Fuller’s dissent is a piece of the puzzle for those of you that don’t know how to read this case.
Try this. ACTUALLY Read the appellent’s brief and tell me what issue was before the court??? The United States of America was appealing the lower court decision. WHAT WAS THEIR BASIS FOR APPEAL????? SCOTUS AFFIRMED Lower court case without exception.
And if case you can’t seem to figure out a key paragraph of Fuller’s dissent:
“And it is this rule, pure and simple, which it is asserted determined citizenship of the United States during the entire period prior to the passage of the act of April 9, 1866, and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and governed the meaning of the words “citizen of the United States” and “natural-born citizen” used in the Constitution as originally framed and adopted. I submit that no such rule obtained during the period referred to, and that those words bore no such construction; that the act of April 9, 1866, expressed the contrary rule; that the Fourteenth Amendment prescribed the same rule as the act, and that, if that amendment bears the construction now put upon it, it imposed the English common law rule on this country for the first time, and made it “absolute and unbending” just as Great Britain was being relieved from its inconveniences.”