Qualifications for President and the “Natural Born” Citizenship Eligibility Requirement
development of the concept of “natural-born” allegiance to the reciprocal duties of protection and allegiance (fealty, or “ligamen” (tie)), that developed concerning land ownership and use under the feudal system, eventually understood to encompass the reciprocal protection/allegiance of all English subjects with respect to the crown.[1]
In 1844, in a probate case in New York State, Assistant Vice-Chancellor Lewis Sandford authored a detailed and scholarly opinion, later cited and relied upon by numerous federal courts and legal treatises, on the legal history of natural born citizenship status in the United States.[2] The opinion in Lynch v. Clarke found that one of the litigants, Julia Lynch, who was born in New York to alien parents who were merely on a “temporary sojourn” in this country, was a natural born U.S. citizen who had the legal capacity to inherit. Sandford concluded that all persons born in the United States, even of alien parents who were only here temporarily, had “natural born” citizenship status under English common law, carried forward in the laws in all of the original thirteen states after independence, and then under the laws and constitutional provisions of the United States:
My conclusion upon the facts proved is, that Julia Lynch was born in this state of alien parents, during their temporary sojourn. That they came here as an experiment, without any settled intention of abandoning their native country, or of making the United States their permanent home….It is indisputable that by the rule of the common law of England, if applied to these facts, Julia Lynch was a natural born citizen of the United States. And this rule was established and inflexible in the common law, long anterior to the first settlement of the United States… By the common law, all persons born within the ligeance of the crown of England, were natural born subjects, without reference to the status or condition of their parents….
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At the formation of our present national government, the common law prevailed as a system of jurisprudence, in all the thirteen states which then constituted the nation….
I need not dwell more at large upon this unquestionable proposition….
As the common law prevailed in all the colonies, and was the basis of their laws and jurisprudence, it follows that all persons born in the colonies while in the ligeance of the King of England, became subjects of the Crown of England; unless it be made to appear that the rule of the common law was incompatible with the situation with the colonists, or unsuited to their circumstances; or that it was altered by legislation.
Instead of abridging the rule, all colonial legislation which has come under my observation, proceeded on the assumption that it was the settled law of the land.
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It may then be safely assumed, that at the Declaration of Independence, by the law of each and all of the thirteen states, a child born within their territory and ligeance respectively, became thereby a citizen of the state of which he was a native. This continued unchanged to
