Charter Member Keith Whittington featured in Symposium on Birthright Citizenship

Keith Whittington, a charter member of the Society for the Rule of Law, was just featured in a Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy Symposium for his paper, By Birth Alone: The Original Meaning of Birthright Citizenship and “Subject to the Jurisdiction” of the United States.

Whittington describes his work in a Volokh Conspiracy article. The Harvard Symposium discusses “the original meaning of birthright citizenship in the United States and in the Fourteenth Amendment.” Whittington’s paper, “focuses on the content, scope, and qualifications of the common law rule of birthright citizenship as it developed in England and was carried into the United States and eventually embodied in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Whittington, “reaffirms the traditional view that birthright citizenship would extend to children of unauthorized aliens born in the United States,” and asserts that President Trump’s executive order denying citizenship to children born in the U.S. to unauthorized immigrants is unconstitutional. He writes:

“The conventional wisdom is right, and the executive order is wrong. Children born within the territory of the United States are natural-born citizens except under very narrow exceptions. Those historically recognized exceptions do not include the case of unauthorized aliens.”

Whittington argues that the Fourteenth Amendment, “sought to lock-in the liberty-enhancing rule that current political majorities cannot exclude undesirable populations from their birthright as citizens.” Redefining the clause to exclude children of unauthorized immigrants “would undo that achievement and reopen the door of the political manipulation of the qualifications of birthright citizenship that the Reconstruction Congress sought to close.”

Read the full paper here.

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Keith Whittington is a charter member of the Society for the Rule of Law.