I'm willing to consider the possibility that Wong Kim Ark needs revision, but also recognize I don't understand the law enough to argue the details. I have downloaded the full decision for future reading. Hopefully I'll learn something from it.
That's a great place to start.
I also recommend the series of quotes and the discussion in post 295. I have gone to pains to include at least some discussion of the 3 legitimate sources of contrary opinion cited by birthers that I am aware of.
They also sometimes cite Chief Justice Marshall in The Venus (1814), but that case doesn't even use the term "natural born citizen" and had to do with how we treated US citizens living in a foreign country we were at war with, not citizenship itself.
They also sometimes cite Inglis v. Sailors' Snug Harbor (1830) and Shanks v. Dupont (1830), but those cases don't bear directly on the issue, either.
For that reason, I didn't include those as legitimate sources of contrary opinion.
'Birther' sources have claimed Won Kim Ark only dealt with citizenship, not with 'NBC.' My browser's search only found one instance of "natural born" and none of "natural born citizen" in the decision yet you report an "excruciatingly detailed 30 or 40 page discussion of the entire legal history of NATURAL BORN CITIZENSHIP" is there. I look forward to reading it as the former doesn't rule out the latter.
Be sure you are searching Justice Gray's Opinion in the case.
I just searched the text and found "natural born" or "natural-born" a total of 34 times, if I counted correctly. There are also other phrases like "natural subject." And the concepts are pervasive throughout dozens of pages.
Usually in that text you see "natural born subject," because "natural born subject" was the earlier historical term. They favorably quote Justice Gaston as saying that the terms "subject" and "citizen" are "precisely analogous," and then use the terms interchangeably:
The term "citizen," as understood in our law, is precisely analogous to the term "subject" in the common law, and the change of phrase has entirely resulted from the change of government. The sovereignty has been transferred from one man to the collective body of the people, and he who before as a "subject of the king" is now "a citizen of the State."
You said:
One of the frustrations of 'birthers,' and also of those undecided as to whether they should be birthers, is the refusal of courts to rule on the alleged issue of what is NBC.
Several courts actually have ruled that Obama, born in the US to a 17-year-old mother and a non-citizen father, is in fact a "natural born citizen" and is eligible. They have simply quoted Wong Kim Ark, and the US Supreme Court has refused to hear any appeals on those cases. Their refusal is again an affirmation that the lower courts are correct in their understanding of Wong.
I downloaded the opinion, the dissent and the “syllabus” from Wong Kim Ark. I only found one case of “natural born” with my browser search but when I tried “natural-born” I found 34 more. I appreciate all the data - from both sides. I’ll get to reading it some time and then recheck further discussion on this thread. Alas I have return to work on complying with Obama, specifically his latest HIPAA regulations. A task the Founders and Framers would all have considered grounds for revolution.
I would suggest that the best place for you to look for the correct meaning of "natural citizen" is not a court case over a century after the fact, but in the words and deeds of the Founders.
Those who know what the term mean were those who passed it in Congress, and those who ratified it in the state legislatures.(Here are the names of the men to whom I refer.)
Subsequent lawyers who were not involved in the process are not primary sources. William Rawle is particularly bad because he was NOT a DELEGATE, because he was the Son of a British loyalist,(British Mayor of Philadelphia.) trained in England in explicitly British Law, and motivated by his adoption of the abolitionist agenda (He was President of the Abolition Society of Pennsylvania) to push the British law interpretation of citizenship so as to make a legal case for the emancipation of slaves. (He attempted this before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and failed. This same strategy was successful in Massachusetts though.)
But he wrote the most famous textbook on the Constitution, and thereby mislead thousands of others who followed.