The Supreme Court’s Birthright Citizenship Decision Hinges on a Case You’ve Never Heard Of
“The Supreme Court will hear Trump v. Barbara, a case challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship for certain children. The case hinges on the 1844 New York inheritance case, Lynch v. Clarke, where Judge Sandford ruled that a child born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents was a citizen. This precedent, emphasizing birthright citizenship regardless of parental domicile, contradicts the Trump administration’s argument and is significant in the ongoing debate about the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause.
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On April 1, the Supreme Court hears oral argument in Trump v. Barbara, a class-action lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship for certain people. No one will be surprised to hear lawyers discussing the text of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause and the history that led to its ratification—that clearly relates to the Trump administration’s claim that birthright citizenship doesn’t apply to children of “undocumented” or “temporarily present” noncitizens because their parents cannot establish “domicile,” meaning permanent presence in the country. But court watchers may not expect to hear debate about an 1844 inheritance case from New York. Yet that case, Lynch v. Clarke, has become incredibly important. Indeed, it may be instrumental in determining the fate of millions of American-born infants.
In the 1844 case, Judge Lewis Sandford held that Julia Lynch, the child of Irish parents who was born during their “temporary sojourn” in New York, was a U.S. citizen. The issue arose amid a heated battle over the fate of Lynch & Clarke, a firm that sold bottled spring water from Saratoga Springs to New York City residents in the early 1800s. Thomas Lynch and John Clarke were partners in the firm until Lynch died in 1833. Lynch had no will, and his only surviving heirs, which included his brother Bernard and a deceased brother’s daughter—his niece Julia—lived in Ireland. A year after Thomas’ death, when Julia was 15, she and her uncle Bernard sailed to New York and geared themselves for a fight for Thomas’ property.
Things came to a head in the early 1840s when the case became a family battle over Julia’s citizenship. In New York, as in many other states at the time, noncitizens could not inherit land. Bernard therefore argued that Julia was not a citizen, which meant that his claim over the property was stronger than hers (he was born in Ireland, but had naturalized in 1834).
But Bernard faced a problem: Julia was born in the United States. To get around that issue, Bernard and his lawyers painted a picture of U.S. citizenship law that would be familiar to anyone who has read the Trump administration’s brief in Trump v. Barbara. They claimed that Julia was not a citizen because her parents were only temporary visitors to the United States and lacked a permanent “residence or domicile” there. In Bernard’s telling, citizenship was not the product of “mere accidental birth,” but rather the “political condition” of the parents. He conceded that Julia would be an American citizen under English legal principles, under which everyone “born in her dominions” was a “subject,” but he argued that the colonists, when declaring independence from British tyranny, had also liberated themselves from the common-law rule of birthright citizenship.
Judge Sandford rejected these arguments. His opinion was a firm endorsement of the principle that being born in the United States entitled someone to citizenship, no matter the domicile of their parents. He did not rely on Julia’s argument that she was a citizen because her parents were, in fact, domiciled in the United States when she was born. Instead, he explicitly concluded that though Julia’s parents lacked any permanent domicile or “expectation of remaining” in the country, these facts did not prevent her from acquiring American citizenship by birth.
Sandford also rejected Bernard’s argument that Americans had abandoned the English concept of birthright citizenship. He acknowledged that American authorities had rejected some aspects of British law and society. But he concluded that birthright citizenship was by now distinctively American. As Sandford recounted, the Founders understood that their new nation was, in James Madison’s words, “indebted to emigration for her settlement and prosperity.” American authorities therefore embraced the rule of birthright citizenship, referring, for example, to a “natural born citizen” in various statutes and cases.
In today’s birthright citizenship battle, Sandford’s opinion in Lynch v. Clarke is a problematic precedent for the Trump administration. By holding that neither the temporariness of a noncitizen’s stay in the United States nor their intention to remain there had any bearing on the citizenship of their U.S.-born children, Lynch illustrates that the traditional concept of citizenship was broader than the permanent-allegiance-and-domicile rule that Trump’s lawyers are advancing. To be sure, Lynch is not a Supreme Court case, and it was decided over two decades before the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution. But Lynch sheds light on the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause because it represents the state of the law before the amendment was ratified, and the clause, according to its Framers, was ratified to confirm—not change—this aspect of existing law.
The Trump administration doesn’t disagree that Lynch is bad precedent for its side. Instead, it emphasizes that the case was just a single case, and points to two instances where other authorities disagreed with Sandford’s opinion.
What the administration neglects to mention is that the opinion was a big part of the 19th-century legal culture from which the citizenship clause emerged. Lynch was cited by several members of the Congress that drafted the 14thAmendment. In 1866, for instance, Rep. William Lawrence of Ohio made a speech highlighting Sandford’s declaration in the syllabus, or published summary of the case, that Julia’s birth in the United States made her a citizen “without any regard to the political condition or allegiance of their parents.” (While one scholar emphasizes that this quotation doesn’t appear in Sandford’s opinion, the summary was written by Judge Sandford himself, because Sandford, unlike many judges, wrote and published the reports of his own cases.) Several years later, Illinois Sen. Lyman Trumbull, who played an active role in the citizenship clause’s passage, cited Lynch while recounting the drafting of the clause.
What’s more, the case was quoted in several legal guides, including one international law tome that the Trump administration itself cites in its brief, and in Kent’s Commentaries, which one historian called the “most influential American law book of the antebellum period.”
Lynch made its mark on the executive branch, too. It was cited by two attorneysgeneral when resolving issues of citizenship law. Local newspapers publicized Sandford’s opinion as well, both by publishing the speeches of the lawmakerswho discussed it and by recounting the story of a young woman from Ireland and the “great and laborious” research project Sandford undertook to confirm her citizenship.
In part, Lynch was influential because of the deep connection between birthright citizenship, racial equality, and abolitionism. As scholars like Amanda Frost, Kate Masur and Martha Jones demonstrate, abolitionists and free Black activists used the concept of citizenship by birthright to make claims of freedom and otherwise challenge inequitable and terrifying circumstances. This activism inspired official action. For example, Abraham Lincoln’s attorney general, Edward Bates, cited Kent’s Commentaries (which, again, cited Lynch) to describe the “true principle” of birthright citizenship in an influential opinionconcluding that Black Americans were citizens of the United States. (Lawmakers cited Bates’ opinion, in addition to Lynch, when drafting the citizenship clause.) Cases like Lynch helped legitimize claims for Black citizenship, portraying birthright citizenship as an American tradition. As one newspaper (which, you guessed it, cited Lynch) recounted, these cases served as a notification that the “law, which is considerably older than the Republican party, is just as radical as ‘Radicals.’ ”
Scholars and advocates on both sides of Trump’s citizenship order have engaged in what feels like a battle of the citations to elevate or undermine Lynch v. Clarke. To some extent, the battle over Lynch is emblematic of legal practice in the Supreme Court’s text-and-history era, in which lawyers arm themselves with text-searchable databases to undercut one another’s claims about what happened in the past. But in this case, the extent of historical evidence that the government ignores to make its claim is staggering. To be sure, Lynch is just one case, but it is an important one. The Supreme Court should appreciate that.“
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