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Full-Text Articles in Law
Equality, Sovereignty, And The Family In Morales-Santana, Kristin Collins
Equality, Sovereignty, And The Family In Morales-Santana, Kristin Collins
Faculty Scholarship
In Sessions v. Morales-Santana, 3 the Supreme Court encountered a body of citizenship law that has long relied on family membership in the construction of the nation’s borders and the composition of the polity.4 The particular statute at issue in the case regulates the transmission of citizenship from American parents to their foreign-born children at birth, a form of citizenship known today as derivative citizenship.5 When those children are born outside marriage, the derivative citizenship statute makes it more difficult for American fathers, as compared with American mothers, to transmit citizenship to their foreign-born children.6 Over …
Brief Amici Curiae Of Professors Of History, Political Science, And Law In Support Of Respondent, Kristin Collins, Catherine E. Stetson, Jessica K. Jacobs
Brief Amici Curiae Of Professors Of History, Political Science, And Law In Support Of Respondent, Kristin Collins, Catherine E. Stetson, Jessica K. Jacobs
Faculty Scholarship
Sex-based laws premised on archaic presumptions about the proper roles of men and women run afoul of established constitutional principles, especially when they interfere with the parent-child relationship. Amici write to explain the history of the federal government’s use of sex-based classifications in the regulation of citizenship. In its regulation of intergenerational and interspousal citizenship transmission, the federal government has perpetuated outdated gender-based norms concerning proper parental roles, even when those norms have been rejected in other legal and social contexts. In addition, the laws governing derivative citizenship have significantly encumbered the ability of American fathers to transmit citizenship to …
A Short History Of Sex And Citizenship: The Historians' Amicus Brief In Flores-Villar V. United States, Kristin Collins
A Short History Of Sex And Citizenship: The Historians' Amicus Brief In Flores-Villar V. United States, Kristin Collins
Faculty Scholarship
The historians’ amicus brief that accompanies this essay was submitted to the Supreme Court in Flores-Villar v. United States, an equal protection challenge to federal statutes that regulate the citizenship status of foreign-born children of American parents. When the parents of such children are unmarried, federal law encumbers the ability of American fathers to secure citizenship for their children, while providing American mothers with a nearly unfettered ability to do the same. The general question before the Court in Flores-Villar – and a question that the Court has addressed in sum and substance on two other occasions during the last …
When Fathers' Rights Are Mothers' Duties: The Failure Of Equal Protection In Miller V. Albright, Kristin Collins
When Fathers' Rights Are Mothers' Duties: The Failure Of Equal Protection In Miller V. Albright, Kristin Collins
Faculty Scholarship
The history of coverture and the transmission of American citizenship brings an elementary point into focus: The allocation of parental rights is always correlated with the allocation of parental responsibility. This basic legal truism, and its numerous implications for citizenship law, suggests that the principal gender injustice caused by § 1409 is not its truncation of fathers' rights, but its creation and perpetuation of a legal regime in which mothers assume full responsibility for foreign-born nonmarital children. Once we recognize this gendered operation of § 1409, broader failures of equal protection analysis come into relief. First, while the jurisprudential understanding …