Spiro On Dual Citizenship

Peter J. Spiro, Temple University School of Law, has published At Home in Two Countries: The Past and Future of Dual Citizenship (Introduction) in At Home in Two Countries (NYU Press, 2016). Here is the abstract.

How did dual citizenship evolve from traitorous to trendy? Dual nationality was once considered an offense against nature, an abomination on the order of bigamy. It was the stuff of titanic battles between the United States and European sovereigns. As those conflicts dissipated, dual citizenship continued to be the object of loyalty and misplaced security concerns. Only recently has the status largely shed the opprobrium to which it was once attached. The first monograph on the status in several generations, AT HOME IN TWO COUNTRIES charts the transformed understanding of dual citizenship from strong disfavor to general acceptance. Today, the state lacks both the capacity and the incentive to suppress the status as citizenship becomes more like other forms of membership. Dual citizenship allows many to formalize sentimental attachments. For others, it’s a new way to game the international system. The introduction opens with the author’s own experience acquiring dual citizenship. It then outlines the book’s consideration of dual citizenship in historical and contemporary perspective.

Download the introduction from SSRN at the link.

Lua K. Yuille on Categories of Citizenship

Lua K. Yuille, University of Kansas School of Law and University of Wisconsin Law School is publishing Individuals, Corporations, and the Pedagogy of Citizenship in volume 63 of the Kansas Law Review. Here is the abstract.

This essay examines access to and experiences in the market for citizenship (writ large to include legal, cultural, social, and political) across three broad categories: Black Americans, immigrants, and corporations. Drawing on the critiques reanimated by the killings of youth, like Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the essay suggests that, while Black Americans enjoy full legal citizenship, they, nevertheless, face often insurmountable obstacles in accessing and negotiating the market for arguably more valuable forms of citizenship. Contrasting the position of a range of noncitizens -- from pop stars to migrant workers -- the essay reaffirms the common wisdom that for immigrants, the market for citizenship is an unpredictable and unreliable lottery. Then, using recounting the story of Burger King's partial expatriation, it illustrates that corporations participate in a market for citizenship that is flexible and negotiable, not unlike traditional markets. Although, the stories this essay tells and the discourses associated with them are well known, their juxtaposition reveals a new question. What is the lesson taught by these disparate experiences? Describing law as a societal pedagogy, the essay suggests a heuristic through which that question may begin to be explored.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Ruth Bryan Owen's Citizenship, Gender Discrimination, and Plain Meaning

Daniel B. Rice, Duke University School of Law, has published The Riddle of Ruth Bryan Owen. Here is the abstract.

This Article recovers a lost chapter of constitutional history — the ill-fated challenge to Ruth Bryan Owen’s congressional eligibility. Owen was the brilliant (and American-born) daughter of famed politician William Jennings Bryan. The Expatriation Act of 1907 ironically stripped Owen of her American citizenship when she took a British husband. Congress swiftly repealed this loathsome feature after the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification. Owen had been a naturalized citizen for three years at the time of her House election in 1928, and she had accumulated far more citizenship credit in her youth. Even so, her defeated opponent claimed that she hadn’t “been seven Years a Citizen of the United States” as the Constitution requires. The House therefore faced an unenviable adjudicative dilemma: does “seven Years” mean the immediately preceding seven years, or any seven years cumulatively? Owen’s case explodes the conventional assumption that “mathematical” constitutional provisions are, by nature, self-interpreting patches of plain meaning. And in recounting Owen’s historic victory, this Article presents powerful new evidence that women came to be seen as improper objects of state-sanctioned discrimination after the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification. Owen’s triumph marks an important turning point in American women’s effort to achieve full constitutional equality. Because scholars have forgotten her story, they have overlooked crucial sources that might have helped provide a historically firmer basis for sex-discrimination doctrine.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Narrative In U. S. Arab Naturalization Cases, 1790-1952

Khaled A. Beydoun, Barry University School of Law, has published Between Muslim and White: The Legal Construction of Arab American Identity at 69 N. Y. U. Ann. Surv. Am. L. 29 (2013). Here is the abstract.

This Article examines the legal origins of Arab-American identity during the racially restrictive Naturalization Era (1790 through 1952), when whiteness was a prerequisite for American citizenship. Ten of the 53 naturalization hearings during this era involved a petitioner from the Arab World. Judges during the Naturalization Era viewed “Arab” as synonymous with “Muslim” identity. Because Muslims were presumed to be non-white, and Arabs were presumed to be Muslims, Arabs were presumptively ineligible for citizenship. But this presumption could be rebutted. Arab Christians could – and did – invoke the fact of their Christianity to argue that they were white. These arguments sometimes secured citizenship for Christian petitioners, but did not always rebut the presumption that every immigrant from the Arab World was Muslim.

Legal scholars have paid insufficient attention to the Arab naturalization cases. These cases reveal not only how judges viewed religion as a proxy for race, but also the ways in which they conflated Arab identity with Muslim identity to do so. This conflation persists today in that many people continue to believe that Arab is synonymous with Muslim, a conflation that is especially salient following the September 11th terrorist attacks. Almost all of the current literature on Arab-Americans centers on how the government’s response to 9/11 made people who are perceived to be Arabs, Muslims, or Middle Eastern vulnerable to legalized forms of racial surveillance, subordination, and violence.

While this body of work is important, this Article introduces a preface to the post-9/11 racialization of Arab-Americans – the racial conflation of Arab and Muslim identity during the Naturalization Era. The courts during this era rendered Arab Muslim immigrants presumptively non-white and inassimilable, while sometimes finding Arab Christians eligible for citizenship and white by law. The legal construction of Arab-American identity in that earlier period helped shape contemporary understandings and misunderstandings of both Arab and Muslim-American identity today.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.