aren't a lot of bars in the US scanning the id card with some purpose-made id scanner? Seem to remember reading about that, and it being the US I would guess that data gets very much stored/shared/molested.
Yes, they are. The systems aren't even expensive, and they have some features like they track people who have been trespassed, etc.
However, you can buy fake IDs online, and the IDs are reportedly beating those machines. So if you trust the machine for age-verification, you might let in underage people.
Hate to be that guy, but this a pet peeve of mine that pisses me of...
The term "birthright" means "a right that is derived from the circumstances of your birth". Virtually ALL countries grant citizenship by consequence of the circumstances of birth, but what circumstances they consider vary. For some countries, the circumstance is "birth happened in the soil of the country" (jus soli), for others, it's "birth was to parents who are citizens of our country".
I said "virtually", because there is one SINGLE exception. The Vatican. Ok, there's the SMOM, but do they even count?
Yes it matters, because jus sanguinis is also a birthright and therefore "birthright citizenship" despite having no relevance to where you were born (jus soli)
It matters. Because if the proposed executive order were to prevail, the US would effectively drastically change its citizenship assignment system, but it would still hinge on a right derived from a circumstance of your birth - a birthright. Essentially, it would move from "you are a citizen if you were _born_ in the country" to "you are a citizen if you were _born_ to a citizen".
Isn't this statement aimed at citizenship tourism or whatever its called?
I used to live in a state where some new friends had told us about places that facilitated pregnant women's trips to the US solely for the purpose of staying and giving birth in the US so the child could become citizens. They then head home. I have no idea how prevalent this is.
If people really want to stop this kind of birth citizenship tourism they must vote for people who will pledge to amend the constitution using the proper democratic process.
But today's climate is so hostile to any kind of rational discussion about how to change laws. One faction just wants to deny citizenship right now to any people they seem not "american enough" while the other faction cannot possibly entertain any change to the current system or else It would concede something to the populist faction
I can imagine a compromise that exchanges a path to citizenship for DACA kids for restrictions on birthright citizenship.
What is missing from this debate is the practical side of things. On the one hand, a permanent underclass of non-voting second class citizens is probably not a stable long term equilibrium.
On the other hand, allowing anyone to visit the US to have their baby and automatically receive all the benefits of US citizenship is also not a stable long term equilibrium.
What change would you suggest? A minimum period of time in the country before birthright citizenship applies? What about people who enter the United States illegally and then have a child twenty years later? What about my ancestors, who entered the country legally but never pursued American citizenship?
The 14th amendment was written the way it was to create a bright line that was easy to implement. I'm sure they considered other ways of framing the issue. I think it's brilliant just the way it is.
I'm not suggesting a change, I'm suggesting a public discussion about a change.
What I see is one political faction who wants to convince everybody that their desired outcome was in the constitution all along and we're just misreading it. My suggestion is that, if that's really what the people want, then the current democratic process should be followed to amend the constitution in order to clarify whatever rule is unclear. There are good reasons in place for such changes to require a supermajority.
If a supermajority cannot be reached, then let's have a discussion and figure out how to make everybody's concerns heard.
But that's so completely against the current populistic climate where the most boisterous and outraging claims are rewarded; so I know this won't happen; but that's what I think _should_ happen.
Yes, the Justices in dissent have an ideological opposition to "citizenship tourism" and are working backward from that to find it to be out of scope of the Constitutional language. But that's wrong, that's not their job.
I had a friend from Shanghai who did this. It’s completely legal, you can have a proper tourist visa and be pregnant when you enter the USA, there are hospitals in SoCal that even cater to anchor babies and will express a passport for them so the parents can return with the baby shortly after birth.
That was back in the early 2010s, I don’t think it was prevalent then (I just had too many friends with the money to do that). I don’t think it is common now because Chinese citizens have more confidence about China and so aren’t looking for backup plans anymore.
The question of whether babies born to foreign tourists are automatically citizens is separate from the question of whether this is desirable.
On the desirability side of things, it's been this way for the entire history of this country (the amendment just codified how things were already done) and it seems to have worked OK. But even if we were to decide that this is bad, it would need to be fixed with an amendment.
