On May 15, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of President Trump’s executive order which seeks to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. Legal scholars 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 join Jeffrey Rosen to debate the scope of the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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Today’s episode was produced by Samson Mostashari and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Greg Scheckler and Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Cooper Smith and Gyuha Lee.
Participants
Ilan Wurman is the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law at University of Minnesota, where he teaches administrative law and constitutional law. He previously taught at Arizona State University. He writes primarily on the 14th Amendment, administrative law, separation of powers, and constitutionalism. His academic writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Minnesota Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the Texas Law Review among other journals.
Amanda Frost is the David Lurton Massee Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, where she writes and teaches in the fields of immigration and citizenship law, federal courts and jurisdiction, and judicial ethics. Her scholarship has been cited by over a dozen federal and state courts, and she has been invited to testify on the topics of her articles before both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. In 2019 she was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to complete her book, You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers (2021). Before entering academia, Frost clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and spent five years as a staff attorney at Public Citizen.
Kurt Lash is the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Richmond. The 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 (2014), The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment (2009), and The American First Amendment in the Twenty-first Century: Cases and Materials (with William W. Van Alstyne) (5th ed.). In 2021, University of Chicago Press published Lash’s two-volume collection of original documents relating to the framing and ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. Titled “The Reconstruction Amendments: Essential Documents,” the collection is the first of its kind.
Gabriel "Jack" Chin is a teacher and scholar of immigration law, criminal procedure, and race and 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 (2013), in which the Court called his Cornell Law Review article “the principal scholarly article on the subject,” and in Padilla v. Kentucky (2010), which agreed with his contention that the Sixth Amendment required defense counsel to advise clients about potential deportation consequences of guilty pleas. Justice Sotomayor cited his Penn Law Review article in her dissent in Utah v. Strieff (2016).
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
- 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)
- Ilan Wurman, “Jurisdiction and Citizenship,” Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper No.25-27 (April 14, 2025)
- Amanda Frost, “The Coming Assault on Birthright Citizenship,” The Atlantic (Jan. 7, 2025)
- Kurt Lash, “Prima Facie Citizenship: Birth, Allegiance and the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause,” SSRN (Feb. 22, 2025)
- Amanda Frost, Testimony Before the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, U.S. House of Representatives (Feb. 25, 2025)
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