We rejected English Common Law. That’s why we fought for our independence. Given the profound differences between the citizenship rules associated with the English common law and those connected with American national citizenship, it is evident that the Founders did not use English common law to define what an Article II “natural born Citizen” is but rather used the law of nations for that purpose which became incorporated into and became federal common law.
The U.S. Supreme Court has seen it differently:
According to the Supreme Court, words and phrases used, but not defined, within the Constitution, should “be read in light of British common law,” since the U.S. Constitution is “framed in the language of the English common law.” Although the English common law is not “binding” on federal courts in interpreting the meaning of words or phrases within the Constitution, nor is it necessarily to be considered the “law” of the United States (as it is for the individual states specifically incorporating it), it can be employed to shed light on the concepts and precepts within the document that are not defined there, but which are reflected in the corpus of British law and jurisprudence of the time. As noted by Chief Justice (and former President) William Howard Taft, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, the framers of the U.S. Constitution “were born and brought up in” the English common law, they “thought and spoke in its vocabulary,” and that English common law was thus what the “statesmen and lawyers of the Convention” employed for the meaning of the terms in the Constitution “confident that they could be shortly and easily understood.”
—3 Smith v. Alabama, 124 U.S. 465, 478 (1888). See also, more recently, Carmel v. Texas, 529 U.S. 513, 521 (2000), where the Supreme Court noted that the meaning of an undefined term in the Constitution “necessarily requires some explanation,” and that “the necessary explanation is derived from English common law well known to the Framers.”