The previous article, “Cranking natural born citizenship” exceeded the limit of 500 comments, and this is primarily an article to hold the overflow.
I did want to make one comment in general about the topic. To my knowledge few cases have ever been heard in court about the presidential eligibility of a person born US citizens outside of the United States. The closest we have is the complicated case of John McCain, in which Judge Alsup said in his decision that he thought McCain likely to be eligible.
In the case of US. v. Wong, the court used reasoning that concluded that Mr. Wong was born a citizen under the principles of the common law of England, and pretty much all legal authorities consider the question of persons born US citizens in the US settled as to people like Wong (they are eligible).
The problem with Supreme Court case citations and authorities with regard to the foreign born, is that no case to my knowledge ever needed to distinguish between “born citizen” and “natural born citizen” in order to reach a decision. This is because the only distinction at law in the United States is in regard to eligibility of the President. So when, for example, a court says that there are only two sources of citizenship, birth and naturalization, they are not necessarily analyzing that formula for potential US Presidents. It may well be that someone is, as one commenter here put it, both natural born and naturalized.
Dicta is generally considered less authoritative than the argument that leads to the decision, and the decision itself. These side remarks and observations are not, so it is thought, so carefully reasoned or precisely crafted as the essential parts of the decision. In any discussion of the subject, one should consider how carefully the authority cited might have been speaking in the context in which we cite them.
There are some interesting items in the reading list Obama gave his students. On the issue of the removal of Indians, he cited Vattel’s The Law of Nations. We don’t have the over 500-page reading packet itself, so we don’t know what the particular reading from Vattel was1. It is nevertheless instructive that then professor Obama picked such a source, which in modern times is rather obscure. Obama also included a reading about the Dred Scott case and the Slaughterhouse Cases (both having been cited in the Presidential eligibility debate). Of course no discussion of citizenships is complete without the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, both of which appear in the Obama syllabus.
