Page:Qualifications for President and the “Natural Born” Citizenship Eligibility Requirement.pdf/49

 significantly, no historical nor controlling legal holding in American jurisprudence to support the argument that parental citizenship governs and controls the eligibility of a native born U.S. citizen to be President. As indicated in the discussion of the history of the constitutional provision, there is also no justification for this unique theory, which would exclude an entire class of native born U.S. citizens from eligibility for the Presidency, in any of the statements or writings of the framers of the Constitution, or in the entire record of the ratification debates of the United States Constitution.

In 1825, in a significant and widely recognized work on the Constitution, William Rawle specifically noted that the term “natural born citizen” as used in the Constitution would include “every person born within the United States… whether the parents are citizens or aliens….” Similarly, in his treatise on Citizenship of the United States, Frederick Van Dyne, Assistant Solicitor of the Department of State, explained in 1904 that the rule governing citizenship is not one derived from “international law” or the so-called “law of nations,” but is rather municipal law which “[e]very nation determines for itself’” [sic] and, in the United States, derives from the common law principle of jus soli, dependantdependent [sic] “on the place of birth,” as modified by statute incorporating the principles of jus sanguinis to include the children of citizens “born out of the jurisdiction of the United States.” In reviewing Supreme Court decisional material, the author in this treatise noted that the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1866 civil rights act “reaffirm the fundamental principle of citizenship by birth” which “was generally held to be regulated by the common law, by which all persons born within the limits and allegiance of the United States were deemed to be natural born citizens thereof.”

Although the Supreme Court has never had to address the issue of “natural born” citizenship directly in the context of a challenge to the eligibility of one to be President, the federal courts have discussed the concept on numerous occasions for more than 200 years and have, other than in the Dred Scott decision, consistently relied upon the place of birth, without regard or reference to the status of one’s parents, as the determining factor of natural born citizenship. In a celebrated state court ruling, in 1844, providing a detailed explanation of the legal history of the citizenship Rh