I don’t recall seeing anything about Ex Parte Lockwood in Leo’s brief or in Hatfield’s arguments. I thought this proved Minor as precedent.
IIRC, In Lockwood the MvH NBC language applied to Minor was referred to as a “holding” but the reference in Lockwood was as a holding regarding only citizenship, not referring to natural born citizenship. IIRC, Leo was challenged in comments and he may have decided that even if he was right it was not as clear a support for proof of a precedent as he had initially stated.
The best approach was the one taken by Hatfield (and also Donofrio) using proper legal construction applied to the MvH case itself in context to show that NBC was clearly defined and relied on to make the ruling and that the “doubts” only concerned the citizenship status of those person born in country to aliens and foreigners who were NOT NBC.