EXCERPT: LSA 2025 Presidential Address
“To be a Citizen: What it Means to be a Person” with Michele Goodwin
What does it mean to be a citizen? To be included in the vision of a nation? To belong under a nation’s flag or a community’s embrace? A review of legislative history prior to the United States Civil War (1861-1865), reveals significant ambiguity underneath perceived certainty as to what citizenship fully meant or conveyed to lawmakers, drafters of the United States Constitution, courts, and people. Disputes about citizenship and belonging can be traced to early legislation instantiating matrilineality into states’ laws, further exploiting enslaved women and their offspring. Subsequent legal cases in the United States: Prigg v. Pennsylvania, Dred Scott v. Sanford; and United States v. Wong Kim Ark, explicitly debated these matters, while Plessy v. Ferguson, Ozawa v. United States, Thind v. United States, Buck v. Bell, and Korematsu v. United States to name a few drew the color and sex lines.
In her presidential address, Michele Bratcher Goodwin reflects on the meanings of citizenship and personhood. In her talk, she explains that wealth, sex, and race were determinate factors in one’s ability to claim full inclusion and the rights associated with citizenship in the United States prior to the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments. After the Civil War, amendments to the constitution addressed citizenship more clearly and directly by explicitly implementing language using the term “citizen.” Ironically, despite its inclusion in the constitution, the scope and scale of what it means to be a citizen remains socially and culturally disputed and legally contested even in these times. For example, does it confer equality in voting, housing, education, and bodily autonomy? Goodwin argues that on close inspection the full aspirations of what citizenship conveys remain elusive.
An excerpt of Professor Goodwin’s address, which closes her two-year term as LSA President, can be found in the video below.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Michele Goodwin
Hello everyone. My name is Michelle Goodwin, and I am our LSA president. And welcome back.
I first want to begin by thanking our LSA staff, and I’d like to ask them to please stand up. I’d like to thank Steven, our Executive Director, Melissa, our Associate Director of Operations, who you have been in touch with, Kevin, our Program Manager also in attendance, and Crissonna, our Communications Manager. Thank for all of the work that you do.
I’d also like to take a moment to thank those who work at this hotel, who made sure that these rooms were available to us, who put microphones in the stands, made sure that the screens were up, who fed us this morning, who are taking care of our rooms and changing the sheets and all of those different things. Who also have their stories in terms of how they got here, how their days go. I’d like to thank them as well.
And to our community, the faculty, the students, the friends who’ve joined us, I thank you for being here. This year, Ms. Magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation are also our co-sponsors.
And then I’d like to thank our program co-chairs. And if they would please stand up, they are Aziza Ahmed, Kimberly Mutcherson, Maya Manian, and Priscilla Ocen. Thank you so much for a fabulous program. And in fact, as I just mentioned Ms. Magazine, that wonderful–isn’t it wonderful on your bags? That artwork that comes from Ms. Magazine. It’s great. It’s super, it’s wonderful, and our graphic designer Brandi Phipps is the person who did that.
And before I begin my speech, I’d also like to thank my family, my husband, Greg Shaffer, who many of you know. I can walk into a room and there are people that are pulling at his coat too. He’s been a wonderful, wonderful traveler with me. And in fact, it was an LSA meeting in Chicago where we had almost a date 26 years ago—we’ve got to be really clear what that was–we were supposed to meet up at Law and Society in Chicago, and it was back in the day, for those of you who remember, where there used to be boards where you put little notes on the board…some of you remember, the note board, right, exactly! Well, we didn’t meet in Chicago, but we were together in Miami.
And then also to our niece who is in the audience. And in fact, as I think about this speech today and what I’d like to convey, I actually want to dedicate this speech to our niece Eliza Quander, who is in the audience, who is a recent law school graduate, is a Skadden fellow and doing fabulous things in this world. This is for you, Eliza.
