Shocker: Fundamentalist law school publishes birther paper

Regent University, the legacy of TV evangelist and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson, has published a remarkable paper in its Law Review. The paper by John Ira Jones IV is titled: "Natural Born Shenanigans: How the Birther Movement Exacerbated Confusion Over the Constitution's Natural Born Citizen Requirement".

The thesis of the paper is that inept birther lawsuits have poisoned the well for a legitimate consideration of the eligibility of Barack Obama to be president of the United States and that Barack Obama is actually not eligible. The inept birther litigants enumerated in the paper include:

• Philip Berg, attorney (Berg v. Obama and other cases)
• Orly Taitz, attorney (Keyes v. Bowen and other cases)
• Christopher Earl Strunk pro se (Strunk v. NY Board of Elections, and other cases)

He fails to list a some other losing birther litigants, all represented by attorney Mario Apuzzo and rather he uses Apuzzo as one of his sources, and thereby turns what might have been an interesting subject into a farce. Jones embraces the same junk birther theories promoted across the Internet by Apuzzo, and rejected by at least 11 courts (and on appeal) just since 2008.

Jones selects only the sources that help his thesis (that Obama is ineligible) ignoring the flood of material clearly pointing in the other way. And in fact, Jones says nothing that he couldn't have gotten and probably did get from a birther web site. He relegates the elephant in the room regarding Vattel's Law of Nations translation to a footnote, and in the footnote waves the problem away. Either Jones is being dishonest with his sources, or he did no independent research, relying only on birther predigested sources.

Regent University is located in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Federal district judge Gibney in Virginia said in the case of Tisdale v. Obama:

It is well settled that those born in the United States are considered natural born citizens.

Nevertheless, this one law student didn't get the memo, and his faculty adviser did a shoddy job in allowing this article's publication.