The judge in this eligibility challenge ruled: “No court, federal, state or administrative, has accepted the challengers’ position that Mr. Obama is not a “natural born Citizen” due to the acknowledged fact that his father was born in Kenya and was a British citizen by virtue of the then applicable British Nationality Act. Nor has the fact that Obama had, or may have had, dual citizenship at the time of his birth and thereafter been held to deny him the status of natural born. It is unnecessary to reinvent the wheel here. … The petitioners’ legal position on this issue, however well intentioned, has no merit in law. Thus, accepting for the point of this issue that Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, he is a ‘natural born Citizen’ regardless of the status of his father.” New Jersey Administrative Law Judge Jeff S. Masin, April 10, 2012
The New Jersey Secretary of State, Kim Guadagno, a Republican approved Obama for the state ballot; the plaintiffs appealed to the New Jersey Supreme Court but the petition was denied.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/88910250/Purpura-Moran-Initial-Decision-of-ALJ-Masin#scribd
Excerpt:
In Wong Kim Ark,Justice Gray wrote at great length about the understanding of the term “natural born” and its common law meaning, probing English authorities and concluding that the “law of England for the last three centuries, beginning before the settlement of this country, and continuing to the present day, . . . every child born in England of alien parents was a natural-born subject, unless the child of an ambassador or other diplomatic agent of a foreign state, or of an alien enemy in hostile occupation of the place where the childwas born. The same rule was in force in all the English colonies upon this continent down to the time of the Declaration of Independence, and in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the constitution as originally established. ”This position as to the common law meaning is in accord with Justice Joseph Story’s statement, concurring in Inglis v. Trustees of Sailors’ Snug Harbor, 28 U.S. (3 Pet.) 99, 7 L. Ed. 617 (1830), “Nothing is better settled at the common law than the doctrine that the children, even of aliens, born in a country, while the parents reside there under the protection of the government, and owing a temporary allegiance thereto, are subjects by birth.”