Foreword
The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enacted three years after the end of the Civil War, reads, in part: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” For more than a century and a half, American courts have interpreted that language to guarantee citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil with only a narrow list of exceptions. Those include children born to foreign diplomats, members of invading armies, and — until a change in federal law in 1924 — American Indians living on tribal reservations. The…
