CONSTITUTIONAL ROUNDTABLE
presents
Professor Helen Irving
University of Sydney
The Disallegiant Heart:
Constitutional Citizenship and the History of Marital Denaturalization
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (room FA2)
84 Queen's Park
In this paper, I invite a reconceptualization of constitutional (as distinct from political) citizenship, by examining the legal practice, virtually universal between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, of the denaturalization of citizen women who married alien men. This practice, which emerged as a by-product of the post-revolutionary constitutional state and the ‘new Westphalian’ international order, reveals two core paradigms: allegiance and protection. Our modern idea of citizenship, I argue, is still embedded in the first, to the detriment of the second. Our concept of citizenship, and the legal regimes that accompany it, reflect a distinction between the allegiant and the disallegiant citizen, which mirrors the injurious distinction upon which marital denaturalization rested. This is a work in progress, and I welcome feed-back.
Helen Irving is Professor of Law at the University of Sydney, where she teaches Australian and comparative constitutional law. She is the author of, among others, Gender and the Constitution: Equity and Agency in Comparative Constitutional Design (Cambridge, 2008). http://sydney.edu.au/law/about/staff/HelenIrving/index.shtml
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Cheryl Milne at cheryl.milne@utoronto.ca or Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
