I find Google to be superior to Lexis and Westlaw for about 50% of my legal research. Google Scholar and many other free search engines make it possible for anyone to research the law, not that there are that many people who really want to.
Your comment affirms the insidious nature of the Justia scrubing of Minor from citations. Legal researchers using free internet links get lulled into confidence in the reliability of the links.
Note that Wiki moderators have viciously scrubbed any attempts to include reference to Minor v Happersett from their “natural born citizen” page.
The Wiki page on Natural Born Citizen has been recently updated for comments by Lawrence Solum relating to Rubio and even makes reference to his own law review article from Sept. 2008 based on the Minor v Happersett formulation and mentions that Solum has modified his position away from Minor in a way that just happens to make Obama and Rubio eligible:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born-citizen_clause_of_the_U.S._Constitution
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Academic opinions
In a 2008 article published by the Michigan Law Review Lawrence Solum, Professor of Law at the University of Illinois, stated that “there is general agreement on the core of [the] meaning [of the Presidential Eligibility Clause]. Anyone born on American soil whose parents are citizens of the United States is a ‘natural born citizen’”.[24] In April 2010, Solum republished the same article as an online draft, in which he changed his opinion on the meaning of natural born citizen to include persons born in the United States of one American citizen parent. In a footnote he explained that “based on my reading of the historical sources, there is no credible case that a person born on American soil with one American parent was clearly not a ‘natural born citizen’.” He further extended natural born citizenship to all cases of jus soli as the “conventional view”.[25] Although Professor Solum stated elsewhere that the two-citizen-parents arguments “weren't crazy”, he believes “the much stronger argument suggests that if you were born on American soil that you would be considered a natural born citizen.”[26]
Ronald Rotunda, Professor of Law at Chapman University, stated, “There's some people who say that both parents need to be citizens. That's never been the law.”[27] Polly Price, Professor of Law at Emory University, added, “It's a little confusing, but most scholars think it's a pretty unusual position for anyone to think the natural born citizen clause would exclude someone born in the [United States].”[26] Professor Chin concurred with that assessment, stating, “there is agreement that ‘natural born citizens’ include those made citizens by birth under the 14th Amendment.”[28] Similarly, Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law at UCLA, found “quite persuasive” the reasoning employed by the Indiana Court of Appeals, which had ruled “that persons born within the borders of the United States are ‘natural born Citizens’ for Article II, Section 1 purposes, regardless of the citizenship of their parents.”[29][30]
Daniel Takaji, Professor of Law at Ohio State University, stated Marco Rubio (whose parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of his birth in the United States) was a natural-born citizen because he was born in the United States; the citizenship status of his parents was irrelevant.[31]
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Yes, Wiki has a page on Minor, but the unnamed reviewer goes to great pains to state on that page that Minor is “obiter dictum” and not precedent and omits the subsequent citations as precedent that were scrubbed by Justia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_v._Happersett
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In obiter dictum, the Court referenced the natural-born-citizen clause of the U.S. Constitution, stating, “The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens. The words ‘all children’ are certainly as comprehensive, when used in this connection, as ‘all persons,’ and if females are included in the last they must be in the first. That they are included in the last is not denied. In fact the whole argument of the plaintiffs proceeds upon that idea.”
Subsequent history
Minor has not been explicitly overruled by another Supreme Court decision. In fact, Minor is still cited for the proposition that the Constitution does not confer the right to vote. However, as the decision relates to women's suffrage in particular, it is no longer applicable because of the Nineteenth Amendment.
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Google superior to West or Lexis? In terms of cost, yes. In terms of content or quality? That is laughable.