I’m assuming you didn’t go to law school, otherwise you would’ve learned in the first week that treatises such as Vattel have no binding force whatsoever in our legal system. At best they called “persuasive authority” and may be consulted and cited where the law is unclear or there is no law. Only if the principles of a treatise become part of a published opinion, or become part of a statute, do the principles become law. Otherwise, a legal treatise on its own has as much force of law as a Batman comic book.
“I’m assuming you didn’t go to law school, otherwise you would’ve learned in the first week that treatises such as Vattel have no binding force whatsoever in our legal system.”
It’s futher ironic that these birthers are trying to convince of the unimportance of common law in our system, all the while peddling theories that could not even apply without a common-law interpretation.
Federal Courts have to rule based on the statutory law and the Constitution.
Nowhere in the constitution or Federal statutes are their claims to be found. They misinterpret a simple term of art ‘natural-born’ (a term meanign those who acquire citizenship at birth) to be something special or different from what it really is. That’s why they have to lean on an 18th century treatise written by a foreign source and with no legal binding authority on any US court.
Vattel is NOT part of our written law, and hence has no authority in the courts per se.
“Courts which originate in the common law possess a jurisdiction which must be regulated by their common law until some statute shall change their established principles, but courts which are created by written law and whose jurisdiction is defined by written law cannot transcend that jurisdiction. It is unnecessary to state the reasoning on which this opinion is founded, because it has been repeatedly given by this Court, and with the decisions heretofore rendered on this point no member of the bench has even for an instant been dissatisfied.” – Chief Justice Marshall, Ex Parte Bollman, 8 U.S. 75 (1807)