The Law Professor Who Coached the Marquette Football Team

The Marquette University Law School has long been associated with the world of sports.  Although the National Sports Law Institute has represented the connection in recent years, the school’s relationship to the sports industry goes back much further than the 1989 founding of the Institute. Federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, later the first Commissioner of Baseball, was a lecturer at the law school shortly after it opened; Carl Zollmann, the first major sports law scholar, was on the Marquette Law faculty from 1922 to 194; and a number of outstanding athletes, including Green Bay Packer end and future U. S. Congressman Lavvy Dilweg and Olympic Gold Medalist (and future congressman) Ralph Metcalf studied at the law school in its early years.

However, no one has ever combined the two fields more perfectly than Prof. Ralph I. Heikkenin who, during the 1947-48 academic year, both taught full-time at the law school and coached the Marquette varsity football team, at a time when the team played at the highest level of collegiate competition.

Heikkinen was already well known to sports fans in the upper Midwest when it was announced that he would be joining the Marquette faculty and staff in the spring of 1947.  A native of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Heikkinen had grown up in the community of Ramsey.  He had enrolled in the University of Michigan in the fall of 1935 where he excelled academically. Not only was he an outstanding student, but he was a published poet and the president of the student government.  On top of that, he was an under-sized lineman who made the powerful Michigan football team as a walk on.

Although he began his career as an unheralded newcomer, by the time he was a junior, Heikkinen had developed into one of the best two-way linemen in the country. Although just 6’ tall and weighing only 183 pounds, he was voted as his school’s MVP during both his junior and senior years and was chosen unanimously as a guard on the 1938 All-American team.  During Heikkinen’s senior year, the Wolverines, under new coach Fritz Chrisler, narrowly missed a perfect season thanks to a narrow 7-6 defeat at the hands of Minnesota, in which Michigan botched an extra point kick, and a 0-0 tie with Northwestern, which featured a Michigan missed field goal from the 6 yard line.  Even so, the team finished the season 6-1-1, ranked #16 in the country in the final Associated Press poll.

After completing his college career, Heikkinen was drafted by the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National Football League.  Because of concerns over his size and his interest in playing professional football he was not chosen in the 1939 draft until the 12th round, the #105 overall pick.  Since the end of the 1938 college season, Heikkinen had been on the fence on the issue of professional football, and initially appeared to be leaning toward remaining at the University of Michigan as a graduate or law student who would also coach the linemen on the freshmen football team.

Finally, after accepting an invitation to play in the 1939 College All-Star game, which pitted the top senior collegians against the NFL campion Washington Redskins, “Heik,” as he was known, decided to sign with the Dodgers.

However, the football success he had achieved in Ann Arbor was not to be repeated in Brooklyn.  Even though NFL players in 1939 were much smaller then than they are today, Heikkinen was undersized by the NFL lineman standards of the time. Also, having missed the pre-season because of his indecision and his participation in the College All-Star game (which was won by Washington, 27-20), he had trouble earning playing time after his arrival in Brooklyn.

Although one of the Dodgers’ 1938 guards had retired and the other had been moved to tackle, Heikkinen lost out in the competition for the two guard positions to two other, less-heralded rookies.  After only three games of the 1939 season (in only two of which he actually played) the Dodgers simply released Heikkinen rather than keep him on the bench while paying his salary.

Some published accounts reported that the release had been that Heikkinen’s request so that he could accept a coaching position at the University of Virginia.  Whatever the reasons for his release, within three weeks, Heikkinen was in Charlottesville, Virginia.  There, he accepted a position as assistant line coach for the school’s football team which has coached by former Marquette head coach Frank Murray.  At the same time he enrolled as a first year student at the University of Virginia Law School, even though the fall semester was already underway.

For the next five football seasons, Heikkinen was an assistant coach on the Virginia football team.  In 1940, he was promoted to head line coach, a position that he would hold for the next five seasons. Virginia’s football fortunes increased dramatically after Heikkinen’s arrival, but that probably had more to do with the simultaneous appearance of future Hall of Famer halfback “Bullet Bill” Dudley, arguably the greatest player in the school’s history.  Although the team’s fortunes fell off after Dudley graduated, in 1944, the team had its second best record since 1925.

