Supreme Court Cites Professor Kristin Collins in Citizenship Case, Morales-Santana
The high court draws extensively on Collins’s scholarship to hold gender discriminatory citizenship law unconstitutional.
The United States Supreme Court cited scholarship by BU Law Professor Kristin Collins in its ruling in Sessions v. Morales-Santana. In the court’s majority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg relies on Collins’s Yale Law Journal article, “Illegitimate Borders: Jus Sanguinis Citizenship and the Legal Construction of Family, Race, and Nation,” as well as an amicus brief submitted by Collins and other professors of law, history, and political science.
At issue in the case was the constitutionality of a statute governing whether the foreign-born child of a US parent is a citizen. If the parents are not married, and only the father is a US citizen, the statute imposes numerous restrictions on citizenship transmission that do not apply when only the mother is a US citizen.
The petitioner, Luis Morales-Santana, was required by statute to prove that his US-citizen father had been present in the United States for ten years prior to his birth, at least five of which had to occur following his father’s fourteenth birthday. His father was just 20 days shy of satisfying that presence requirement. Had Morales-Santana’s mother been a US citizen, she would have only needed to reside in the United States for a year at any point prior to his birth.
The government has argued that Congress distinguished between fathers’ and mothers’ ability to transmit citizenship—and treated mothers and their children more favorably—because the mother is the only legal parent of the child at birth, and out of concern that the nonmarital, foreign-born children of American mothers were at a special risk of being born stateless. The government contended that this concern justified the gender-based distinction drawn in the citizenship law, though such distinctions are rarely permissible.
Professor Collins is a leading scholar of citizenship law, family law, and legal history. In the fall of 2012, she held a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where her research focused on the role of family law in the administration and development of American citizenship and immigration law.
Collins reconstructed the origins of the derivative citizenship laws through extensive archival research, and found virtually no concern about statelessness in the relevant documents. Instead, after tracing the origins of the differential treatment of US-citizen mothers and fathers and their nonmarital children to the early twentieth century, she found that the distinction drawn by the statute reflected then-prevalent “understandings of fathers’ and mothers’ respective parental roles.” The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided Morales-Santana’s case in 2014. That fall, shortly after Collins’s article was published, the court ordered the parties to re-brief the core constitutional issue, citing the article, and ultimately concluded that the statue violated constitutional gender-equality principles.
In an opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by all but Justices Thomas and Alito, who concurred in part, the Supreme Court agreed and held that the gender discriminatory citizenship statue violates the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee.
Justice Ginsburg quoted “Illegitimate Borders” and cited the amicus brief submitted by Collins and several other specialists in the history of citizenship law and family law multiple times as she examined the history of the government’s reliance on gender-based assumptions in the transmission of citizenship. Asserting that laws relying on such assumptions both reinforce existing stereotypes about gender roles in parenthood and harm men who are involved in their children’s lives, Ginsburg argued that “in light of the equal protection jurisprudence this court has developed since 1971 […] discrete duration-of-residence requirements for unwed mothers and fathers who have accepted parental responsibility is stunningly anachronistic.”
Related News
- US Court of Appeals Cites Professor Kristin Collins’s Scholarship in Citizenship Transmission Case
- Supreme Court Cites Professor Frederick Tung in Bankruptcy Case
- Khiara M. Bridges Changes the Conversation about Motherhood, Poverty, and the Right to Privacy