Solicitor General Sauer brought up the same point during oral arguments in this case, and he didn't seem to know how prevalent it was either. Seems like the kind of thing you should have figured out before making your case to the Supreme Court.
Well, it doesn't matter. If the SCOTUS decides that some people, in certain circumstances, are not in jurisdiction of US law, then they have to apply that notion everywhere.
They can't pick and choose "oh no they are in jurisdiction of law A but not in law B". Jurisdiction is a fundamental concept, there's no middle ground.
As for whether people are really doing birth tourism: sure, there might be some cases, but well, they are using something that the legal system allows. If the country feels like it doesn't want that happening, it needs to amend the Constitution.
(Also, let's not kid ourselves that the birth tourism thing is what conservatives care about... People doing that kind of thing are usually rich. The real target are poor illegal immigrants giving birth in the country.)
> They can't pick and choose "oh no they are in jurisdiction of law A but not in law B". Jurisdiction is a fundamental concept, there's no middle ground.
I mean, they shouldn't do this but clearly they can rule however they want with any pretext they want, because they answer to nobody but themselves. Who's going to tell them they can't do something? Who is left to appeal to?
It's a deeply corrupt and undemocratic institution, with virtually unchecked power to rewrite legislation and even the Constitution at a whim.
Jurisdiction is not some singular concept that means the same thing in every context. You can have jurisdiction over some things in some contexts and not have jurisdiction over other things in other contexts.
If you do crime, can you be arrested by the local police?
"I have diplomatic immunity! Also I live on a reservation with their own police force. So no."
It's pretty clear that's what the amendment means. The only ambiguous situation I've found is if you're born just inside American waters on your way between foreign countries, but that's a really narrow case.
In that case, the use of the word jurisdiction in the 14th Amendment is meaningless, too ambiguous to rely on. Unless we think the Constitution should be living, breathing, and adapt to the current political environment. Is that the current conservative viewpoint?
Not all originalists will hold the same views on how to deal with ambiguity in the same way not all on the living constitution side agree how ambiguity should be resolved. The takes are usually more on the "how to think about resolving the meaning" side than a "is there any meaning to resolve" side.
That said, the originalist viewpoint is usually more along the lines of "we should seek to resolve that ambiguity in context of when, why, and with which references the framers who wrote it had in mind". Most originalists are unlikely to care what an argument about the current political environment implies.
Well, a word can have different meanings in different contexts but still have a clear meanings in each particular context. But I agree that “jurisdiction” doesn’t have a well defined meaning in the context of individuals being subject to the jurisdiction of a nation.
In that case, the proper approach is to look at other evidence of what the drafters meant, which is what both the majority and dissents did.
This is obviously not true. Everyone always wants to say "my ideology is right and this is not contested anymore" and everyone is always wrong about that.
Insofar as originalism did “win,” it was only as a convenient signal to Mitch Mcconnell that a potential appointee would play ball.
As an academic legal theory it’s entirely sterile. There’s little actual content within it and it demonstrates almost no consistent application of its supposed principles. When it ceases to deliver conservatives relatively painless victories, they’ll move on to something else.
The fourteenth amendment doesn't say "within the jurisdiction" but "subject to the jurisdiction": if you break a window as a tourist, you expect to be prosecuted because you committed a crime within that jurisdiction, but you do not expect to be conscripted into military service or to pay income tax, because you are not subject to the jurisdiction.
Birth tourism is definitely an issue for conservatives worried about China. Here's a 2019 ICE press release on prosecuting someone who was running a birth tourism ring to benefit Chinese government officials: https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/chinese-national-pleads-gu...
The right is concerned that Chinese-American dual citizens born in the US but raised in China might, upon reaching adulthood, act with impunity as US-citizen agents of the Chinese Communist Party.
Even better, Chinese anchor babies born in the USA are subject to pay income tax on income they earn in China. It’s not even clear they can get out of it by renouncing their citizenship when they turn 18 to take Chinese citizenship instead (when they have to decide). I think it’s more trouble than it’s worth now.
