All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States , or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University
James Madison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law
The Constitution as originally adopted assumes that there is citizenship of the United States, and of the States, but does not explicitly provide a rule that tells whether anyone is a citizen of either (other than by giving Congress the power to naturalize). Article III, which deals with the judiciary, gives the federal courts jurisdiction over controversies between citizens of different states, and thus assumes that some people have state citizenship. Article II provides that only a natural-born citizen of the United States, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, may be President, and thus assumes that some people have national citizenship. Nowhere, however, does the original Constitution lay down a clear and comprehensive rule about either kind of citizenship.
Prior to the Civil War, both state and national citizenship were the subjects of considerable controversy. State citizenship was especially important for practical purposes because it gave access to the jurisdiction of the federal courts that was based on diversity of citizenship, and because Article IV secured certain rights to the citizens of one state who were present in another. Different theories of citizenship were developed. One view was that national citizenship was dependent on state citizenship, so that those who were state citizens under state law, and only those people, were citizens of the United States. This view raised a question concerning those born or resident in the District of Columbia, or in a federal territory. Another view was that federal law implicitly provided a rule that identified citizens of the United States, for example the rule of citizenship by birth.
A flashpoint of the controversy over citizenship was the Supreme Court’s decision in 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Dred Scott, who had been held as a slave, sued the executor of his former master’s estate under the state-citizenship diversity jurisdiction of the federal courts, seeking a determination that he had become free because his master had voluntarily taken him into free territory. Chief Justice Taney concluded that Scott was not a citizen of any state for purposes of the diversity jurisdiction because the Constitution implicitly limited both state and national citizenship on racial grounds, generally excluding individuals like Scott who were of African descent. This and other aspects of Taney’s analysis were strongly disputed by dissenters on the Court and others, who noted that free blacks had in fact been viewed as citizens by many states at the Founding.
The Republican Party strongly opposed Dred Scott, in which the Chief Justice also stated that Congress could not bar slavery from the federal territories. Excluding slavery from the territories was the Republicans’ principal goal, so the Chief Justice had implied that the party was organized for an unconstitutional purpose. Led by Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party won control of the White House in the election of 1860; and Lincoln’s Administration took the legal position, contra Taney, that free blacks were indeed American citizens. At the end of the Civil War, the Republican Party was in control of the 39 th Congress, which started its first session in December 1865, at a time when the former Confederate states had formed new, white-dominated governments that restricted the rights of former slaves. In response to those discriminatory laws (generally referred to as “Black Codes”), Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared that all persons born or naturalized in the United States were citizens of the United States and the state in which they lived, thereby affirming a rule of citizenship by birth that did not depend on race. The only two textual exceptions to this rule of birthright citizenship were for American-born persons “subject to any foreign power” and for “Indians not taxed.” The Civil Rights Act also provided that all citizens of each state should have the same basic civil rights, including the right to hold property and make contracts, as were enjoyed by white citizens. The statute thus forbade race discrimination among citizens with respect to various legal benefits then called civil rights, but did not dictate the full content of all the rights of citizens. It did not address a distinct category of rights then referred to as “political rights” as contradistinguished from “civil rights.” Voting was a paradigmatic political right. Under widely prevailing views at the time, citizenship alone did not suffice to confer full and equal “political rights.” For example, under the Civil Right Act an American-born minor child or adult woman would clearly be a citizen, but would not therefore be automatically entitled to vote or exercise other “political rights.”
The Fourteenth Amendment as drafted by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction in the spring of 1866 did not explicitly deal with citizenship. The Senate added what is now the first sentence, which grants both national and state citizenship in language quite similar to that of the Civil Rights statute, and the House agreed to the amendment. The basic principle of a federal rule of race-blind citizenship based on birth (and naturalization) was not in much dispute, although there was some debate about the restriction of the grant of citizenship to persons subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
The Citizenship Clause has given rise to several controversies. Does the grant of citizenship bring with it any particular legal benefits, and if so what are they? Are these benefits, whatever they might be, to be defined and enforced exclusively by courts? Alternatively, does Congress have power to broadly supplement judicially-recognized benefits, thanks to the final sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment, which empowers Congress to “enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of” the Amendment? If there is such a congressional power, does it encompass authority to define rights of citizenship applicable against other private persons? And how should the first sentence’s restriction to persons “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States be understood? When adopted, that clause, which was drafted against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Act, was clearly understood to withhold birthright citizenship from the American-born children of foreign diplomats present in this country, because under international law diplomats and their families were largely immune from the legal control and the courts of their host country. The limiting clause also was understood not to grant birthright citizenship to various members of Indian tribes whose political relations with the United States limited its authority over the tribes’ members. The scope of the limiting clause is a matter of political controversy today.
