Short Cuts: England’s Birthright Citizenship
Kathleen Commons, 23 July 2026
Calvin’s Case (1608) is, as one of its judges, Sir Edward Coke, put it, ‘magnum in parvo … a matter of great consequence upon a slender subject’. The case concerned whether a Scottish child could inherit property in London. King James VI of Scotland had acceded to the English throne five years earlier, and this was the first test to establish whether a Scottish...