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So, to be a citizen. What does that mean? According to Webster’s Dictionary, the etymology of the word “citizen” links to the Middle English of “citisein,” from Anglo-French “citesein,” all sounding somewhat the same, alterations of “citizen” and “city.” Today it is defined as a native or naturalized person who owes allegiance to a government and is entitled to protection from it. A member of a state.
But what does it mean to belong to a city, to a state, a land, a country? This is being tested all around the world. It’s being tested in lands all over. It’s being tested in these lands. How would indigenous people around the world answer the question of what it means to belong? What it means to be a citizen?
The Maori, the Aborigine, the Berbers, the Ladakhis, or locally, the Lakota, the Sioux, the Ho-Chunk, the Navajo, the Potawatomi, the Inuit. How would Gazans define what it means to be a citizen? When your home becomes rubble as the world watches? As schools, museums, places of worship, the bridge that carries you to and fro, when they no longer exist? In Sudan, a place devastated by tragedy, 13 million people have been forced to flee their homes in search of safety, and the world watches. 8.6 million people have been internally displaced there and it barely makes the news at all. In the Congo, where extractions for cobalt used for batteries and electric vehicles and consumer products, 10% of the world’s copper, nearly 30 million people have been internally displaced. That was just as of 2024. In other words, what does it mean to be a citizen in your own land, both within and without, at the same time?
What does it mean to be a citizen, to be included in the vision of a nation, to belong under a nation’s flag or a community’s embrace? If we think about this within the context of the United States, though clearly we can think about this, and we should, as global questions. These were matters that were being debated in the United States in the period that led up to the Civil War, and they’re still being debated now as people are being disappeared off of U.S. streets, as doors are knocked upon in the middle of the night, mothers and daughters dragged out saying, “We are citizens! We are citizens and we belong here.”
What does it mean at a time in which clearly it is neighbors that are calling on people? A mother who has just come to a new community–why is it that her door is knocked upon? Why is it that she’s taken out? Who called? These are the questions and the disputes that are being debated now. But we could trace those very questions far back in this American story to a time of American enslavement before the 13th amendment was ratified.
I was recently in Ghana with our daughter and our nieces, traveling to the places that people go to when they are in Ghana to pay some homage and attention to a place where there was no return. That is, the place that served as a significant spot for what became global slavery of people of African descent. We visited a river called The River of no Return. It was the last place that, if you were about to be sent away to what would become North America, South America, or other places in the Caribbean, it was the last place that folks were taken to for the last bath. Because at the forts, now called castles, where people were then taken, the enslaved, the captured, there were no means for them to be able to bathe.
So we walked barefoot along this path, going to the river to see this place where people were last bathed, the last auction before they were taken off to the castle, the last auction after a series of bartering back and forth and trading, kind of like a U.S. stock exchange, back and forth and back and forth, until finally folks are at the fort. And all of that auctioning, of course, didn’t end there.
There’s an interesting question to think about, just what that practice is. That practice of American slavery, which we dismiss so quickly today as if we really know that story, because it kind of burdens our hearts and it burdens our minds. And so it’s not something really that we care to dig into and to understand. When she’s captured, what was she on her way to do?
Perhaps she was on her way to meet with her mother, meet with a cousin or a friend, have dinner or have lunch. But because we have reduced the people who were enslaved to having no lives whatsoever before they were snatched away, you don’t think about those questions, that there was identity, that there was a place, that there was belonging… and then to be snatched from the place in which you belong…
Now, before we got to the 13th amendment, and indeed, right after all that auctioning off, all before being walked into a castle and put aboard a ship, if you survived the journey at all, and then landing in these spaces, it’s debated when exactly it is that American capitalization on people’s bodies, a true body politic, began.
