Trump’s citizenship Order reaches the Circuit Court of Appeals

The Trump administration’s attempt to reinterpret the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment’s birth citizenship clause by the issue of an executive order - Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship - has thus far been consistently regarded as unconstitutional in federal district courts. The matter has now reached a Circuit Court of Appeals, which has also concluded that the order is incompatible with the Fourteenth Amendment. This paper evaluates the Circuit Court of Appeal’s judgment, and questions if the substantive matter is quite so clear cut as the lower courts and the Circuit Court have assumed.