Aaron Freiwald, Managing Partner of Freiwald Law and host of the weekly podcast, Good Law | Bad Law, is joined by law professor, Amanda Frost, of the Washington College of Law at American University, to discuss the rights of citizenship, citizenship stripping and denaturalization, sexism and xenophobia, as well as Professor Frost’s new book, You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers. What is citizenship? Who is a citizen? And furthermore, who decides the answers to these questions?

 

In today’s conversation, Aaron and Amanda have an incredibly relevant conversation about citizenship in the United States. Citizenship is invaluable and yet, as Amanda explains, it is always at risk. In her new book, Amanda explores the history of citizenship and citizenship stripping over the last two centuries – she explains that the U.S. government has used revoking citizenship (even from those born on American soil) as a tool to cast out its unwanted, suppress dissent, and deny civil rights to all considered “un-American.” Amanda and Aaron talk about the historical aspects of citizenship challenges but also those of today, touching on the events of the last four years and Trump’s repeated threats of deportation/denaturalization, the issues of race and equality, the notion of political power and the right to vote, as well as the Supreme Court, the civil war, and the idea of community, membership and belonging.

 

Amanda Frost is the Ann Loeb Bronfman Distinguished Professor of Law. Amanda writes and teaches in the fields of constitutional law, immigration and citizenship law, federal courts and jurisdiction, and judicial ethics. Her scholarship has been cited by over a dozen federal and state courts, and she has been invited to testify on the topics of her articles before both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. Professor Frost’s non-academic writing has been published in The Atlantic, Slate, The American Project, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and USA Today, and she authors the “American round-up” column for SCOTUSblog. Amanda is a member of the Editorial Board of Oxford University’s Border Criminologies, an Academic Fellow at the Pound Civil Justice Institute, and a member of the National Constitution Center’s Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board; she has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, UCLA Law School, Université Paris X Nanterre, and the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

 

Before entering academia, Professor Frost clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and spent five years as a staff attorney at Public Citizen, where she litigated cases at all levels of the federal judicial system.

 

Listen now!

To learn more about Professor Frost, please check out her bio at American here.

You can also learn more about Professor Frost by visiting her personal website here.

To check out Professor Frost’s new book, You Are Not American: Cit

Citizenship Stripping: A Conversation w/ Amanda Frost

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