Sorry, that makes zero sense. Why are you picking conscription into military service or obligation to pay income tax as the defining jurisdiction? Why those two things, and not something else?
Specifically, of those two things you selected: the first would be horrendously problematic as the defining jurisdiction, since it would exclude persons ineligible for conscription (women, disabled persons, etc), and the second wouldn't even have the effect you are suggesting, since persons on non-immigrant visas sometimes _are_ subject to income tax. Heck, I don't even reside in the US, am not a citizen, and I do pay income tax on my RSUs. What gives?
As for the Chinese spy/saboteur/etc: treason will still be treason, and it's not like your country was above internment camps.
What if you're in the US on a work visa, so you do expect to pay income tax but don't expect to be conscripted into military service? What's the correct preposition for that case?
Still "subject to the jurisdiction of". US law doesn't currently have a law allowing them to be conscripted, and it would be very ill-advised to do so and it would cause a lot of diplomatic backlash, but it certainly could pass such a law if it chose to.
So people on a work visa are "subject to", specifically because of two criteria (income tax and conscription) which must both hold, at least hypothetically? What if the US passes a constitutional amendment explicitly saying that foreigners on work visas cannot be conscripted, would that, by removing the hypothetical, have the implicit effect of making such people no longer "subject to" its jurisdiction?
I think your take on this is overly complex and silly.
I think this take is overly complex and silly. If you're subject to the laws, that's that. As an exercise, go read the Federal code and put each law that might potentially be applicable to people on a work visa into a pile. I guarantee that pile will be taller than you are by the time you're done. It will certainly be larger than two random examples.
Yes. You are correct. You completely missed the point of what this subthread is about, but yes. It's clear what "subject to the laws" means to normal people.
The thread was about someone misunderstanding what "subject to the jurisdiction" meant. Someone suggested that it meant subject to US laws including conscription and income tax, another person said "what if the law in question doesn't mandate conscription of foreigners" and then Telemakhos gave a pretty confusing answer to that. At some point you dropped in to make a further confusing and argumentative comment in response to that, so I tried to clear it up. If you were just disagreeing with Telemakhos, then I apologize for misunderstanding.
> The right is concerned that Chinese-American dual citizens born in the US but raised in China might, upon reaching adulthood, act with impunity as US-citizen agents of the Chinese Communist Party.
The US seems fully committed not to learn from its past. I suppose the expectations are for expulsions and/or west-coast internment camps for Chinese-Americans should there be a hot war between the US and China. It figures, since the MAGA is all for turning back the clock.
Citizen tourism is not a real concern; good grief why do people care about fringe issues that impacts no one instead of concentration of corporate power, consolidation of wealth, and decreasing rights for citizens?
Because the people in power don't believe those last things are problems, so they distract us with the former things which actually aren't problems that they present as problems.
What terminology would you prefer to describe that real dynamic then? I don’t know that you can hand wave it away when it’s a substantial portion of the real births. I’m not even claiming it’s a problem, just not something that should be superficially dismissed in a good faith discussion.
> I used to live in a state where some new friends had told us about places that facilitated pregnant women's trips to the US solely for the purpose of staying and giving birth in the US so the child could become citizens. They then head home. I have no idea how prevalent this is.
As many as 26,000 mothers do it (birth tourism) every year.
CIS analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data to track the number of foreign-born mothers who gave birth in the United States. Researchers cross-referenced those births against federal figures of temporary visitors. They isolated foreign mothers who arrived on short-term visas, gave birth, and did not establish long-term residency in the U.S. CIS concluded that 20,000 to 26,000 births annually are attributable to women arriving on short-term tourist visas specifically to obtain citizenship for their children.
The debate is whether the USA is a Jus Soli (no s) country.
Roberts claims Jus Soli applies to the USA by looking at historical concept of the words in the constitution and the king's obligations to those on his soil. He cites historical statements by founders.
Thomas and Gorsuch rejects Jus Soli applies since it is a concept from feudal lords and serfdom which the USA did not inherit. The cite historical statements by founders.
