" of all social life, the tension between "individual freedom" and the coercive communal life with "[o]thers (family, friends, bureaucrats, cultural figures, the state)" that is "necessary if we are to become persons at all - they provide us the stuff of our selves and protect us ,in crucial ways against destruction." It should not be surprising if something so fundamental does not prove amenable to resolution. In any case, the reader should not expect to find a …
Theories Of Loss Of Citizenship, T. Alexander Aleinikoff
Theories Of Loss Of Citizenship, T. Alexander Aleinikoff
Michigan Law Review
The underlying issue that I address in this essay is whether the Constitution ought to be read to prohibit denationalization of U.S. citizens. (I will use the term "denationalization" to refer to the government's act of terminating citizenship. "Expatriation" will be used to refer to an individual's voluntary relinquishment of citizenship.) In examining this question, I will explore citizenship from four different perspectives - rights, consent, contract, and community - in search of a theoretical framework for the Supreme Court's doctrine in the denationalization cases.
Community, Citizenship, And The Search For National Identity, Frederick Schauer
Community, Citizenship, And The Search For National Identity, Frederick Schauer
Michigan Law Review
As a test of this proposition, I want to explore the issue of alienage restrictions. Under what circumstances is it justifiable to draw lines based on whether a person is a citizen? Lines drawn on the basis of citizenship are a useful test of how seriously we take the idea of the nation as a relevant community and, more tangentially, of how seriously we take the idea of community itself. To the extent that we are skeptical of such lines, our concerns are to that extent individual-oriented, primarily focused on the adverse consequences of excluding some people from benefits or …