Annual Constitution Day Lecture: Birthright Citizenship on Trial

On Thursday, September 17, 2015, at 7:00 pm, Bethany Berger ’90 will give the annual Constitution Day lecture in Smith Reading Room, first floor Olin Memorial Library.  This free event is open to the public and is sponsored by the Friends of the Wesleyan Library.

Birthright Citizenship on Trial — Immigration and Indigeneity

Egged on by Donald Trump, the majority of Republican candidates have supported ending birthright citizenship.  This talk looks at this fourteenth amendment right, its constitutional origins, and the different things it meant for American Indians and immigrants.

See Berger quoted in a Washington Post article about birthright citizenship.

 

Bethany Berger '90

Professor Bethany Berger is the Thomas F. Gallivan, Jr. Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law.  She graduated from Wesleyan in 1990 with a major in Government, and from Yale Law School in 1996.  After law school, she became the director of the Native American Youth Law Project at DNA-Peoples Legal Services, which serves the Navajo and Hopi reservations, and later the Managing Attorney at Advocates for Children of New York.  She is a co-author and member of the Editorial Board of Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law, the foundational treatise in the field, and co-author of leading casebooks in American Indian Law and in Property Law.  Her articles on legal history, race, gender, and jurisdiction in federal Indian law have been cited in testimony to Congress and several briefs to the Supreme Court.  She has also served as a judge for the Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals and as a Visiting Professor at Harvard and the University of Michigan.

For more information, email libfriends@wesleyan.edu.