Afroyim v. Rusk
| Afroyim v. Rusk | |
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| Argued February 20, 1967 Decided May 29, 1967 |
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| Full case name | Beys Afroyim v. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State |
| Citations | 387 U.S. 253 (more)
87 S.Ct. 1660; 18 L.Ed.2d 757
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| Prior history | 250 F. Supp. 686 (S.D.N.Y. 1966); 361 F.2d 102 (2nd Cir. 1966); certiorari granted, 385 U.S. 917 (1966) |
| Holding | |
| Congress has no power under the Constitution to revoke a person's U.S. citizenship unless he voluntarily relinquishes it. In particular, citizenship may not be revoked as a consequence of voting in a foreign election. | |
| Court membership | |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Black, joined by Warren, Douglas, Brennan, Fortas |
| Dissent | Harlan, joined by Clark, Stewart, White |
| Laws applied | |
| Nationality Act of 1940; U.S. Const. amends. V, XIV | |
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This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings
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| Perez v. Brownell | |
Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967), is a major United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that citizens of the United States may not be deprived of their citizenship involuntarily. The U.S. government had attempted to revoke the citizenship of Beys Afroyim, a man born in Poland, because he had cast a vote in an Israeli election after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. The Supreme Court decided that Afroyim's right to retain his citizenship was guaranteed by the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In so doing, the Court overruled one of its own precedents, Perez v. Brownell (1958), in which it had upheld loss of citizenship under similar circumstances less than a decade earlier.
The Afroyim decision opened the way for a wider acceptance of dual (or multiple) citizenship in United States law. The Bancroft Treaties—a series of agreements between the United States and other nations which had sought to limit dual citizenship following naturalization—were eventually abandoned after the Carter administration concluded that Afroyim and other Supreme Court decisions had rendered them unenforceable.
The impact of Afroyim v. Rusk was narrowed by a later case, Rogers v. Bellei (1971), in which the Court determined that the Fourteenth Amendment safeguarded citizenship only when a person was born or naturalized in the United States, and that Congress retained authority to regulate the citizenship status of a person who was born outside the United States to an American parent. However, the specific law at issue in Rogers v. Bellei—a requirement for a minimum period of U.S. residence that Bellei had failed to satisfy—was repealed by Congress in 1978. As a consequence of revised policies adopted in 1990 by the United States Department of State, it is now (in the words of one expert) "virtually impossible to lose American citizenship without formally and expressly renouncing it."
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