Apparently you didn’t even get the point that was being made, which was that Vattel was cited as the best expert on citizenship. What did your friend say about that?
I am not going to bother her with that question because it is sooo simple to answer. ONE, the VENUS case was about war stuff which is fighting between two or more nations, so it would be INTERNATIONAL LAW stuff which who knows, maybe Vattel maybe wrote some good stuff about people who were caught in the crossfire.
TWO, even if Vattel was a expert, the American judges did not quote him very much in our American citizenship cases, because I didn’t even see him in the Minor case, and he was not talked about very much in Wong Kim Ark that I saw. Sooo, who cares???
THREE, only very sneaky Vattle Birthers who are trying to deceive people would go back to some 1814 case thingy and try to wiggle around 1898 cases (84 years later!!!) or 2009 cases.
Wong Kim Ark assumes that “natural born citizen” as intended by the Founders is the same thing as “citizen at birth”, based almost entirely on Dred Scott and other cases from around that time, which were primarily focused on whether Blacks, gypsies, and “Mongolians” could be US citizens.
How would a person know what the Founding Fathers intended back in 1787 by looking at a racist Dred Scott decision of 1857? A decision that denied ANY kind of citizenship to Blacks even if they were the 14th generation born on US soil, I might add. How the Wong Kim Ark court got from that Dred Scott decision to saying that the Founding Fathers intended anybody born here to be eligible to be POTUS is astounding. I’ve seen pretzels that were less convoluted.