And that’s somewhat interesting, isn’t it? All of the huff and the puff around, “Was it really 1619?” When the fact it existed, if we add 50 years to it such that it’s 1679, does it take away the centuries of dehumanization? Does it take away the fact that not just for an hour, not just for a day, there would be people raising ballots, bidding on children, bidding on women, bidding on men, and not just for an hour, not just for a day? For many of us, if we saw a film where that was happening and we had to sit through ten minutes of it, there would be people who leave the theater saying, “That’s just way too much. It’s too gratuitous that we had to sit through seeing people who had no clothes on, whose mouths are being examined, who have to bend over and their buttocks examined, is too gratuitous for us to sit through ten minutes of it.”
But to be in a part of the world, not just here in North America and South America too. More enslaved people were brought to Brazil than the United States. But to sit through that, we can’t do it for ten minutes, but we are in a nation here that did it for 400 years. And so as I think about the body politic and also think about the laws that fasten the body politic as well, and frameworks, some of these laws and frameworks played out in cases.
For many of us the cases are familiar, right? At least a case like Dred Scott is one that’s familiar and yet we don’t really know it. Which opens up the story of a kind of second body politic, which is the point of my talk today. Because Dred Scott himself was not just seeking his own freedom, but also seeking the freedom of his daughters, two of them, Eliza and Lizzie, as well as his wife Harriet. And they are erased. But these cases, Prigg v. Pennsylvania, the Dred Scott case, the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which has come into greater appreciation in these times as the Trump administration is challenging birthright citizenship or the cases of Ozawa. And then the cases where people of Asian descent tried to challenge Jim Crow laws but in a way that is worth unpacking, because in those cases, they could read the tea leaves and what they understood was that in the United States, the thing to petition for was to petition for whiteness as the only way to get around Jim Crow. And those challenges failed.
In my time today, I want to touch on just a few points: matrilineality, hypo descent, eugenics, and anti-miscegenation, as I think that they really have become the fabrics of American law in the body politic.
But in order to do that, let me start with something that’s a little bit more recent in the body politic, and that is with the Dobbs decision of 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. And so then I would ask, what is the requiem for Roe v. Wade?
In 1973, in a 7 to 2 opinion, exactly 100 years after the Supreme Court upheld states’ laws barring women from suffrage, in Minor v. Happersett and practicing law, in Bradwell v. Illinois, the Supreme Court acknowledged the disturbing social conditions associated with centuries of shaming, stereotypes, and stigmatization of women when it struck down laws that criminalized abortion, and in doing so, the court finally recognized the detriment that states had long inflicted on women when legislatures denied them choices about their reproductive destinies and aspirations beyond motherhood and being bound to their husbands.
Although unstated in Roe, the court also initiated the work of dismantling a very ugly record of its own complicity in affirming harmful laws that tethered women to motherhood. Laws banning women from full participation in society and suffrage, arguably rooted in “coverture,” that troubling legal theory, advanced by Sir Matthew Hale and Sir William Blackstone, that women’s identities and legal rights subsumed within the bundle of the rights possessed by their husbands. Such laws were never meant to enrich women or to recognize their constitutionally protected personhood, but rather to secure “familial harmony” for men, even to the detriment and abuse of their wives and daughters. According to Blackstone, “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law that is, the very being or legal existence of women is suspended during marriage, or at least it is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.” Supposedly, a woman gained protection from being under her husband’s “wing,” protection or cover.
Blackstone declared that wives were, to “perform everything and is therefore called in our law ‘feme covert.’” In 1736, Sir Matthew Hale’s highly acclaimed treatise “Pleas of the Crown” declared that it was inconceivable for a woman to be raped by her husband. Hale argued that, “A husband cannot be guilty of rape because marriage conveys unconditional consent, whereby wives have entered a binding contract and hath given up herself and this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.”
Importantly, no, no prior English common law articulated the standard, but this rule found broad support amongst parliamentarians and eventually, in a nation where people came to the United States in a quest for a new kind of freedom, they decided to bring this with them.
