Vattel disagrees.
Vattel disagrees.
“Vattel disagrees.”
Not really. Vattel carefully noted the requirement for the Sovereign’s armies to be exercising actual sovereign jurisdiction within the former foreign territory in which the birth of the child takes place. The difference between then and now is who is exercising sovereign jurisdiction at the place of birth, the sovereign United States or the foreign sovereign. Modern day examples of foreign deployments of the U.S. armed forces typically result in the host or foreign nation retaining its permanent sovereignty over any such territories being occupied by the United States. At the time Vattel wrote his comments that you excerpted, a sovereign’s armies could be expected to invade for the purpose of temporary or permanent conquest, so those pre-20th Century armies often exercised actual sovereign jurisdiction over captured territories where the birth occurred. Following the Kellogg-Briand Treaty or Peace Pact, such conquests were outlawed; so the invading armed forces of the U.S. typically did not exercise sovereign U.S. jurisdiction where their armies occupied enemy or allied territories. Consequently, U.S. jurisdiction required for the occurrence of natural born citizenship became curtailed to the lesser number of locations where actual diplomatic immunity shielded the location from the exercise of foreign jurisdiction.