Current Debate on Birthright Citizenship

The first Ernst Fraenkel Lecture will trace the historical development of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which codifies the principle of citizenship acquired via place of birth, also known as “birthright citizenship.” The central question explored in the lecture will be Donald Trump’s efforts to abolish this legal right by means of an executive order. Should this decree be found legally viable, it could have profound repercussions in particular for children born to migrants in the United States, whose parents’ residency status had no impact on their right to citizenship until now.

The link between German-American lawyer and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel (1898–1975) and this subject could not have been made clearer in recent months when Ketanji Brown Jackson, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, referenced the key arguments of Fraenkel’s best-known work The Dual State, which analyzed the Nazi legal system, in her dissenting opinion against the ruling.

Following the lecture, the first Ernst Fraenkel Dissertation Prize will be awarded. The prize, which comes with a cash award of 5,000 euros, is sponsored by the Foundation for Tolerance and Humanity and will be awarded annually for scholarship that engages in an exemplary manner with questions of democracy in the transatlantic sphere or from a broader comparative perspective.

Honoring Ernst Fraenkel as Founding Director of the John F. Kennedy Institut

The John F. Kennedy Institute hopes to commemorate its founder Ernst Fraenkel, one of the founding fathers of German political science, with its latest lecture series. Born into a family of Jewish business owners in Cologne in 1898, Fraenkel served in World War I and was severely injured in the conflict. Having earned his doctorate in 1923, he worked as a lawyer in Berlin and represented people who were persecuted on political and racial grounds in the wake of the Nazi Party’s rise to power. Due to increasing repression he was forced to emigrate to the United States in 1938, where he completed an additional degree in law at the University of Chicago and published The Dual State in 1941, which has remained one of the most influential analyses of Nazi totalitarianism to this day. During World War II he worked for the United States government and served as a consultant to the Marshall Commission in developing plans to democratize post-war Germany.

Following his return to the country of his birth in the early 1950s, Fraenkel became a leading light of political science in West Germany. He was appointed professor at Freie Universität Berlin and made significant contributions to the development of this discipline. He was guided by his vision of an interdisciplinary approach to research on the United States when he founded the America Institute in 1963. The institute was posthumously renamed the John F. Kennedy Institute just a few months after the US president’s visit to Berlin. The renaming was meant to pay tribute to the consistent support the United States had given the young university in West Berlin since its establishment in 1948. This new name also reflected Freie Universität Berlin’s close entanglement with the political upheavals of the twentieth century, something that can also be clearly seen in Fraenkel’s own biography.

By holding this new lecture series, the John F. Kennedy Institute aims to make Ernst Fraenkel’s vision of interdisciplinary American studies accessible to an even wider audience and open up a critical space for discussing Fraenkel’s work, which has gained even greater relevance – particularly for the United States – in recent years. In doing so, it will be picking up where the Ernst Fraenkel Distinguished Lecture Series that ended in 2018 left off, while also providing fresh perspectives on contemporary political developments.