And then, very recently and egregiously, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that was authored by Justice Alito and that struck down Roe v. Wade, the court returned to Blackstone and Hale. In doing so, the court invoked legal theorists who refuted that women possessed any identity apart from their husbands. Hale and Blackstone also rejected the recognition of their rape, and thus denied the principle that women deserve to defend themselves against sexual violations committed by their husbands. And seemingly because Hale and Blackstone espoused the view that marital rape was non-existent, so did eventually U.S. legislatures and also state courts.
Now, undoubtedly, Blackstone and Hale provided convenient cover for male legislators already inclined towards patriarchal interpretations of law. In a society that also embraced and greatly profited from slavery, race and sex hierarchies served as architecture and organizations of American life, not only in southern states, but in northern states as well. As such, invidious laws and norms became justified and maintained by laws.
Problematically, American courts became complicit in upholding dangerous patriarchal ideals and citing Blackstone and Hale in justification of invidious norms, violating what can be described as minimal standards of the rule of law.
And this then affected, not only cases of intimacy or what could hardly be called intimacy, but rape in families, but also violence. And then this violence became narrated through American law and American society, such that even what we call the “rule of thumb” comes from this space. So long as the instrument that a husband uses is no thicker than a thumb, it is permissible to use that instrument in the beating of a wife.
These norms tethered also to what was expected in terms of the conditions that black women experienced. And from here, I want to just narrate a little bit about what that means in the coming of what eventually was a form of freedom. When the United States organized itself around the principle of matrilineality, it made a choice in doing so and doing so in matrilineality meant that children would inherit the status of their mothers and not the status of their fathers and this was quite purposeful, because in inheriting the status of your mother, this meant that any offspring that were born unto women who were enslaved would also inherit that condition, and would not inherit the condition of their fathers, including those who owned the very estate unto which they were born. And this played out in a variety of ways, in ways that are worth us thinking about.
What did this mean in the conditions of a person like Sojourner Truth, who in 1851 made a speech in Ohio that many people remember, but remember in a way that I want to shake up a bit for us. In the speech called “Ain’t I a woman?” many people remember the speech as one in which Sojourner Truth talks about how no one opens up a carriage door for a black woman, how they failed to show any kind of chivalry towards black women.
But what’s misremembered in the speech, or just left out entirely, is how she starts the speech, when she says, “and I bore 13 children and saw nearly each one snatched from my arms, and nobody heard my cry but God. Ain’t I a woman?”
Her speech of 1851 is one that is worth searing in our memories for what it pertains. Now many have debated whether she actually bore 13 children at all, or whether this was just a turn of the tongue. But does it really matter? Because what is true is that her children were indeed snatched from her arms, and it was absolutely true that there was no law that recognized what that was about for her. And nobody heard her cry but God.
Years later, there is the story of Margaret Garner in 1856, and it is the story of a woman made in many ways famous and recognized by Toni Morrison in her book Beloved. But given that beloved is a work of fiction, though based in real life, its truth is a kind of horror that is so difficult for us to recognize that perhaps we want to cement it in a vault, as if it could only be fiction, as if the story of a woman, barely 20, with several kids on a Kentucky plantation reaches a day where she can take it no more, where the politics on her body leads her to think, “there is a place across the river. And if I can only get across this river to this place of freedom, perhaps there will be a different body politic.” And so Margaret Garner with her children in tow, and not the benefit of any kind of jacket, right? A down coat, Uggs, boots, whatever you are wearing on your shoes, on your feet, is not what Margaret Garner had access to.
But Margaret decides that the body politic of American slavery, and that in the state of Kentucky, is too much for her to bear. And so she, along with her children in the middle of the night, and not in a June, a July, an August, a balmy September, but in December, as a river is frozen that separates Kentucky from Ohio, she decides “tonight we will walk.” And she walks with her children, crossing a frozen river to this place, to get to a free body politic.
And then you know the story that Toni Morrison makes real and jump off the page for us. But then Oprah Winfrey turns into a movie. Because this, after all, is the United States. This after all, is a space where the federal government has enacted the Fugitive Slave Acts, which means that any person can be deputized to then go seek and find and capture the people who have somehow claimed their own bodies, as if their own body politic matters.
