President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship has reignited debates over the 14th Amendment and the meaning of citizenship in America. Legal experts Gabriel Chin of the University of California, Davis School of Law; Amanda Frost of the University of Virginia School of Law; Kurt Lash of the University of Richmond School of Law; and Ilan Wurman of the University of Minnesota Law School analyze the legal challenges surrounding birthright citizenship, explore the constitutional and historical arguments on all sides of this debate, and discuss its broader implications for immigration. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
Video
Participants
Gabriel "Jack" Chin is the Edward L. Barrett Jr. Chair of Law, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, and Director of Clinical Legal Education at the University of California, Davis School of Law. His scholarship has appeared in the Penn, UCLA, Cornell, and Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties law reviews and the Yale, Duke and Georgetown law journals among others. The U.S. Supreme Court cited his work on collateral consequences of criminal conviction in Chaidez v. United States and in Padilla v. Kentucky. Justice Sotomayor cited his Penn Law Review article in her dissent in Utah v. Strieff.
Amanda Frost holds the David Lurton Massee, Jr. Professorship of Law and the John A. Ewald Jr. Research Professorship at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she also directs the Immigration, Migration, and Human Rights Program. She is the author of You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers and writes the “Academic Round-up” column for SCOTUSblog. Before entering academia, Frost spent five years as a staff attorney, worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and served as acting director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at American University.
Kurt Lash is the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law. Founder and director of the Richmond Program on the American Constitution, Lash has published a number of works on the subjects of constitutional history, theory and law, including The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges or Immunities of American Citizenship, The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment, and The American First Amendment in the Twenty-first Century: Cases and Materials (with William W. Van Alstyne). He is also the author of a two-volume collection titled “The Reconstruction Amendments: Essential Documents” and is currently working on A Troubled Birth of Freedom: The Struggle to Amend the Constitution in the Aftermath of the Civil War.
Ilan Wurman is the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law at University of Minnesota. He is the author of A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism and The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment. His next book, The Constitution of 1789: An Introduction, is also forthcoming.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Trump v. CASA, Inc., United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (2025)
- Trump v. Washington, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (2025)
- Trump v. New Jersey, United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (2025)
- Amanda Frost, You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers (2021)
- Amanda Frost, “The Coming Assault on Birthright Citizenship,” The Atlantic (Jan. 7, 2025)
- Ilan Wurman and Randy Barnett, “Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship,” The New York Times (Feb. 15, 2025)
- Ilan Wurman, “Jurisdiction and Citizenship,” Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper No. 25-27 (April 14, 2025)
- Gabriel “Jack” Chin and Paul Finkelman, “Birthright Citizenship, Slave Trade Legislation, and the Origins of Federal Immigration Regulation,” UC Davis Law Review, Vol. 54 (April 8, 2021)
- Gabriel J. Chin, “America Has Freaked Out Over Birthright Citizenship For Centuries,” Talking Points Memo (Aug. 2015)
- Kurt Lash, “Prima Facie Citizenship: Birth, Allegiance and the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause,” SSRN (Feb. 22, 2025)
- Kurt Lash, The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges and Immunities of American Citizenship (2014)
Stay Connected and Learn More
- Questions or comments about the show? Email us at [email protected]
- Continue the conversation by following us on social media @ConstitutionCtr.
- Sign up to receive Constitution Weekly, our email roundup of constitutional news and debate.
- Subscribe, rate, and review wherever you listen.
- Join us for an upcoming live program or watch recordings on YouTube.
- Support our important work.