James Madison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law
The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment resolves a question that was hotly contested before the Civil War by providing the basic rule regarding acquisition of citizenship of the United States. It also confers state citizenship on national citizens who reside in a state. The Clause identifies individuals who hold national and state citizenship. It does not identify the legal benefits that come with that status. Before the Amendment, the Constitution recognized both state and national citizenship. The Amendment did not create either citizenship, and does not address the rights that come with them.
The Clause does leave open some questions concerning acquisition of state and national citizenship. It does not say whether a state may confer state citizenship on anyone who is not a citizen of the United States. It also does not say whether national citizenship may be acquired other than through birth in the United States or naturalization, a question that may be important in determining who is a natural born citizen of the United States and so eligible to be President. If someone who becomes a citizen through naturalization is not a natural born citizen, then persons born outside the United States can be natural born citizens only if national citizenship may be acquired in a way not mentioned in the Amendment.
Persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens only if they are subject to its jurisdiction. That exception applies to individuals present in the United States over whom the United States does not exercise full territorial prescriptive or adjudicatory jurisdiction because of its relations with another sovereign or quasi-sovereign such as an Indian tribe. (Prescriptive jurisdiction is a sovereign’s authority to prescribe legal rules. Adjudicatory jurisdiction is the authority of a sovereign’s courts to make persons parties to cases before them.) When the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, the leading examples of people present in the United States but not fully subject to its territorial jurisdiction were foreign diplomats, who enjoyed diplomatic immunity under international law, and those members of Indian tribes whose relations with their tribes limited the authority the United States exercised with respect to them. The debates in Congress on the exception from the citizenship rule focused mainly on members of Indian tribes who fell into that category.
Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University
The Fourteenth Amendment begins with a simple declaration: if you’re born in America under the American flag, you’re an American citizen. It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, rich or poor, black or white, gay or straight, the daughter of a president or the son of an undocumented/unauthorized/illegal immigrant. You’re a free and equal citizen. This principle of equal citizenship was at the core of the Republican vision for post-Civil War America.
In 1857, the Supreme Court set out its own racialist vision of American identity in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision. There, Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney declared that a black man generally couldn’t be a United States citizen—that he had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” As a matter of history, many of Taney’s assertions were plainly false: As dissenting Justices and other critics of Taney made clear, free blacks were viewed as citizens in several states at the time of the Founding; indeed, some blacks had even fought in Washington’s army, and had in several states been eligible to vote on the Constitution itself in 1787-88.The newly formed Republican Party set out to reverse various aspects of Dred Scott—most pressingly, the decision’s ruling that Congress could not generally prohibit slavery in federal territories.
Candidate Abraham Lincoln campaigned against the decision in 1858 and 1860. Then, under President Abraham Lincoln, Attorney General Edward Bates took on Dred Scott in an 1862 legal opinion arguing that free blacks generally could be U.S. citizens. Finally, the Republican Congress enshrined the principle of birthright citizenship in America’s first major civil rights law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Two months later, Congress included birthright citizenship in its proposed Fourteenth Amendment.
At the simplest level, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause was meant to repudiate Dred Scott and place the Civil Rights Act of 1866 on a firm legal foundation. However, it was also meant to root post-Civil War America—America’s Second Founding—in an inspiring Lincolnian reinterpretation of one of our nation’s Founding truths, that we’re all created/born free and equal.
Let’s begin with the text of the Citizenship Clause: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” While the Citizenship Clause was directed at the specific evils of both the Dred Scott decision and the Black Codes, the Clause’s text doesn’t protect only African Americans. For instance, while the Fifteenth Amendment explicitly mentions race, the Fourteenth Amendment’s text is more capacious—speaking not just of African Americans, but of “[a]ll persons.” This sweeping language grants U.S. citizenship to everyone born here and subject to our laws. The only relevant exception today (given that Native Americans no longer live in the same kind of tribal regime that existed in the 1860s) is for those who owe their allegiance to another sovereign, such as the children of foreign diplomats.