When not coaching the Cavaliers, Heikkinen divided his time between his legal studies and his involvement with the University of Virginia’s Flight Preparatory School which was established as part of the United States Navy’s V-12 program during the Second World War.  According to the University records, Heikkinen was enrolled as a law student in 1939-40; 1940-41; and 1944-45, although it seems likely that his coaching duties kept him from taking a full load of courses during the fall semester, and he may have taken classes in 1941-42 and 1943-44 to catch up for the work that he had missed.

In 1943 and 1944, he was an instructor in aeriel navigation and physical education for Naval Officers enrolled at UVA under the V-12 program.  (The UVA football teams in 1943 and 1944 were greatly strengthened by the presence of the Navy students who were eligible for intercollegiate sports.)  It is entirely possible that Heikkinen was also enrolled in the Navy Reserves between 1942 and 1944, in preparation for his service to the V-12 program.

In spite of his protracted time as a law student, Heikkinen excelled academically.  When he graduated, he ranked number 1 in his class, and he was selected to Phi Beta Kappa and was one of two law students in 1944 honored with membership in the Order of the Coif.  He was also chosen as a member of the University’s prestigious Raven Society.  Although his work schedule was not really compatible with law review membership, he did become a member of the staff of the Virginia Law Review during his final semester in law school.

After graduating from law school in June of 1944, Heikkinen remained on Murray’s coaching staff.  However, at the conclusion of the 1944 season, he announced his resignation from his coaching position and his decision to accept an associate’s position with the New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore.

While practicing law in New York, Heikkinen kept his hand in the world of football by serving as a scout for Lou Little’s football program at Columbia University during the 1945 and 1946 seasons.

Following the 1945 season, Coach Murray left the University of Virginia and returned to his previous employer, Marquette University, where he was a legendary figure.  As the head football coach of Marquette from 1922 to 1936, the Golden Avalanche/Hilltoppers compiled a won-lost record of 90-32-6, culminating with an appearance in the inaugural Cotton Bowl during Murray’s final game at the helm. Neither of his successors, Paddy Driscoll and Tom Stidham, came close to matching Murray’s success on the playing field, and in 1946, Murray was enthusiastically welcomed back to Marquette.

In 1946, Murray’s first season after his return, the Golden Avalanche went 4-5-0.  At the conclusion of the season, head line coach Al Thomas decided to step down. Thomas had actually been Heikkinen’s replacement at the University of Virginia, and he had come back to Marquette with Murray in 1945.  As a replacement for Thomas, Murray seized on the idea of convincing Heikkinen to return to the coaching ranks. Heikkinen was initially reluctant to return to coaching, but Marquette was willing to sweeten the pot a good deal by offering Heikkinen a full time position as Associate Professor of Law as well as a job as Murray’s chief assistant with the football team.

Moreover, Murray suffered a heart attack in the spring of 1947, a development that would require his role in the management of the football program to be reduced for the rest of the calendar year.  As a result, Heikkinen was offered the chance to run the football team’s spring practice in April and to coach the team from the bench during regular season games in the fall (although Murray would officially remain the head coach).  Heikkinen accepted the position in April of 1947, with the stipulation that he would be allowed to retain his New York affiliations and would be free to return to New York at the end of the 1947-48 academic year, if he chose to do so.  He arrived in time to oversee the 1947 spring practice.

The law school that Heikkinen joined in 1947 was thriving, as more than 400 students, many of whom were ex-GI’s, streamed into its hallways.  (Three years earlier, during the War, the enrollment had fallen to 44 students.)  Over the past two years Dean Francis X. Swietlik had quickly rebuilt the law faculty which had been largely dismantled during the war years.

To accommodate the influx of students anxious to return to civilian life and get on with their legal careers, the law school had decided to continue the “three semesters per year” curriculum that it had embraced during World War II.  With full length Summer, Fall, and Spring semesters each year, this format meant that law students could graduate from the law school in just two years.  Heikkinen’s first class was part of the Summer 1947 semester.

