My answer is in the next paragraph, with the following condition. If you happen to agree you do not need to say a thing. If you should disagree with the answer, just write it off as sadly mistaken, I can live with that. You are certainly free to discuss it with others, just do not respond to me.
Thank you. The wording of your question demonstrates that parental citizenship may only "relate to" and not entirely define NBC. Minor's citizenship was stipulated, and the court referred to NBC solely as a means of determining whether even the highest form of citizenship should, via the intent of the 14th A, trump a state law that prohibited its female citizens from voting. It concluded, under the very best circumstances for a U.S. female, that despite the 14th A, a state could indeed deny its females the vote.
It was not necessary for the court to conclusively define NBC because it was not a concept in dispute before the court. That is why the holding of the case does not mention NBC. That is also why it has been cited in cases limited to 14th A disputes for its manner of testing the 14th A, but has never been cited in a case as providing for a defintition of NBC because the later cases were not concerned with NBC.
Think of it this way, if the court had mentioned "bread" and noted such was available in loafs and was sometimes wrapped, that would not have conclusively defined bread.
The only response has been weak spin, such as what you claim about the "no doubt" language being "sorted out" and not applying or whatever.
Many readers of this thread will note Edge's mischaracterization the way the "no doubt" language was resolved on this thread, and recognize the intellectual dishonesty in his post.
“It was not necessary for the court to conclusively define NBC because it was not a concept in dispute before the court.”
That is a very interesting statement. And it may explain why the Minor decision is not usually cited as having defined NBC.
The best example of this comes from the Wong Kim Ark case.
In his dissenting opinion Chief Justice Fuller makes several claims about what the majority opinion means. He says that according to the majority, the Constituional terms “natural born Citizen” and “citizen of the United States” were defined based on English Common Law. That would have been an excellant time to point out that Minor is binding precedent for the definition of NBC. But he doesn’t mention Minor.
Later in the dissent, he says that it is inconceivable to him that children of visiting aliens born in the United States are eligible to the Presidency while children born overseas to American citizen parents are not eligible. And again he doesn’t cite Minor as precedent.
And this is the Justice who wrote the Lockwood decision only a few years earlier. If Chief Justice Fuller doesn’t interpete Minor as defining NBC, it is hard to image any court today saying that it is. Which may explain why the Indiana Court of Appeals said this about the Minor decision,
“Thus, the Court [in Minor decision] left open the issue of whether a person who is born within the United States of alien parents is considered a natural born citizen.”
My question was based on the premise of one definition of NBC (which is why I said THE definition). How the criteria relates to that definition is strictly for entirely defining the term. Second, the wording of my question is irrelevant to the fact that Justice Waite uses the characterization of NBC for only one set of citizenship criteria ... one that looks like it was basically plagiarized from Vattel's Law of Nations.
Minor's citizenship was stipulated, and the court referred to NBC solely as a means of determining whether even the highest form of citizenship should, via the intent of the 14th A, trump a state law that prohibited its female citizens from voting. It concluded, under the very best circumstances for a U.S. female, that despite the 14th A, a state could indeed deny its females the vote.
That's an interesting thought, but the ruling doesn't say anything about a need to determine the highest form of citizenship or whether such citizenship would trump state laws. Instead, Waite explores different ways one can be a citizen and whether voting is one of the privileges and immunities of citizenship. IOW, he's not finding whether the highest form of citizenship can or can't trump a sate law, but whether the lowest form of citizenship (14th amendment) added to the privileges and immunities of citizenship, and whether state laws are actually denying pre-existing P&I of citizenship.
It's interesting that you classify this as the highest form of citizenship, which actually strengthens the idea that when Waite identified two classes of citizens at birth, that he only characterized one as NBC based on the specified criteria.
It was not necessary for the court to conclusively define NBC because it was not a concept in dispute before the court.
The definition was used to dispute a citizenship claim through the 14th amendment. If that concept is NOT conclusively defined, then it doesn't actually reject the argument because the other class of citizenship matches the criteria for 14th amendment citizenship. IOW, there's no point in characterizing the higher form of citizenship of NBC if it is not an exclusive definition and characterization. That the citizenship of the parents is included as part of the holding solidifies that the NBC definition is exclusive. It also explains why Horace Gray went out of his way to avoid declaring Wong Kim Ark to be a a natural-born citizen more than 20 years later.
Think of it this way, if the court had mentioned "bread" and noted such was available in loafs and was sometimes wrapped, that would not have conclusively defined bread.
You're using an oversimplified analogy. NBC is a hyphenated and modified noun and "bread" is not. A better analogy might be a term like whole-wheat bread.
EXAMPLE: It was never doubted that baking flour that contains the bran, germ and endoplasm results in a loaf of wheat bread. This is whole-wheat bread, as distinguished from white bread and Texas toast. Some authorities go further and include as wheat bread those made from flour without reference to bran, germ and endoplasm. To this class there are doubts, but never the first.
The characterizing adjective "whole-wheat" is defined by a specific set of criteria the same way that "natural-born" is defined by a specific set of criteria. The ONLY way to reconcile that the second class is actually NBC is to satisfy the criteria that is not refenced, which is the citizenship of the parents. It's a self-limiting definition, otherwise, there's no point in using the characterization.