Kavanaugh thinks congress gets to decide the meaning (within reason), so he rejects Jus Soli as well.
Jackson worries about backsliding and using this to oppress people, unsure about her legal reasoning, but seems to guess at how authors of the amendment understood the words. I would still classify her as saying USA did not inherit Jus Soli, but later codified it via amendment.
I'm sorry, but it's simply insane to appeal to the founders over Jus Soli. The founders did not write the 14th amendment. Their opinions on the matter are irrelevant.
The 14th amendment grants Jus Soli. End of story. It doesn't matter if every single founder and their forefathers were opposed to that notion. The people who drafted the 14th and ratified it were in favor of Jus Soli. They were VERY explicit about that fact. There were active debates when the 14th was drafted if it should be drafted and if it should be as broad as it is.
Thomas, Gorsuch, Alito, and Kavanaugh are all hacks for going further back into history than the drafting of the 14th.
It would be like talking about what the founders thought about alcohol when discussing the 18th amendment. Nobody cares because that amendment was written long after the founders died.
> The 14th amendment grants Jus Soli. End of story.
But it isn't the end, it then qualifies who gets Jus Soli. And that is the debate.
> The people who drafted the 14th and ratified it were in favor of Jus Soli
Thomas cites Sen. Howard and Sen. Trumbull statements in support of the claim that the 14th amendment ratifiers did not intend to grant universal Jus Solis. Is he a liar?
> ... and Kavanaugh are all hacks for going further back into history than the drafting of the 14th
Kavanaugh doesn't go back further into history, it seems like you didn't read the opinion. He spends very little time on the constitutional question.
Yes, he's quote mining to try and argue that there was some sort of confusion about the implications of the amendment. This was part of the debate about the amendment and whether or not it should be reworded. In other words, Howard and Trumbull were raising the very issues with the text that Thomas wants to take issue with.
That discussion was one which shows that the implications of the text were understood and accepted as a result of debate. It cuts against Thomas's actual argument.
Thomas is a liar. Or at very least a dishonest in his characterization.
This is a great summary! This is a case where all the opinions are quite good. I quite like Jackson’s opinion here. The framers of the 14th amendment were radical egalitarians and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.
Nah, the conservative opinions in this case aren't even worth the paper they are printed on. Every single court that saw this case decided the same way: birthright citizenship was intended to work exactly as it has been applied since its inception.
The precedent was correctly decided, as affirmed in this decision. They left the precedent stand, since it was never up for debate for any serious legal scholars. Thus, the supreme court never needed to take up this case.
The only people entertaining a challenge to the previous decision are those who wish to ethnically cleanse the United States.
So what's Thomas's point then? Do they mean to say that jurisdiction attached to soil is a feudal concept? Wtf? What IS the US jurisdiction then? Is no one under jurisdiction because there are no feudal lords obliged to serfs? What a load of nonsense.
Jurisdiction has multiple concepts, you are thinking of territorial jurisdiction. There is also personal jurisdiction, feudal jurisdiction (serfdom), political jurisdiction.
Thomas is reacting to Roberts. Roberts spends time talking about the king's obligations to those born on their land. There is also each person's obligation to the king. Roberts wants to say "we inherited common law, and under common law everyone born on the king's land immediately came under his jurisdiction, the king owed things to these people immediately (and the people owed the king)". Thomas is saying "no kings".
> What a load of nonsense.
Or, this is a complicated, multi-layered concept that goes back through 500 years of common law. It will look messy.
And so we have the whole bench of 9 people guessing and discussing the intention of the lawmakers. Did they indeed mean diplomats when they wrote "subject of the jurisdiction thereof"? If a Martian lands on the US soil and gives birth, will the offspring immediately be "subject of the jurisdiction thereof"? What was the common meaning of the word "jurisdiction" in 1868? This kind of stuff.
Citizenship means having political rights. If it's decided at some point that a martian may have political rights...then yes, as it stands, their offspring would have citizenship upon birth/ejection/hatching/transmogrification or whatever means of reproduction they use.