The addition of Heikkinen brought the number of professors on the law faculty to 15, which included eight full-time professors.  Four–Dean Francis Swietlik, Francis Darneider, E. Harold Hallows, and Willis Lang —were full professors, while four others–James Ghiardi (who joined the faculty in January 1946, after returning from military service in Europe), Warner Hendrickson, Kenneth Luce, and Heikkinen—were associate professors. Of the eight full-time professors, four—Darneider, Swietlik, Lang, and Ghiardi–were Marquette Law School alums, while the other four had law degrees from Michigan, Chicago, Harvard, and Virginia.

In addition, the faculty included seven part-time lecturers and instructors, and a regent, Rev. Edward McGrath, S.J., a Jesuit who was also a professor of jurisprudence. The most prominent of the part-time faculty was Milwaukee lawyer Carl Rix, who taught Property and who was wrapping up his term as president of the American Bar Association.

Associate Professors Ghiardi and Heikkinen, who were only a year apart in age, were both from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (although from opposite ends) and quickly became great friends, often socializing with their wives and with colleague and fellow-Michiganer Kenneth Luce and his spouse.

As a teacher Heikkinen appears to have been readily accepted by his colleagues.  He taught a variety of courses, but he specialized in corporations and security transactions, and during the 1947-48 academic year, he and Luce contributed an article on recent developments in Wisconsin corporation law to the Marquette Law Review.  Although he was a football coach, Heikkinen had a surprisingly soft speaking voice.  As an AP wire service story noted in November of 1947, he had “such a low-pitched voice that he uses a microphone during classroom hours.”

He was also quite conscientious when it came to making sure that his coaching duties and opportunities did not interfere with his classes.  Shortly after he joined the faculty in the summer of 1947, he declined a much coveted invitation to coach the North team in the Upper Peninsula High School All-Star football game because it would have required him to cancel some classes.  During several away games during the football season that fall Coach Heik had to follow the team in a later train, and in one case, take an airplane, to avoid having to miss any classes.

Under the joint direction of Murray and Heikkinen, the 1947 Marquette football team got off to a roaring start, defeating South Dakota, St. Louis University and Detroit Mercy in its first three games by a combined score of 101 to 47.  The winning streak came to an end, however, in game four when the Hilltoppers lost in Milwaukee to a fellow Jesuit school, the University of San Francisco, 34-13.  Trailing 28-0 at half, Marquette was never in the ballgame, and the victory elevated the California school to #20 in the Associated Press rankings.

Marquette may have been over-confident coming into the San Francisco game, given that the team was undefeated, and San Francisco was coming off a home loss to Mississippi State.  The next week featured the game that most Marquette fans felt was the most important of the season, the annual match-up with the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

The 1947 game, like all the others in the series, was played at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, and pitted the 3-1-0 Hilltoppers against the 2-1-1 Badgers.  Even though Madison was coming off of a 9-0 upset of #12 Yale the week before, Marquette fans seemed confident that this could be one of the rare years that the Catholic school might win out over the state university.

In spite of optimistic predictions of success, Marquette’s offense simply could not gain any traction, and single touchdowns in the first three quarters put the UW ahead 21-0 before MU finally scored.   The Badgers subsequently added two more TD’s to Marquette’s one, for a final score of 35-14.

The suddenly dispirited Hilltoppers proceeded to lose their next three games to Michigan State, Villanova, and Indiana, all of which had winning records in 1947.  The team finally rebounded in its last game of the season which required it to travel to Phoenix the weekend before Thanksgiving.  There, it defeated the 5-2-0 Arizona Wildcats.  Rolling to a 33-7 lead in the third quarter, Marquette coasted to a 39-21 victory to bring its final record to 4-5-0, the same mark it had achieved in 1946.  However, the season did at least end on a positive note.

Although many Marquette law students had played on the university football team in the years before World War II, the growing expectation that law students in the post-war era would be college graduates all but eliminated the law school football player.  It does not appear that any law students played on the varsity football team during Heikkinen’s year as coach.

Following the end of the football season on November 22, Heikkinen continued to be an active faculty member at the law school, and most members of the law school community assumed that he would remain at Marquette the following year.  He participated in the spring football practice in late April of 1948, and several newspapers reported that he would be part of the Marquette coaching staff in 1948.  However, in August, the university announced that Heikkinen had resigned both his law school and coaching positions so that he could return to law practice in New York.

