About Amanda Frost
Amanda Frost is the Ann Loeb Bronfman Distinguished Professor of Law and Government.
Amanda Frost Frost 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.
Her non-academic writing has been published in The Atlantic, Slate, The American Prospect, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and USA Today, and she authors the “Academic round-up” column for the SCOTUS blog. In 2019 she was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to complete her book, You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers (Beacon Press), which is scheduled for publication in January 2021.
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. She has also worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee, served as Acting Director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic, and spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar studying transparency reform in the European Union.
Professor Frost 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. Professor Frost has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, UCLA Law School, Université Paris X Nanterre, and the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.
In 2015, Professor Frost won the American University Washington College of Law’s Excellence in Teaching Award.
Where to find Amanda Frost
Personal website
Twitter
You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers
Citizenship is invaluable, yet our status as citizens is always at risk—even for those born on US soil.
Over the last two centuries, the US government has revoked citizenship to cast out its unwanted, suppress dissent, and deny civil rights to all considered “un-American”—whether due to their race, ethnicity, marriage partner, or beliefs. Drawing on the narratives of those who have struggled to be treated as full members of “We the People,” law professor Amanda Frost exposes a hidden history of discrimination and xenophobia that continues to this day.
The Supreme Court’s rejection of Black citizenship in Dred Scott was among the first and most notorious examples of citizenship stripping, but the phenomenon did not end there. Women who married noncitizens, persecuted racial groups, labor leaders, and political activists were all denied their citizenship, and sometimes deported, by a government that wanted to redefine the meaning of “American.” Today, US citizens living near the southern border are regularly denied passports, thousands are detained and deported by mistake, and the Trump administration is investigating the citizenship of 700,000 naturalized citizens. Even elected leaders such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are not immune from false claims that they are not citizens eligible to hold office.
You Are Not American grapples with what it means to be American and the issues surrounding membership, identity, belonging, and exclusion that still occupy and divide the nation in the twenty-first century.
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