This is really no different than if we decided that a dolphin or a naked mole rat are able to hold political rights. If an understanding that this is possible emerges, then as a logical consequence any dolphin or naked mole rat born in US jurisdiction would be a citizen.
You are surely oversimplifying it. The amendment clearly says "born or naturalized"; can hatching or transmogrification be considered a birth? We need to look at the original meaning of the word "born" in 1868.
Also, it does not say anything about having political rights, just about being a "person", which will surely start a separate debate :)
If you read Roberts's opinion he literally explains the definition of jurisdiction as it stood when the amendment was drafted (he cites three different dictionaries) and cites floor arguments directly from the Congressional record. It's not long, takes about 15 minutes to get through.
The rest of the documents are the concurrences (Jackson) and the three, frankly insane, dissents. Thomas's is 90 pages long somehow (I couldn't get through all that one, it's properly crazy).
Here's part of the Senate debate where they discuss it. It turns out that they were extremely precise about what it meant, and they described the exceptions in great detail. It's even typewritten. The downside: you can't come away from reading this stuff and pretend like there's some legal flexibility in the term. If that's important to you, you probably shouldn't click the link.
There are other people who can be within the territorial boundary of the US but not subject to its jurisdiction. An invading army, for example. It leaves some interpretation of this question but it does not leave unlimited interpretation to the President, or even to Congress. That is the understanding of Wong Kim Ark, which overturned the law Congress passed 14 years after the ratification of the 14th amendment.
We know that because jurisdiction is such a fundamental concept that it needs no further specification. It's fundamental to any system of laws, if a jurisdiction is not defined, the system of laws is useless. Running a legal system without a jurisdiction is like running computer code without memory space.
The US legal system defined everyone in its soil to be under its jurisdiction, _except diplomats_, because of diplomatoc norms.
If an illegal immigrant kills a person while in the US, they get tried according to US law. If a diplomat kills a person in the US, they do not get tried because the US has no jurisdiction over that diplomat.
> You’re saying we need to look to the international meaning of some Latin phrase (“jus soli”).
Discussion of law discussion that uses comparison with international standards is quite common in every legal system. The sentence regarding the murder of a relative of mine had citations of Italian law, German law, some Spanish doctrine. It was also peppered with Latin terms and expressions, because Roman law had quite an influence in all Western legal systems.
So yeah, sometimes discussions of law can be complicated. This one... Ain't.
> If an illegal immigrant kills a person while in the US, they get tried according to US law. If a diplomat kills a person in the US, they do not get tried because the US has no jurisdiction over that diplomat.
Diplomats have diplomatic immunity, which is not the same thing as jurisdiction. For example, diplomatic immunity doesn't extend to a diplomat's commercial activities: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/diplomatic_immunity. So if a diplomat sells you fake Hermes bags passing them off as the real thing, you can sue them in a U.S. court. And the U.S. court will have jurisdiction.
> Discussion of law discussion that uses comparison with international standards is quite common in every legal system... So yeah, sometimes discussions of law can be complicated. This one... Ain't.
We have to look to international standards concerning latin phrases to understand what Americans meant by the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction," but that isn't "complicated?" If you say so.
> We have to look to international standards concerning latin phrases to understand what Americans meant by the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction," but that isn't "complicated?" If you say so.
It really isn't, it's literally what lawyers do for a living.
Everyone on U.S. soil is subject to the law and rule of the courts to some extent, including diplomats. Diplomats are immune to prosecution for crimes, but that's different than being outside the jurisdiction of U.S. laws.
For example, in 2013 several Russian diplomats were indicted for Medicaid fraud: https://abcnews.com/US/russian-diplomats-scammed-medicaid-15.... They had diplomatic immunity, so the U.S. had to get the Russian government to waive the diplomatic immunity. But if Russia waived the immunity, the prosecution could proceed even though the diplomats had diplomatic immunity at the time the crime was committed.
Moreover, diplomats are subject to civil liability for commercial activities beyond their office: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/diplomatic_immunity. Diplomatic immunity doesn't protect them from suits in U.S. courts related to such activities.
