“I’m not trying to be flippant here. This is precisely the distinction I had in mind when I wrote my original comment.”
I understood that, which is why I couldn’t understand why you would have made the statement. Obviously legislation is written and does not incorporate a legal treatise, unless authorizing it as a legal reference like Black’s Law Dictionary. In other words, the only way a legal treatise like Vattel’s Law of Nations is going to find its way into the Constitution and statutes as the law of the United States is by incorporating its ideas and perhaps some of its phrases, and that is exactly what we are seeing. I had to ask because I’ve seen so many people on FR try to marginalize Vattel’s work as being unknown and inconsequential, which is about as opposite from the truth as it can get. of course they do so to avoid the natural conclusion his definition of natural born citizen was incorporated into the constitution.