The Citizenship Clause also marked an important shift in American identity. Prior to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Constitution didn’t provide a set definition of citizenship. This allowed states to set their own ground rules, with many states reserving state citizenship for whites and making African Americans—even those born on a state’s own soil—mere “inhabitants.” In turn, these state-by-state determinations often defined who would become a U.S. citizen. The Citizenship Clause flipped this troubling script. Rather than deferring to the racist citizenship determinations of individual states, the Fourteenth Amendment made Americans citizens of the nation, first and foremost, and established a simple national rule for citizenship: If you’re born in America under our flag, you’re a U.S. citizen. Furthermore, under the Fourteenth Amendment, American citizenship brought with it a set of fundamental “privileges or immunities”—rights protected not just against abuses by the federal government (as with the original Bill of Rights), but also against abuses by one’s own state. (This aspect of the Clause was elaborated and clarified by the next sentence of the Amendment, which includes express language prohibiting states from abridging the “privileges” and “immunities” of American “citizens.”)
Finally, properly understood, the Citizenship Clause also offers interpreters a way around one of the most vexing challenges of modern constitutional law, the so-called “state action doctrine.” Under this doctrine, the Fourteenth Amendment’s key protections—equal protection of the laws, privileges or immunities of U.S. citizenship, and due process of law—reach only the actions of state governments, not those of private actors. During Reconstruction, the Supreme Court used this doctrine to unduly limit Congress’s ability to attack acts of private discrimination—and private violence—in the South.
While the Fourteenth Amendment’s second sentence (“No state shall . . .”) can plausibly be read as creating rights only against state governments, the Citizenship Clause’s text sweeps more broadly. By its own terms, the Citizenship Clause is not expressly limited to the relationship between citizens and governments; it can also be understood as having implications for the relationship between citizens themselves in certain situations—for example, in certain prominent public spaces, even if these public spaces are not, strictly speaking, owned by the government. This opening sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment must be read in connection with the Amendment’s closing sentence, which grants Congress sweeping power to “enforce” all the Amendment’s provisions. Together, these two sentences give Congress the power to address private actions that undermine the Amendment’s command of equal citizenship. (While the Citizenship Clause doesn’t explicitly mention “equality,” it does imply it—declaring those “born” on American soil free and equal citizens. This reading is reinforced by the text of the Civil Rights Act of 1866—which spoke of “full and equal” civil rights for all citizens—and a later Supreme Court majority opinion (authored by the towering Justice John Marshall Harlan, the great dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)) reading the Citizenship Clause as guaranteeing that “[a]ll citizens are equal before the law.”
A key word in the Fourteenth Amendment’s opening sentence is the word “born”—a word undergirding the key concept of birth equality. Under this equal-birth principle, the government may regulate its citizens in numerous ways using all sorts of legal distinctions—for example, between wage earners and dividend earners in the tax code, or between opticians and ophthalmologists in medical regulations. But government may not penalize or degrade anyone born on American soil simply because he or she was born the wrong way—because, say, he was born black or she was born female, or he was born out of wedlock, or she was born gay. This birth-equality principle stood in sharp contrast with the infamous Black Codes that many ex-Confederate states had enacted after the Civil War. These laws—the paradigm evils that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to eradicate—degraded African Americans simply because they were born with dark skin, reducing them to the status of second-class citizens. Furthermore, Dred Scott itself situated citizenship in a broader context—defined not just by official state action, but also social meaning and practice. According to Dred Scott, African Americans couldn’t be citizens because whites disrespected blacks— not just through government action, but also because private custom and belief reinforced the idea that African Americans were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race.”
The Citizenship Clause—designed to strike out against both the Black Codes and Dred Scott—gave Congress the power to overturn this order, not just by going after the actions of state governments, but also through passing laws that affirmed that African Americans were free and equal citizens. To be clear, there were limits to the Clause’s reach. For instance, Congress couldn’t force whites to invite African Americans to private dinners or promote political equality. It didn’t cover these social and political rights that lay outside the domain of citizenship pure and simple. However, Congress could protect the full and equal citizenship of African Americans by shielding them from racially motivated private violence; likewise, Congress could go after powerful private systems of pervasive racial exclusion, including in privately owned yet distinctly “public” places like hotels, theaters, trains, and steamships. The Reconstruction Congress passed several laws along these lines; however, the Supreme Court struck down some of them, reading the Fourteenth Amendment as only reaching actions by state governments. These Supreme Court decisions—including the infamous 1883 Civil Rights Cases—were inconsistent with the Fourteenth Amendment’s text and history.
In the end, the Citizenship Clause is one of the richest single sentences in the entire Constitution, rivalling the Preamble in both theoretical depth and breadth. Here are just some of the many extraordinary things done by this extraordinary sentence:
Thus, every generation, the constitutional clock resets; regardless of the lapses of a person’s parents, the sins of the fathers and mothers are not visited upon the children. To repeat: Anyone born on American soil under the American flag is an American.
