City Research Online

Abstract

The second Trump administration has sought through the use of executive orders to fashion significant changes to federal government policies in many areas. While many of those Orders raise no significant constitutional issues, some appear to overstep long-recognised constitutional boundaries. Perhaps the most contentious of the Orders is the Trump administration’s attempt to alter understandings of the so-called ‘birthright citizenship’ clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Order has widely been regarded as what one federal judge termed ‘blatantly unconstitutional’. This paper suggests that characterisation is overly simplistic, and that a close reading of the (very little) Supreme Court authority on the point would suggest that the current Supreme Court could credibly construe the citizenship clause in a fashion which gives the Trump administration much of the policy outcome which it is seeking, albeit not through the interpretive methodology that one would expect the Court’s conservative majority would instinctively wish to use.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Publisher Keywords:	United States, constitution, birthright citizenship, Fourteenth Amendment, originalism
Subjects:	J Political Science J Political Science > JK Political institutions (United States) K Law > K Law (General)
Departments:	The City Law School The City Law School > Academic Programmes
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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