The evolution of the concept of U.S. Citizenship took center stage before an engaged audience in the Tompkins County Public Library's BorgWarner Room on Thursday, December 18. Michael Dorf, the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell University and co-author of On Reading the Constitution led the hour-long presentation and discussion, which touched on the role of race, the actions of the current administration, legal precedents, and predictions for the U.S. Supreme Court's role in ongoing case.

Professor Dorf's presentation also touched on news from this week that the Trump administration intends to dramatically increase the number of "denaturalization" cases it plans to bring, and what that could look like.

You can watch the entire presentation and discussion on the TCPL YouTube channel.

The program was the fourth and final installment of a series of programs called The Constitution: Rights to Know, a joint effort between Tompkins County Interim Historian Carrol Kammen, Steve Yale-Loehr, retired professor of immigration law at Cornell Law School and Tompkins County Public Library.

Professor Dorf also led the first program in the series in September which focused on The Bill of Rights.

The second program in the series, held in October, focused on Voting Rights and modern elections. David A. Bateman, Associate Professor in the Government Department as well as the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University and author of Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, United Kingdom, and France, led the discussion which also included Tompkins County Elections Commissioners Alanna Congdon and Stephen DeWitt.

In October, Yale-Loehr, a retired immigration law professor at Cornell and author of Green Card Stories and Tania Peñafort, staff attorney for Journey's End Refugee Services, hosted an in-depth discussion on immigration and naturalization. The discussion included Peñafort sharing her own personal journey of transitioning from being a person without legal status to a permanent resident.

Tompkins County Public Library is grateful to Kammen, Yale-Loehr, as well as former TCPL Library Director Susan Currie for their efforts to bring together library resources with Constitutional law experts from Cornell University to add perspective to national discussions spurred by recent challenges to the U.S. Constitution and legal precedents. TCPL would also like to thank all those who agreed to speak in the series, and those who attended either in-person or online.

Livestreaming at TCPL is made possible in part by a grant from The Tompkins County Public Library Foundation.