And so you know the story, that when Margaret Garner hears the hounds and hears the hooves of the horses, after she has made her way to a safe space in Cincinnati, she actually did make it across the river. But upon hearing the hooves and the cries of the dogs, she grabs her child and she slits the first one’s throat. And it is said that when the doors break open and they capture Margaret, that she is holding a second child about to do the same. And she cries out that her children cannot endure what her body has been put through.
It becomes a very interesting thing, this case of Margaret Garner, because the abolitionists in Cincinnati want to help her.
And it’s a case that is heard around the world, and they figure that the best way to help Margaret Garner is to claim that what she has done is to commit First-Degree murder, because at least if there is a claim that she has in fact committed murder, this means that her child was a human being. And this means that Margaret Garner is a human being and not an enslaved person.
And imagine being in a society where it is, in fact, that kind of argument where the argument is about whether you are a person or whether you are a piece of property. Margaret ends up losing her case. And ultimately, we can say that it was determined that Margaret was not a human being, but an enslaved piece of property that would have to go back to the people who owned her in Kentucky. Margaret died by the time that she was 25.
The question of the body politic is not one that ends in the space of American slavery, but it’s one that continues during the period of Jim Crow. And it’s worth us thinking about just that through line that separates the two. For example, in thinking about the 13th amendment, which ends slavery and abolishes involuntary servitude, it’s worth noting what was recognized by members of the federal government, legislators, and senators as they drafted a law that would end not only slavery, but end something else.
I think very much they recognized that slavery was not just what’s become romanticized in films today, that there is a bucolic grain field, and there are people that are happily picking little balls, puffy balls of cotton, but that instead–what they truly did understand is that American slavery had this body politic that, baked into it, was one of reproductive servitude. And in abolishing slavery and this politic of involuntary servitude, it was meant to address the kinds of stories that I’ve just told.
But then there’s the question of the cases that we remember. And again, misremember in the cases, and I wanted to just touch on a couple more before I close out, because the case of Plessy v. Ferguson is held out as one of the worst decisions ever made by the United States Supreme Court. It comes after the period of the Reconstruction Amendment, the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery and involuntary servitude; the 14th Amendment, which welcomes in equal opportunity and protection under law, and the 15th Amendment, which protects the right to be able to vote. But shortly after that, the doors closed. And those doors really cement shut with a case called Plessy v. Ferguson.
But it’s interesting how that case is misremembered as well. Most people think of that case and remember it as that awful case that instantiated “separate but equal.” That meant that black people could not join the train cars of white people. And that would be enough, to remember it in that way, except that there was an exception in the law, and that exception was another one that was rooted in the body politic, because the law provided an exception: except for black women who are nursing white babies, that they could be in the white train cars.
And I guess the story that I’m telling you today about the American body politic is that it’s one that has used, the bodies of women inscribed on those bodies in myriad kinds of ways. I could tell you the story about Carrie Buck, and in fact, I will very briefly.
In 1927, the United States Supreme Court takes up a case from the state of Virginia. And it’s a case from Virginia that challenges the state’s eugenics law. Only the lawyer that’s been provided for Carrie is actually a eugenics sympathizer himself. Carrie Buck is a 16-year-old white girl who’s poor. And how you know that she’s a 16-year-old poor white girl is because Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the case tells us that she is. And it’s a case that, if found permissible by the Supreme Court, would mean that compulsory sterilization is permissible in the United States. Because Carrie was raped at 16 and had a baby out of wedlock, and the state of Virginia was rounding up poor white people like her and placing them in a place that they called the Virginia Colony.
We could call it a colony. We could call it a camp. We could call it a detention center. But at any rate, the case goes up before the United States Supreme Court and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. And for those of you who are familiar with the case, you know that he says that three generations of imbeciles are enough and better then to let them starve for their imbecility; society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. And the court says, as the case comes to a close, that the laws in the United States that provide for compulsory vaccination are broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes.