[DoctorBulldog]

Yeah, I’ve been down this road before. You will have to prove that Blackwell is the source for the “Natural Born” clause in the U.S. Constitution.

After wrestling with this question for years, I am of the opinion that it was based on Vattel’s work and the SCOTUS got it wrong in the Wong decision because they were trying anything they could to get around the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Wouldn’t be the first time the SCOTUS has played politics and won’t be the last.

Here is a link to a well argued case for Vattel:

http://birthers.org/USC/Vattel.html

Yeah, I know, it’s a “birther” site, but it covers many of the same items I have come across in various history books while researching this issue at various libraries.

Cheers

[EnderWiggins]

"Yeah, I’ve been down this road before. You will have to prove that Blackwell is the source for the “Natural Born” clause in the U.S. Constitution."

Well... for starters it's Blackstone, not Blackwell, and he isn't the source. English common law is the source and that's already been firmly established by multiple Supreme Court decisions culminating in Wong Kim Ark. Blackstone is merely a convenient authority for documenting that the definition existed and that it was explicitly and exclusively jus solis, with no reference to the citizenship of the parents.

"After wrestling with this question for years, I am of the opinion that it was based on Vattel’s work and the SCOTUS got it wrong in the Wong decision because they were trying anything they could to get around the Chinese Exclusion Act."

Then I guess you must believe that the Framers were capable of time travel, because de Vattel himself never mentioned the phrase "natural born citizenship" in word or writing. That phrase was never associated with him until it was inserted by somebody else into an edition of his work published ten years after the Constitution was written.

At the time of the Framing there was a single definition of natural born citizen in the English language. And that was the defintion of English common law. there was no other.