Not many folks have spent more time than I searching the Internet and WestLaw for keywords including “natural born citizen”. You can see the results of such activity on pages like my The Great Mother of All Natural Born Citizen Quotation Pages and Tes’s SCOTUS & “Natural Born Citizen” – A Compendium. While that’s useful, finding short paragraphs with keywords is not the way to understand the subject in depth. Even those who disagree with me fall into the same pattern, for example, citing E. de Vattel without reading the chapters that follow.
To really understand what’s going on one must read those works where the subject is developed: this happens in some scholarly works, and in some imp0rtant court decisions. Here are some useful texts, by far not all.
- The United States Constitution
- The Congressional Debates on the 14th Amendment
- Lynch v Clarke (Supreme Court of New York)
- US v Wong Kim Ark (Supreme Court of the US)
- Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253
- Rogers v Bellei (Supreme Court of the US)
- The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870
- The Natural-Born Citizen Clause and Presidential Eligibility: An Approach for Resolving Two Hundred Years of Uncertainty – Yale Law Journal 1988
- The Origins and Interpretation of the Presidential Eligibility Clause in the U.S. Constitution: Why Did the Founding Fathers Want the President To Be a “Natural Born Citizen” and What Does this Clause Mean for Foreign-Born Adoptees?
- Defining “American” Birthright Citizenship and the Original Understanding of the 14th Amendment, James C. Ho.
- Rawle’s View of the Constitution
- Citizenship in the United States, Frederick Van Dyne (1904)
- The Justiciability of Eligibility: May Courts Decide Who Can Be President? [HTML] [PDF] Daniel P. Tokaji, The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law
- Originalism and the Natural Born Citizen Clause [HTML] [PDF] Lawrence B. Solum, University of Illinois Law School
- Attorney General Edward Bates, Opinion of Attorney General Bates on Citizenship (1852).
Commenters here may suggest additions to the list.







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