If the Constitution permits Congress to regulate their children's citizenship by statute, what should that statute provide?
Mr. McCain's citizenship was established by statutes covering the offspring of Americans abroad and laws specific to the Canal Zone as Congress realized that Americans would be living and working in the area for extended periods.
And Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington, said he was also launching a legal challenge, saying the banning of immigrants based on their country of citizenship went against state statutes meant to stop discrimination based on place of birth or nationality.
It is immaterial for these purposes that Mrs. Mackenzie's citizenship might, under the statute there, have been restored upon termination of the marital relationship; she did not consent to the loss, even temporarily, of her citizenship, and, under the proposition apparently urged by the Court today, it can therefore scarcely matter that her expatriation was subject to some condition subsequent.
2120, 53 L.Ed.2d 63 (1977), submitted a list of the New York statutes that required citizenship, or a declaration of intent to become a citizen, for no fewer than 37 occupations.
In a more widely cited landmark case before the United States Supreme Court, he argued on behalf of a German-born American woman stripped of her citizenship under a decades-old statute.
We should let our judgment be guided so far as the law permits by the spirit of freedom and tolerance in which our nation was founded, and by a desire to secure the blessings of liberty in thought and action to all those upon whom the right of American citizenship has been conferred by statute, as well as to the native born.
But government lawyers should understand how derivative citizenship works and apply the relevant statutes consistently.
614616, 56 L.Ed. 1066, especially where, as here, the statute antedated petitioner's citizenship and the review was thus a condition of its award.
"The legal fiction that the cessation of citizenship occurs by operation of the statute conceals administrative decision making that must logically occur for the bill to operate," he writes.