According to Heikkinen’s friend Jim Ghiardi in a 2014 interview, no one at Marquette ever knew exactly why Heikkinen decided to leave the law school after only one year on the faculty.  He may have been disappointed with Murray’s decision to return to full-time coaching in 1948, which would have diminished his role in the program.  He also may have simply missed practicing law; after accepting the coaching position in the spring of 1947, he briefly considered turning down the faculty position in favor of a position with a Milwaukee law firm.  Also, by the summer of 1948, Heikkinen’s wife was pregnant with the couple’s third child, and Heikkenen may have decided that he could better support his planned large family—the Heikkinen’s ultimately had six children—on the salary of a Wall Street lawyer than he could on his modest assistant football coach-law professor salary at Marquette.

On the Marquette Law School faculty, Heikkinen was replaced by a young law professor named Leo W. Leary, who left the faculty at the University of Texas to return to his native Wisconsin in the fall of 1948. While he never coached the football team, Leary became a Marquette Law School legend in his own right over the next three decades. If you want to strike up an interesting conversation with any Marquette alum over age 70, just ask him or her what they thought of Leo Leary.

Shortly after his return to law practice in New York, Heikkinen became the executive secretary and attorney for the Studebaker-Packard Corporation, an automobile company that had been a Cravath client.  In 1958, he left Studebaker and went to work in the legal department of General Motors, where he remained until his retirement in 1978.  At different times in his life Heikkinen apparently battled alcohol problems, and at General Motors he was responsible for initiating and establishing corporation-wide alcohol treatment and education programs.  After leaving Marquette, he never again worked as a football coach, but at his induction into the Upper Peninsula Sports Hall of Fame in 1973, he was also identified as a former professional football scout, so his involvement with the sport may have continued after 1948.

Heikkinen died in Michigan in 1990, where he lived in the Detroit suburbs.

Although there have not been very many, Ralph Heikkinen was not the only combination football coach and law professor in American history.  Lawyer and Hall of Fame coach Daniel McGugin coached the Vanderbilt football team and taught occasional classes at the Vanderbilt law school during the first three decades of the 20th century.  Similarly, Fred Folsom taught part-time at the University of Colorado Law School while coaching the school’s football team from 1908 to 1915.  However, unlike McGugin and Folsom, Heikkinen was a full-time law professor, and he managed to hold both positions in the post-World War II era, when both coaching and law teaching were more demanding tasks than they had been forty years earlier.

Since it appears that Heikkinen is the only person to have been a full-time major college football coach and full-time law professor at the same time, it is entirely appropriate that he accomplished this distinction at the Marquette University Law School where the connection between law and sports has long been recognized.

Gordon Hylton is a Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law.  Prior to joining the faculty at UVA, Professor Hylton was a longtime member of the Marquette University Law School faculty.

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Is the Senate Free to Ignore President Obama’s Choice of a Replacement for Justice Scalia?

Court[The following is a guest post from Professor J. Gordon Hylton, a former member of the Marquette Law School faculty.]

Justice Scalia’s unexpected death this past weekend has raised the question of how his seat on the Supreme Court will be filled. Some Republicans have already asserted that it would be inappropriate for the president to even place someone’s name in nomination during an election year.  Others have more modestly pointed out that the Republicans in the Senate would be within their constitutional function to use their majority power to veto any potential justice that the president might put forth.  Democrats, in contrast, emphasize the president’s constitutional duty to fill the slot and reject the idea that the impending election out to somehow stay the process of replacing departed United States Supreme Court rules.

What does the history of the Supreme Court tell us about this situation? As it turns out, in the Court’s more than 225 year history, sitting justices have died or retired/resigned from the Court during an election year (or the brief stretch of the president’s term in the following year) on twenty occasions.  In 14 of the 20 cases, a new justice was appointed and confirmed before the president’s current term ended.  (In 7 of the 20 cases, the sitting president was re-elected, but in none of these cases did the nomination go into the following term.)

However, the story is a bit different when the sitting president’s political party does not control the United States Senate. Not surprisingly, in the 12 cases when the president’s party has been in control of the Senate, the open-vacancy has been filled 11 times.  The one exception came in 1968, when sitting Chief Justice Earl Warren announced in June that he planned to retire before the end of the year.

