Kristin A. Collins

'Petitions Without Number': Widows' Petitions and the Early Nineteenth-Century Origins of Marriage-Based Entitlements

Between 1792 and 1858, Congress enacted approximately seventy-six public law statutes granting cash subsidies to large classes of military widows. War widows’ pensions were not wholly unknown in Anglo-American law before this time, but the widows’ pension system of the early nineteenth century was distinctive in both scope and kind: Congress rejected the class-based approach that had characterized war widows’ pensions of the eighteenth century by pensioning widows of rank-and-file soldiers, not just widows of officers, and by extending pensions to widows of veterans. This significant equalization and expansion of widows’ pensions resulted in the creation of the first broad-scale system of marriage-based entitlements in America. This article seeks to explain the blossoming of this system and argues that widows’ petitioning efforts played a central role. Unlike the women who used the petition to oppose slavery and Indian removal during the same period, widows seeking pensions did not overtly challenge socio-political conventions by petitioning Congress. Rather, in both locution and purpose, widows’ pension petitions conformed to and reinforce dominant views concerning men’s and women’s social roles and responsibilities. And it was precisely the conformist nature of widows’ petitions that made them effective in precipitating the development of a substantial system of public marriage-based entitlements. Attention to these overlooked sources helps explain the emergence of marriage-based entitlements in American law, and enables us to construct a more textured picture of how, in the early nineteenth century, the law shaped women’s lives and women shaped the law.

Abolishing Ius Sanguinis Citizenship: A Proposal Too Restrained and Too Radical

Costica Dumbrava maintains that ius sanguinis citizenship is a historically tainted, outmoded, and unnecessary means of designating political membership. He argues that it is time to abandon it. Dumbrava limits his challenge to ius sanguinis citizenship per se, and even suggests that family-based migration rights could be used to minimise the disruptive effect of abolishing citizenship-by-descent. But his core complaints about ius sanguinis citizenship – the mismatch of biological parentage and political affinity, the difficulties of determining legal parentage – can be, and have been, levied against these various family-based preferences and statuses, which are likely found in every nation’s nationality laws. It is therefore important to consider his proposal in light of the role that the parent-child relationship plays in the regulation of migration, naturalisation, and citizenship more generally. I also argue that, as a remedy for the problems that he has identified, Dumbrava’s proposal is at once too restrained and too radical.