Washington and Lee law professor David Baluarte, director of the School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, has joined an amicus brief that was just filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of scholars of statelessness in the case Lynch v. Morales Santana.
Prof. Baluarte joined other scholars on the brief who have devoted much of their careers to teaching, writing about, and studying statelessness and related subjects, particularly refugees and asylum, migration, and citizenship laws.
The case is an appeal by the federal government that seeks to defend the constitutionality of less favorable treatment, for purposes of U.S. citizenship, of a child born abroad whose father is a U.S. citizen than the treatment given to a child born abroad whose mother is a U.S. citizen.
In arguing that the decision should be affirmed, the authors of the brief claim that there is no support for the government’s assertion that the risk of statelessness for a foreign born, non-marital child was or is substantially greater when the U.S.-citizen parent is the mother rather than the father.
You can read more about the case here.
