The Legal History of Citizenship

Elizabeth F. Cohen, Syracuse University, has published Jus Tempus in the Magna Carta: The Sovereignty of Time in Modern Politics and Citizenship , in PS: Political Science and Politics (2010). Here is the abstract.

A genealogy of early modern British subjecthood reveals that law based on dates and temporal durations - what I will call collectively jus tempus - creates sovereign boundaries as powerful as territorial borders or bloodlines. This concept has myriad implications for how citizenship comes to be institutionalized in modern politics. In this article, I briefly outline one route through which jus tempus became a constitutive principle within the Anglo-American tradition of citizenship and how this concept works with other principles of membership to create subtle gradations of political status beyond the binary of subject and alien. I illustrate two main points about jus tempus: first, how specific dates create sovereign boundaries among people and second, how durational time takes on an abstract value in politics that allows certain kinds of attributes, actions, and relationships to be translated into rights-bearing political statuses. I conclude with some remarks about how, once established, the principle of jus tempus is applied in a diverse array of political contexts.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.