In 1608, Lord Coke wrote that a “dual and reciprocal tie” connected the sovereign and his subjects. More than four centuries later, that same principle - carried from England to the colonies and from the colonies into the American Constitution - has withstood the challenge of an executive order signed at the White House.
On 30 June 2026, in Trump v. Barbara (No. 25-365), the Supreme Court of the United States chose fidelity to a founding principle over the demands of the political moment. By six votes to three, it struck down the order at issue. Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the opinion of the Court, joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett and Jackson.
At the heart of the case was Executive Order No. 14160, signed by Donald Trump on 20 January 2025 - the first day of his second term - in an attempt to deny automatic citizenship to children born on American soil to parents without settled lawful residence. It was an attempt to alter by presidential fiat what the Constitution has, for a century and a half, reserved to the sovereign people through the amendment process.
“Citizens at birth”: the Court’s answer
The Court’s summary leaves no room for ambiguity: “Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”
That sentence brings to an end - at least in constitutional terms - a legal battle which began on the day of the President’s inauguration and passed through district courts, courts of appeal and, finally, the nine Justices in Washington.
From English common law to Philadelphia
What makes the judgment memorable is not merely its outcome - which had in any event been expected, after every lower-court judge had already held the executive order to be plainly unconstitutional - but the depth of Roberts’s historical enquiry. The Court’s opinion reaches back to English common law, Blackstone and the celebrated Calvin’s Caseof 1608 in order to reconstruct the principle of jus soli.
The Court explains the logic behind the doctrine in a single sentence: “With protection came allegiance, and with allegiance came the status of a natural-born subject.” It was a principle the colonists carried across the Atlantic and which changed after independence: the subjects of the British sovereign became citizens of the American states.
It is here that the judgment strikes its most resonant note, recalling Thomas Paine’s description of the young republican experiment - a nation which the Court itself, citing Common Sense (1776), calls “an asylum for mankind”. In a nation of immigrants, the breadth of jus soli assumed particular importance, ensuring that the children of foreigners, “regardless of their intentions”, would be American citizens by birth alone.
These passages deserve to be read alongside the lines Emma Lazarus had inscribed, in 1883, at the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” - words every immigrant passing through Ellis Island knew by heart. It is no coincidence that the Court expressly invokes the image of America as a nation of immigrants. It belongs to the same intellectual climate that Alexis de Tocqueville, almost two centuries ago, observed with astonishment in Democracy in America: a people capable of renewing itself through welcome rather than blood.
The repudiation of Dred Scott and the redemption of the Fourteenth Amendment
The most dramatic part of the historical account concerns the notorious judgment in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Court of that era held that blood, rather than soil, determined citizenship, excluding the descendants of enslaved people from every right. It was precisely to bury that precedent that the Reconstruction Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment.
As today’s judgment recalls, Senator Howard, the principal drafter of the Citizenship Clause, described it as “simply declaratory . . . of the law of the land already” - not an innovation, but the solemn confirmation of a principle already deeply rooted.
“The right to have rights”: the close of the opinion
It is in its final passages that the judgment reaches its moral high point, almost as much a testament of principle as a legal ruling. Responding to those who, in dissent, dismissed medieval common law as a “feudal” remnant, Roberts reverses the perspective: “Where the dissents see feudalism, the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment saw emancipation.”
The judgment closes with one of the most resonant formulations of this phase in the Court’s history: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights - to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”
“We keep that promise today.” Five words that distil the essence of a constitutional order which, at its most exacting moment, chose continuity with its founding principle over political circumstance.
The fault lines: the dissents and the battle that remains open
It would be dishonest to present this judgment as free of shadows. The majority was six to three. Justice Clarence Thomas filed a 91-page dissent, joined by Neil Gorsuch, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment had historically been conceived only for former slaves and their descendants - a reading which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her concurring opinion, described as a striking reversal of Thomas’s traditional rejection of race-conscious interpretations of the Constitution. Samuel Alito wrote a separate dissent.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, while agreeing that the executive order had to be struck down, did so on narrower grounds. In his view, the order does not itself violate the Fourteenth Amendment, but rather the federal statute, 8 U.S.C. §1401(a), which gives effect to its principle. That distinction leaves open - as Kavanaugh himself acknowledges - the possibility of congressional action to introduce exceptions to jus soli, while remaining, in his view, within constitutional limits.
Donald Trump, for his part, responded by shifting the battle to the legislative arena, arguing that a constitutional amendment is not necessary to achieve the same result through ordinary legislation. That reading, however, runs directly against the core of Roberts’s reasoning, which anchors the principle in the constitutional text itself - not in a statute which Congress might, in theory, amend at will.
A vocation that endures
The fundamental fact nonetheless remains: on the day it was asked to decide whether one of the pillars of its constitutional identity could be narrowed by executive order, America chose fidelity to its own history. It chose Wong Kim Ark over revisionist theories of “domicile”; it chose emancipation over blood; it chose - in the Court’s own words - to keep a promise made a century and a half ago.
This is neither an isolated case nor an improvised act of generosity. It confirms that the nation’s founding vocation - Paine’s “asylum for mankind”, Lazarus’s lamp beside the golden door - remains embodied in living law, not merely in the civic rhetoric of the Fourth of July.
S.R.
Silere non possum