By Martha F. Davis, Associate Dean for Clinical and Experiential Education and Faculty Director of the Program on Human Rights and Global Economy, Northeastern University School of Law. Davis filed an amicus brief in Flores-Villar v. United States on behalf of Equality NOW, Human Rights Watch and other groups.
There must be a good story behind the single sentence that the Supreme Court issued as its “opinion” in Flores-Villar v. U.S yesterday. A full seven months after the oral argument in the case, after reviewing hundreds of pages of briefs on the merits, on the surrounding historical issues, on relevant international and human rights law, on remedial questions, the Court opined that “The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Court.”
Unfortunately, it will likely be decades before we learn the back story, when the Library of Congress opens the archives of one of the currently sitting Justices. Then, we’ll learn if it was Justice Kennedy or someone else who joined the dependable group of Justices Breyer, Ginsburg and Sotomayor to strike down the deeply discriminatory citizenship law, creating the even split on the Court. Then, years from now, we’ll find out whether the 4-4- split was just an expedient compromise mandated by the impending end of the term, when the Justices simply couldn’t reconcile competing concerns about deference to Congress, the Court’s remedial power, and even issues of standing. We’ll find out how many opinions were drafted and what the decision might have been if, for example, Justice Kagan hadn’t recused herself from the deliberations.
Because the Court could muster only a single sentence, historians – not journalists and law professors -- will be the ones who tell the story of Flores-Villar v. U.S.
One historian, Professor Linda Kerber of the University of Iowa, is ready.
When a child is born to an unmarried U.S. citizen living abroad, the parent's ability to transmit U.S. citizenship to the child turns on this question: Was the child born to a U.S. citizen father, or mother?