COMMON-LAW DEFINITION TAKEN FOR GRANTED
The English Common Law, then, is the original source of our definition. That definition, taken over with the formation of the American Republic out of the English colonies, was so familiar, so much a part of the nature of things political, that nobody thought it necessary to formulate it—or a new one.
By the Common Law of England, every person born within the dominions of the Crown, no matter whether of English or of foreign parents—and in the latter case whether the parents were settled or merely temporarily sojourning in the country, was an English subject; save only children of foreign ambassadors ... or a child born in hostile occupation of any part of the territories of England.[19]
When the Constitution of the United States was made, a “citizenship of the United States” was recognized but nowhere defined, and it was nearly a century before it found specific statutory expression in the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. Meanwhile, not only the courts, but the Executive, invariably recognized the validity of the Common Law Rule, and the Wong Kim Ark decision of 1897 merely restated it once for all.[20]