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“It was not necessary for the court to conclusively define NBC because it was not a concept in dispute before the court.”

That is a very interesting statement. And it may explain why the Minor decision is not usually cited as having defined NBC.

The best example of this comes from the Wong Kim Ark case.

In his dissenting opinion Chief Justice Fuller makes several claims about what the majority opinion means. He says that according to the majority, the Constituional terms “natural born Citizen” and “citizen of the United States” were defined based on English Common Law. That would have been an excellant time to point out that Minor is binding precedent for the definition of NBC. But he doesn’t mention Minor.

Later in the dissent, he says that it is inconceivable to him that children of visiting aliens born in the United States are eligible to the Presidency while children born overseas to American citizen parents are not eligible. And again he doesn’t cite Minor as precedent.

And this is the Justice who wrote the Lockwood decision only a few years earlier. If Chief Justice Fuller doesn’t interpete Minor as defining NBC, it is hard to image any court today saying that it is. Which may explain why the Indiana Court of Appeals said this about the Minor decision,

“Thus, the Court [in Minor decision] left open the issue of whether a person who is born within the United States of alien parents is considered a natural born citizen.”

This is a poor argument. You're relying on a speculative statement in a dissent which isn't based on anything that is actually stated within the majority opinion. Besides the assumption is wrong. The appeal to the Supreme Court brought up the point that Fuller was responding to, because it was based on a citation made by the lower court. Fuller addresses the speculation made in the appeal, but the majority punts this point entirely. Second, it fails because the majority opinion still quoted, affirmed and respected the Minor definition of NBC.

The Indiana court was all over the place and it fails because it admits that Wong Kim Ark was not declared to be a natural-born citizen. By footnote, the Indiana court tries to brush off this inconvenient fact by claiming its immaterial because the eligibility requirement is only relevant to those persons who become president, ignoring that it's actually a safeguard for the people.

Thank you for your analysis of several decisions that have cited Minor. The analysis sheds light on important aspects that are at a level I have not addressed. It will be interesting to see whether, or how others on this thread respond.

I argued a few years ago thatMinor clearly resolved the NBC issue, but eventually realized that it did not say what I and many others believed it said.

The final quote in your post reveals the risk inherent in any review of the issue by the current court. Again, that risk is undoubtedly viewed as a value by liberals.

OE, my apologies if I and others have hijacked your first post on Free Republic.