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“If that is not a case of legal precedence can you find one that is?”

There is very very little case law which even touches upon the Constitution’s natural born citizen clause. What little there is of that does more to remark upon how the case before the court did not depend upon a definition of the natural born citizen clause. Some of the courts’ decisions flatly contradict themselves and/or prior decisions with respect to the forms of citizenship and the role of natural born citizenship. None of the cases attempts to directly define the natural born citizen clause. Consequently, the only direct guidance to the meaning of the natural born citizen clause is the actual clause, the statements of the men who put the clause into the Constitution, the legal treatise they consulted when they borrowed the clause, previous legal treatises commenting upon citizenship, the customary law of England and the Continent stretching back to the Middle Ages and the Roman Empire, and the fundamental nature of citizenship making a part of the law of nations going back to the first cities from which citizenship was derived.

In other words, the Founding Fathers wrote the clause into the Constitution before the profession of law had developed the practice of recording case law. One of the most attrocious falsehoods put forth by the Indiana court was the claim that the United States law was based upon English common-law. Such a claim is simply impossible, because not even England had yet developed a practice for publishing common-law case precedents by 1797 when the Constitution was written. Americans developed their own unique common-law in parallel with the development of English common-law in England. Legal precedents varied by each court at a time when paper was a limited resource and publications of court decisions weere relatively non-existant.

Instead, American jurists relied upon native commonsense and sometimes upon usages in the handful of legal treatises that became available in the mid to late 18th Century. It was one of these legal treatises from a Swiss author which the authors of the Constitution used to represent their understanding of natural born citizenship and what they had been accustomed to practice in their international relations from time immemorial. Suffice it to conclude for the moment that for these and many other reasons the Indiana court acted so improperly as to perhaps justify their removal from office for their improper conduct.

This post is already long, and past experience has been for these threads on this subject to go on and on for weeks at a time. I’m preparing to leave on another transcontinental trip through some pretty atrocious weather, so engaging in yet another of these long discussions of this case and the natural born citizen clause cannot proceed at this time. Perhaps I can discuss this with you in detail another time when I’ve got the flu and considerably more extendeed time on the keyboard.

In the meantime, I would recommend some of what Leo Donofrio wrote about this case. Don’t let the Obot detractors mislead you and pettifog you. Finding the early sources and relating them to the Constitution is time consuming and challenging. The basic principle employed for millenia are quite simple. It turns on the issues of loyalty owed to the sovereign United States and how that loyalty must be undivided from birth to occupation of the Office of the Presideent and the Office of the Vice President after the Constitution is adopted.