My point was that a resort to natural law is generally a weak argument. There is no authority to resort to, no proof to present, no objective standard of weighing one person’s conception of natural law against another’s. It’s like a postulate in mathematics — it should be used as a basis only for the most fundamental principles that cannot rest on any other foundation. Much is derived from them, but they cannot be derived; but without them, everything falls apart.
“That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty and ...” property; “That to preserve these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That kind of thing.
These principles are fundamental. They are eternal. They are also not very specific as to ways and means. The law of citizenship, on the other hand, is very much contingent, and very, very specific. For starters, for most of human history, even “citizen” was a novel term; people were natural born or foreign subjects. There is nothing fundamental to the notion of ordered liberty about who is or is not considered a citizen.
For a question like the natural born citizen clause of Article II, an appeal to natural law is fruitless. It can much too easily go either way. The first resort should be to the black letter law; then to the intent of the Framers to the extent it can be determined. The problem with that latter step is that the Framers often did not share a consensus view. The vague language in the Constitution is intentionally so; the Framers could not agree amongst themselves, and left the details to the small-r republican and, to varying degrees, small-d democratic institutions they were building.
For a question like the natural born citizen clause of Article II, an appeal to natural law is fruitless. It can much too easily go either way. The first resort should be to the black letter law; then to the intent of the Framers to the extent it can be determined. The problem with that latter step is that the Framers often did not share a consensus view. The vague language in the Constitution is intentionally so; the Framers could not agree amongst themselves, and left the details to the small-r republican and, to varying degrees, small-d democratic institutions they were building. And this is a valid point. One of the theories I keep in the back of my mind is the notion that there might not have been a consensus on the meaning of the term "natural born citizen." It is possible that some thought it was a term referring to the analogous "natural born subject" and therefore English Common law definition would apply, and that others applied the then dominant philosophy of Vattel, along with his definition.
I have been researching this issue quite a lot, and I have been looking for insight regarding it. Commentary from Founders and Delegates is good evidence, and commentary from subsequent law authorities not so much.
I did discover that an Abolition movement was sweeping the nation right after the Constitutional Convention, (Go figure. All that talk of Freedom made people feel bad about being hypocrites.) and that proponents of it disdained Vattel because his definition lent no aid to their cause. They specifically favored the English Common law definition because it offered the best argument for granting freedom to slaves; Being born here made one a "citizen." Vattel's Parent requirement was no help at all.
I strongly suspect that William Rawle, (THE LEADER of the abolition movement in Pennsylvania) intentionally ignored Vattel, and specifically promoted the English Common law theory just because it supported his cause, and not because it was true.
