You cannot quote dicta as a decision, they are NOT the same. I quote from the HOLDING. That is the legally binding part of the case, and is in fact the law. The HOLDING in Minor states that it takes being born in the United States to parentS who are its CitizneS.
That is the LAW. The Dicta is an authoritative opinion and nothing else. It does not bind, it is not law.
Aren't they both from the same paragraph? Where else does the decision discuss the citizen parents thing?
With all due respect, you are confused as to what was the holding of the Opinion of the Court in Happersett and what was obiter dicta. The holding was that the right to vote is not one of the privileges and immunities of citizenship protected by the Constitution, and that a state does not cease to have a republican form of government (a form of government that the United States guarantees pursuant to the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution) merely by limiting the franchise to male citizens. The discussion on the possible limits of citizenship at birth under common law is dicta, since the plaintiff was a woman born within U.S. territory to two U.S. citizens and thus it was unnecesary to determine whether the U.S.-born children of legal immigrants would also be U.S. citizens at birth under common law (which the Court stated that was an issue on which authorities were divided). The Court also points out that Congress has legislated to expand the number of cases in which babies are U.S. citizens at birth, thereby acknowledging that the common law is our source of law only when the legislature has not enacted specific statutes.
The Opinion of the Court in Happersett actually argues *against* the theory that only the common law can tell us who is a natural-born citizen of the U.S., and it doesn’t even help much to the argument that, were the common law the only source of law in the U.S. (i.e., even had Congress never passed any laws), only the U.S.-born children of two U.S. citizens would be natural-born citizens (since the Happersett opinion doesn’t decide whether authorities with the more restrictive view of what tbe common law said were correct).