Why would they be doing all that? They set out the question in the first paragraph or so, along with the mutually agreed facts, and answered it in the last paragraph.
Natural Born citizen was not even at issue. Clearly Wong had not been naturalized, that was not in the agreed facts. The question was only whether he was a citizen at birth, despite the law in effect at the time banning people of Chinese ethnicity from being naturalized. They were not even really trying to *define* "citizen", so much as determine if WKA was one at birth, under the laws and the Constitution of the United States.
When they get to the end, the Wong Court figures out there are only two kinds of citizens
Not quite what Justice Gray wrote. He said that the 14th amendment contemplated only two sources of citizenship.
They find this guy named Vattel from 1800 something or another who adds some additional qualifications to being a citizen.
And you lecture us about not having our facts straight? I think if you look it up, maybe even using Google or Wikipedia, you'll find that Vattel was born April 25, 1714 and first published "The Law of Nations, or, Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct of Nations and Sovereigns", in 1758, well before the Constitution was written. Actually it was during the French and Indian War, which started the 13 colonies on the road to independence. (Remembering that while he wrote in French, he was Swiss). Heck, he wasn't even alive by the time the Declaration of Independence was written, let alone the Constitution, having died Dec. 28, 1767.
Thank you for the date correction on Vattel. On everything else, you are mistaken. Did you link to that 2009 Indiana case? If all that Wong stuff was “dicta”, it would not have been in the 2009 case.
And for Wong, all that stuff in the case is how they are analyzing the case and determining it. It would have been nice if Wong had wrapped it all up in one sentence, but they didn’t. But that is what the case stands for. You can see that by the way the 2009 case put the language into their decision.
Let me try to find you an example of a case so you can see how a court sets forth the relevant law and reuses language from the prior cases. It may help.
parsy, who will try