Birthright Citizenship, In Context
A collection of articles, scholarship, webinars, and other materials about the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Image: Library of Congress/iStock/14th Amendment Center
The first sentence in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment is the Citizenship Clause, which grants U.S. citizenship to all children born in the United States — including children of undocumented immigrants.
In this resource page, you’ll find a collection of essays, webinars, discussions, scholarship, and other materials produced or endorsed by the 14th Amendment Center — in the hopes that they’ll be helpful in illuminating the Supreme Court’s landmark decision upholding birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara.
Judicial Opinion
“Ketanji Brown Jackson Uplifts the ‘Universalist’ Purpose of the 14th Amendment” highlights how the justice’s powerful concurrence in Trump v. Barbara offers a necessary corrective to “ahistorical” accounts of how our second founders conceived of birthright citizenship.
Analysis
“A Supreme Court Without the Range,” by Sherrilyn Ifill, explains how the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. CASA, which preceded the ruling in the birthright citizenship case, is reminiscent of the Supreme Court that hamstrung Reconstruction.
Webinars
The first and second sessions of a webinar series on birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment brought together scholars and historians Kate Masur, Martha Jones, Robert Chang, and Jessica Levin to explore how the people who wrote and experienced the Citizenship Clause understood it.
Second Symposium Panel
“After the Argument: Birthright Citizenship, the 14th Amendment & the Supreme Court,” featuring Madiba Dennie, Deputy Editor and Senior Contributor, Balls and Strikes; Mark Joseph Stern, Senior Writer, Slate; Nana Gyamfi, Executive Director, Black Alliance for Just Immigration.
Amicus Brief of Sherrilyn Ifill and Guy-Uriel Charles
The amicus brief filed by the founding director of the Howard University School of Law’s 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy and the faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard, in support of respondents in Trump v. Barbara (2026).
Other Notable Amicus Briefs filed in Trump v. Barbara
- Amicus brief of Historians Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur
- Amicus brief of The Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Center for Civil Rights and Critical Justice, and 71 additional nonprofit and grassroots organizations.
- Amicus brief of Professors Gabriel Chin, Paul Finkleman, and Erica Lee
- Amicus brief of Constitutional and Immigration Law Scholars Ahilan Arulanantham, Sam Erman, Amanda Frost, Lucas Guttentag, Hiroshi Motomura, Michael D. Ramsey, Ilya Somin, and Leti Volpp.
- Amicus brief of the Cato Institute
- Amicus brief of Black Immigrants’ Rights Organizations: The Black Alliance for Just Immigration, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, and the UndocuBlack Network.
Scholarship
“Birthright Citizenship and the Dunning School of Unoriginal Meanings,” by Professors Evan Bernick, Paul Gowder, and Anthony Michael Kreis, exposes the scholarship that has emerged to justify excluding broad swaths of people born here from the promise of U.S. citizenship.
Books
Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, by Martha S. Jones
The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, by Eric Foner.