Prof. Ilan Wurman's Scholarship Cited in Supreme Court Birthright Citizenship Dissent

Professor Ilan Wurman's recent scholarship played a prominent role in one of the U.S. Supreme Court's most consequential decisions of the term.

In the Court's June 30 decision in Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump's effort to restrict birthright citizenship, reaffirming that children born in the United States are citizens regardless of their parents' immigration status. The 6-3 ruling preserved the longstanding interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause.

In dissent, Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch cited Wurman's article, "Jurisdiction and Citizenship," published this year in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, three times in support of their analysis of the Citizenship Clause and its original meaning.

Wurman, the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law, is a constitutional scholar and has written extensively on the historical understanding of birthright citizenship. His scholarship also informed the litigation leading up to the case, with both the federal government's merits briefs and oral arguments drawing on his research.