Even though the Democrats held a 62-38 majority in the Senate in 1968, President Johnson’s nominee to replace Warren, Associate Justice Abe Fortas, soon ran into trouble as evidence of perceived financial irregularities and conflicts of interest during Fortas’ years on the Court surfaced. Ultimately, the Fortas nomination was withdrawn, and Warren remained on the Court until the following June, when newly elected President Richard Nixon nominated Warren Burger as the new Chief Justice.

In the other 8 situations, in which the President’s political party did not control the Senate, which is the current situation, the vacant court position went unfilled 5 times. In fact, that was the result the first four times the scenario presented itself. In 1828, 1844, 1852, and 1860, presidents–John Quincy Adams, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, and James Buchanan–whose parties did not control the Senate, failed in their efforts to appoint replacements for recently deceased justices.

(Technically, John Tyler was a Whig, and the Whigs did have a slight majority in the Senate during his presidency, but Tyler’s extreme States Rights beliefs alienated a majority of his fellow Whigs. He was actually more successful in working with the Democrats in Congress. Tyler’s efforts to fulfill a previous Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Smith Thompson in 1843, which was not an election year, did not succeed until he nominated Democrat Samuel Nelson shortly before the end of his term in March 1845.)

In the four post-Civil War situations where this fact pattern appeared, Presidents had better luck, largely as the result of choosing candidates designed to appeal to their political opponents who controlled the Senate. During his presidency Republican Rutherford B. Hayes faced a Senate composed of 42 Democrats, 31 Republicans, and 2 independents.  His first two nominees to the Court were chosen to appeal to the large number of Southern Democrats in the Senate by offering to restore a Southern presence to the Supreme Court that had been missing for most of the Reconstruction era.  He did this by appointing former slave-holder John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky and, in the election year of 1880, William Woods, a pre-war Democrat who had been a Union general, but who after the war had relocated to Alabama where he became a cotton planter.  However, when Hayes attempted to fill a third vacancy on the Court with fellow Ohio Republican Stanley Matthews shortly before the end of his presidency in March 1881, the Democratic Senate refused to cooperate.

Similarly, when Chief Justice Morrison Waite died in 1888, Grover Cleveland wanted to replace him with a Democrat, even though the Republicans held a narrow 39-37 margin in the Senate. Earlier in his tenure, his first nominee, Secretary of the Interior L. Q. C. Lamar, a former Confederate official, had been confirmed by a four vote margin, but only because a small number of western Republicans, apparently in appreciation of his policies when he ran the Interior Department, defected to his side.  For Chief Justice in 1888, Cleveland nominated Illinois lawyer and Maine-native Melville Westin Fuller, apparently on the presumption that the four Republican senators from Illinois and Maine would throw their support behind their native son (which they did, and he was confirmed).

The only other time an election year nomination went through the Senate without a clear majority for the president’s party was in 1956, when Democratic Justice Sherman Minton announced on September 7, just two months before the upcoming presidential election, that he would be retiring on October 15. At this point, the Senate consisted of 47 Democrats and 47 Republicans, plus two Independents, one of whom (Wayne Morse) had recently been identified with the Republicans and one (Strom Thurmond) with the Democrats.

Even though Vice-President Richard Nixon, as president of the Senate, could cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate divided along party lines, Eisenhower avoided a potentially costly showdown with Senate Democrats by capitalizing on a Senate recess to appoint the Irish Catholic Democrat William Brennan of the New Jersey Supreme Court to the United States Supreme Court on a temporary basis through the use of the rarely invoked interim appointment to the Supreme Court. As a result, Brennan was able to join the Court the day that Minton retired, which was three weeks before the election.  (Observers then and now speculate that the decision was motivated in part by Eisenhower’s desire to appeal to Roman Catholic voters who traditionally voted Democratic.)  When Brennan actually came up for confirmation in March 1957, he was confirmed by a nearly unanimous voice vote.