So reading "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" to mean "subject to the law and the rule of the courts" proves too much. The U.S. and its courts have some level of jurisdiction over everyone and everything on U.S. soil. So that makes the phrase "born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" redundant--the words "subject to the jurisdiction" aren't doing any work that the phrase "in the United States" isn't already doing.
A child of recognized foreign diplomat, if born in US soil, however, is not a US citizen at birth. And if they try to claim that later in life, it will be denied.
This has always been like that. All jus soli countries do it.
Correct. Children of diplomats born on U.S. soil aren’t covered by the 14th amendment, even though they are subject to U.S. law and can be sued in U.S. courts over many things notwithstanding diplomatic immunity.
Read Jackson’s opinion. The amendment was debated at the time and the history records show that at minimum it was intended to include all people living here who didn’t have permission to not follow laws like diplomats or invaders.
> who didn’t have permission to not follow laws like diplomats or invaders.
That doesn’t quite work, because diplomats and invaders do have to follow US laws and can be tried in U.S. courts. In Ex Parte Quirin, for example, nobody doubted that German saboteurs on U.S. soil could be prosecuted in civilian courts. And while diplomats have immunities in certain areas, they can be sued under U.S. law in U.S. courts for commercial activities conducted in the U.S.
If “subject to the jurisdiction” means the U.S. has some sort of jurisdiction over a foreign national, then children of ambassadors and foreign soldiers would have birthright citizenship. So there must be an additional step or wrinkle to get from the word “jurisdiction” to the exceptions that are recognized.
German saboteurs on us soil are certainly subject to us jurisdiction. If they had kids while here the kids would be citizens according to the 14th. Wong Kim talks of invaders who are working under a different set of laws because they’re part of a military invasion, not a clandestine operation. They can’t be tried because there is no American presence on the invaded territory. I think you’re stretching the definition of jurisdiction with the diplomat stuff. Sure they’re expected to follow laws, but with only a few exceptions if they break laws they just got sent home, not imprisoned. They’re not really subject to our jurisdiction. Being able to withdraw our invitation isn’t the same as having jurisdiction.
> Wong Kim talks of invaders who are working under a different set of laws because they’re part of a military invasion, not a clandestine operation. They can’t be tried because there is no American presence on the invaded territory.
Whether the U.S. has jurisdiction over territory has nothing to do with whether it can enforce its jurisdiction as a practical matter. If someone blew up a court in a particular district, that would not mean that the court, as a legal entity, ceased to have jurisdiction. By your reasoning, if Mexico invades Texas, children of Mexican servicemen born on U.S. soil would qualify as U.S. citizens. I don't think that's correct.
> I think you’re stretching the definition of jurisdiction with the diplomat stuff. Sure they’re expected to follow laws, but with only a few exceptions if they break laws they just got sent home, not imprisoned.
Being immune from prosecution is different from not being subject to the law. Diplomats are subject to the laws just like anyone else. They have immunity from prosecution for crimes. But the U.S. can request the immunity be revoked, and if that happens, they can be prosecuted for crimes that occurred while the had immunity.
And diplomats can be sued in civil cases in U.S. courts for their commercial activities. They are very much subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, even if we can't always prosecute them for crimes.
"US jurisdiction" also includes foreign heads of state residing in, and present in, their own country. I don't think a theoretical definition of jurisdiction is tenable; only a realist one.
Illegal immigrants are also working under a different set of laws because they are citizens of another country. Ask yourself this: where would an illegal immigrant apply for a passport? Just like an invading army, citizens of other countries are obligated to follow the laws of the countries where they have citizenship in addition to any laws that may be imposed on them by being present in the US.
Diplomats are subject to the jurisdiction of the US, that's why we have immunity agreements and we can order them out of the country. We also don't recognize the children of invading armies as citizens. Native Americans don't automatically get citizenship from the constitution. They get it from an act of congress in 1924.
