Yes, notice the sentence I supposedly left out...which was followed one sentence later, as TigersEye knows, with “ This circumstance itself, in regard to a point which must have occurred so often in the administration of justice, furnishes a strong inference that there has never been any doubt but that the common law rule was the law of the land.”
The judge clearly said that in 1844, when he wrote the decision, no judicial decision had been written on it during the preceding 57 years. The decisions involving property and inheritance had not discussed the meaning of natural born citizen - because it was so well known that no one had used it (or Vattel’s 1797 mistranslation) to challenge anyone.
The judge, writing in 1844, was clearly NOT saying that in 2011 no decision had ever been written on the subject! I didn’t leave it out to deceive. I left it out because it changes nothing, and the entire decision runs close to 30 pages - too long to post in a reply on FR.
And John Valentine, the 1844 decision was not anonymous. If you would read, the author is clearly identified. The WKA decision, which is also pretty clear and which you dislike and therefor wish to ignore, wrote:
“That all children born within the dominion of the United States of foreign parents holding no diplomatic office became citizens at the time of their birth does not appear to have been contested or doubted until more than fifty years after the adoption of the Constitution, when the matter was elaborately argued in the Court of Chancery of New York and decided upon full consideration by Vice Chancellor Sandford in favor of their citizenship. Lynch v. Clark, (1844) 1 Sandf.Ch. 583.”
They, at least, knew who wrote it.
JV prefers “The natives or indigenes are those born in the country of parents who are citizens.” While that might be his personal preference, it has no bearing on US law - in spite of JV’s misuse of the Venus case.
Why did Justice John Marshall use Vattel in discussing the Venus case? Because the Venus case was about this:
“This is the case of a vessel which sailed from Great Britain with a cargo belonging to the respective claimants, as was contended, before the declaration of war by the United States against Great Britain was or could have been known by the shippers. She sailed from Liverpool on 4 July, 1812, under a British license, for the port of New York and was captured on 6 August, 1812, by the American privateer Dolphin and sent into the District of Massachusetts, where the vessel and cargo were libeled in the district court...
...The great question involved in this and many other of the prize cases which have been argued is whether the property of these claimants who were settled in Great Britain and engaged in the commerce of that country, shipped before they had a knowledge of the war but which was captured after the declaration of war by an American cruiser ought to be condemned as lawful prize. It is contended by the captors that as these claimants had gained a domicile in Great Britain, and continued to enjoy it up to the time when war was declared, and when these captures were made, they must be considered as British subjects, in reference to this property, and consequently that it may legally be seized as prize of war in like manner as if it had belonged to real British subjects.”
The Venus case was not about something that happened in the USA, where US law applies. It was a matter of INTERNATIONAL LAW - a matter of the “Law of Nations”. When discussing what is legal on the high seas, international law applies - not the US Constitution. The US Constitution recognizes that
by giving Congress the power to “To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations” - because the Law of Nations - INTERNATIONAL LAW - applies on the high seas.
The dicta of Vice Chancellor Sandford has held up for over 160 years. As Sanford noted, no one in any state ever asked a would-be voter if his father was a citizen. No one applying for a passport was asked about his father’s citizenship. If he was born in the US, that was all that mattered under US law.
I’ll repeat: in the USA, there was no legal basis for saying citizenship by parentage was primary over citizenship by birth! No state government and no federal law ever suggested someone born in the US was only a citizen if their father was a citizen.
Vice Chancellor Sandford points out that the states, prior to the Constitution, had already started revising their laws to replace “natural born subject” with “natural born citizen”. The WKA decision discusses a number of state decisions recognizing that NBC = NBS. At the time of Independence, every NB subject became, in the law, a NB citizen. 100%.
Birthers and WorldNutDaily like to pretend that the phrase NBC sprang out of nowhere, or that it came from a bad translation made 10 years after the Constitution. It didn’t. Many of the writers of the Constitution and many of the states ratifying the Constitution had already started switching the wording in their laws, but none of them had changed the meaning. Everyone who had been a NBS automatically was a NBC.
That was US law, and no one tried to claim it wasn’t until the Lynch case in 1844. And they lost the case.
READ Lynch. Read WKA. You are not required to like them, but the courts have not followed Vattel on citizenship. Some people thought they should, but the courts have consistently followed the Lynch decision, not Vattel. Vattel wrote on international law, not the law of the USA.
That is why the Indiana court wrote:
“The Plaintiffs do not mention the above United States Supreme Court authority in their complaint or brief; they primarily rely instead on an eighteenth century treatise and quotations of Members of Congress made during the nineteenth century. To the extent that these authorities conflict with the United States Supreme Court’s interpretation of what it means to be a natural born citizen, we believe that the Plaintiffs arguments fall under the category of “conclusory, non-factual assertions or legal conclusions” that we need not accept as true when reviewing the grant of a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim.”