Consequently, the past shows that in a situation like the current one, past Senates have not hesitated to deny confirmation to the choice of an outgoing (or potentially outgoing) president. On the other hand, there have been times through clever nomination strategies that presidents have persuaded their more powerful political opponents to go ahead and support the chosen nominee, rather than gamble on a more hospitable result in the future.

It is perhaps worth noting that none of these previous situations are particularly recent. Only two of the 20 have occurred since the Election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and of these the most recent is from 1968.  Only six of the examples are from the Twentieth Century, and eight predate the conclusion of the Civil War.  Nevertheless, there is no reason to think that any modern constitutional change would have produced different results or would prevent the President or the current Republican majority in the Senate to follow a similar course.

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Ted Cruz as a Natural Born Citizen

Ted Cruz[The following is a guest post from Professor J. Gordon Hylton, a former member of the Marquette Law School faculty.]

The debate continues over the eligibility of Sen. Ted Cruz for the United States presidency under the Constitution’s “natural born citizen” clause in Article II, Section 1. (Art II, §1 provides, in part, “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President, neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”)

The question is whether the Canadian-born Cruz, whose mother, but not father, was a United States citizen, qualifies as a “natural born citizen.” Unfortunately, the neither the Constitution itself nor the surviving records of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 define the phrase “natural born citizen,” and the Supreme Court has never offered an authoritative interpretation of the clause.

Frequently cited as support for the assertion that individuals born abroad with at least one-American born parent are qualified to hold the office of President is the 1790 Naturalization Act, the country’s first statute setting out the path to citizenship for non-citizens. (Ted Cruz himself has repeatedly made this claim.)

The statute in question was enacted on March 26, 1790, by the first Congress, just a little more than two and a half years after the September 17, 1787 signing of the Constitution by members of the Constitutional Convention. Certainly, if any legislative body was likely to understand the intended meaning of the “natural born citizen” reference in Article II, it would have been the first United States Congress, which included in its ranks 20 of the 55 members of the Constitutional Convention (11 in the Senate and 9 in the House of Representatives).

The Naturalization Act did, in fact, address the citizenship status of individuals born abroad of American parents, and it did indicate that they were to be treated as though they were “natural born citizens.” However, the purpose of the Naturalization Act was not to define who was or was not eligible to be president—that was the responsibility of the Constitution itself, not the Congress—but rather it was to determine the ways in which “non-natural born citizens” were to become eligible to be citizens of the United States.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution delegates this power to the Congress, to wit: “The Congress shall have Power … to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.”  Nothing in Article I of the Constitution (which deals with the powers of Congress) authorizes it to clarify the eligibility requirements for the presidency.

The Naturalization Act divided the pool of potential citizens into two categories. The first included aliens who could be admitted to citizenship if they were white, of good character, had resided within the United States for two years (and their current state of residency for one year), and were willing to take an oath of allegiance to the United States.  Also admitted as citizens were any children of those admitted to citizenship under this provision, so long as they were under age 21 and residing in the United States.

The second category addressed by the statute were those “children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond the sea or out of the limits of the United States.” In regard to such individuals, the statute provided that they “shall be treated as natural born citizens,” so long as their fathers had at some point been residents of the United States.

Two things are to be noted. First, the statute does not say that children born abroad are “natural born citizens;” rather, it directs that they be treated as though they were.  The effect of this is to excuse them from the process described for true aliens seeking citizenship.  For purposes of determining citizenship, they are like “natural born citizens,” but they are themselves not “natural born.”  Second, this provision has absolutely nothing to do with eligibility for the office of President.

Had children born abroad to United States citizen parents been viewed as “natural born citizens,” then there would have been no reason to address their status in the Naturalization Act, which deals exclusively with those who are not automatically citizens. In the 1790 Act, Congress made such individuals citizens, but it was not intending to qualify them for the presidency by doing so (nor did it have the power to do so).

While modern constitutional norms were not necessarily well established by 1790, there is no way to read the language of the 1790 Naturalization Act without concluding that the members of the generation that drafted the United States Constitution believed that only those born within the “limits of the United States” could be “natural born citizens.”

As 21st century Americans we may not be bound by this original understanding, but it is simply incorrect to claim that the 1790 Naturalization Act somehow identified the foreign-born children of American citizens as “natural born citizens.”

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