Decided March 6, 1857.

Justice Cheryl I. HARRIS delivered the opinion of the Court.1

Dred and Harriet Scott have petitioned the courts for their freedom and the freedom of their two children, Eliza and Lizzie, for more than ten years. The relief they are seeking is of crucial significance to them as a family, but the issues implicated in their case go to the heart of the national identity and will shape the nation’s destiny. The conflict over slavery that is now raging in the political sphere is not new although, in recent times, it had taken on a more incendiary tone. Its origins lie in the contradiction between the ideals of liberty guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution and the institution of slavery.The birth of the nation was bound up with slavery as well as the dispossession of native tribes, upon whose land the great edifice of American finance, wealth, and power have been built.

focuses on the particular case of the United States and the development of national citizenship and state citizenship over time. Following the lead of other works in American history and American Political Development, the authors lay out three major periods in federated citizenship that follow significant developments in the US Constitution and federal law: the Framers’ period, stretching from the Articles of Confederation and the founding Constitution through the Civil War; the Reconstruction period’s establishment and subsequent collapse of national control ensuring the provision of those citizenship rights under Jim Crow; and the Civil Rights period, starting with the Twenty-Fourth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and subsequent extensions and contractions in citizenship rights provided at the national and state levels along lines of race, gender, immigrant status, and sexual orientation.

outlines the history of citizenship as a political concept, showing that the dominant view of citizenship today is still primarily seen as nationally provided and tied inextricably to legal status, despite global and urban scholars challenging its claims of exclusivity and immigration scholars challenging its singular focus on legal status. The limited power of these critiques is due, in part, to the fuzziness of claims regarding rights and identities. The authors make a fresh start in the systematic conceptualization of citizenship, showing that legal status is not the gateway to rights as is often assumed. In its place, they develop a concept of federated citizenship as a parallel set of rights along five key dimensions, with the provision of those rights varying by jurisdiction – federal, state, and local. They also lay out important differences between progressive citizenship, regressive citizenship, and reinforcing citizenship. Finally, they move from concept formation to the development of indicators for state citizenship regimes, which sets the stage for the empirical analysis is subsequent chapters on Black citizenship rights and immigrant citizenship rights.

draws attention to comparisons between California and other states in their provision of immigrant citizenship rights. The authors start with the border dividing California and Arizona, two states that lie on opposite ends of the spectrum with respect to progressive and regressive state citizenship, respectively. And yet, Arizona is not the only exclusionary state with respect to immigrant rights today. Indeed, the authors’ analysis reveals that Alabama is about as exclusionary as Arizona and that states like Georgia and Tennessee are close behind in their exclusionary laws on immigrant state citizenship. In this chapter, the authors situate various states along a continuum from the most inclusive to the most exclusionary with respect to each of five dimensions of citizenship rights. They also conduct a fifty-state quantitative analysis to identify the reasons why some states have proceeded farther than others in the development of progressive state citizenship.

Chapter 2 details how the distinction between the public and private spheres of citizenship has been implemented through jurisdictional scale, or federalism. Through a mosaic of laws regarding suffrage, immigration, education and public benefits, zoning, civil rights and others, our federal system has designated the national government as the public sphere of identity and civic activity, and local governments as the private sphere of the market and the family. The potential for conflict among the various conceptions of citizenship is muted because their contradictory components are divided into separate spheres and each is then confined to its designated sphere. This chapter also describes, however, how globalization has caused the public/private distinction to break down, and with it, the line between local and national citizenship to become blurred. As that has happened, the contradictions among the three conceptions of citizenship have become more pronounced, resulting in a crisis in the meaning of citizenship and increasing hostility between cities and the state.