They are not subject to jurisdiction, where the hell did you get that idea? If a diplomat does something that would be a crime in the US, they are _asked_ to leave via diplomatic channels. They usually leave on their own. If they were under US jurisdiction, they could be TRIED in the US, but that basically never happens. The only few exceptions you will find to this were either cases where a) the person was not really immune to begin with b) their country waived the immunity or c) the immunity lapsed because the person did not leave the country in a reasonable timeframe after being asked to
If a diplomat is going on a shooting spree they can be shot and killed with no ensuing issues as a result of US law enforcement enforcing laws in the moment. If they are robbing a seven-eleven they can be arrested and held until arraignment. They can be ordered to remain in their home, aka house arrest. They can be ordered to leave and they have no option to remain in the country. The US constitution does not grant diplomats immunity it is something we have agreed to via treaty and law. They are 100% subject to our laws, that's why our law granting them immunity applies.
That flies in the face of what I understand is true about diplomatic immunity. Citation required.
As a less extreme example, diplomats can and DO park their vehicles illegally: in No Parking zones, Handicap Only zones, and blocking fire hydrants. Diplomat plates render the police unable to ticket them. It's civil not criminal courts, but for the exact reason that they are immune to our laws.
A diplomatic vehicle that is a safety hazard can be towed. A city/state cannot enforce any fines, but they can definitely clear any safety or traffic related issues.
I would start with Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and go from there.
IANAL, but it seems to me like the US could totally pass laws regulating Germans on German soil. It just couldn't enforce them in US courts (short of kidnapping Germans from German soil, or luring them to the US somehow). So it would be mostly pointless but not impossible.
Also, multiple countries have laws claiming universal jurisdiction. As I understand it, French laws against genocide denial claim to apply universally.
From your own discussion, it seems like "subject to the jurisdiction" should be understood as "can be judged in court". Diplomat is immune = can't be judged = not subject to jurisdiction. Immunity lifted = can be judged = subject to jurisdiction.
And also, depending on the crime (and acknowledging it is easier in some cases than others), countries have often agreed to prosecute the diplomat in their home country.
There's also the fact that Diplomatic Immunity is also a lot narrower than people think. Consular Officers are generally not covered by it, but then you get in to the de facto. Okay, NYPD sees consular plates and doesn't ticket a vehicle. Or tickets it but there's no enforcement, because "maybe it's the Ambassador's vehicle". And then a city, state or country is generally not going to make a scene that affects ambassadorial relations over a few hundred, or thousand, dollars of parking tickets.
A popular solution in my country, at least for less formal restaurants and bars (and even nightclubs) is for each customer to have their own tab, which gets marked by waiters and stays with the customer. In those places, it's also the norm that you pay your tab at the cashier prior to leaving, and waiters don't have to handle with money.
Cool story bro. But this shouldn't require a notary.
A sane country would handle this with a handful standardized forms of incorporation with clear rules, so that the majority of use cases that a normie might need is covered. All of this should be a few clicks on a gov webpage at most. Maybe some fee/deposit/whatever.
Lawyers and notaries should only start showing up when people want complicated setups.
(Yes I'm bitter with German notaries because so far they only took my money for some very mid service and couldn't even take two seconds of their time to answer an email with normal German words or clear instructions.)
This holds for Belgium too. The notary class here are overpaid self-dealing monopolists selling you mediocre service at best. We were just required to pay 801€ for a bog standard piece of paper. A web form would have served us better and more quickly. At least they've recently become a bit less hereditary than the last 200 years.
In my country, we have public exams to get into Uni, with the ones for high demand majors being very competitive, but performance in that exam is not a good predictor of academic performance.
The guy who got into my uni class as #2 in that exam dropped out after a few semesters because he couldn't beat calculus. The #4 took several extra semesters to graduate despite not working/not interning. Several others in the top third struggled through. We had _maybe_ 2 or 3 guys who straight-A'd the entire major.
I myself got in as #17 and still failed a few courses. Thankfully no one cared throughout my professional career.
Unlike the oil dependency system, where there's actual scarcity of the thing you need (oil), there's nothing special about building solar panels that locks you to China. Basically any country could build it, but they need to figure out how to build stuff in general (as opposed to outsourcing like the last three decades)
