Title: Persons and citizens in constitutional thought
Abstract: Persons or citizens: Aligned or opposing concepts?The ideas of citizenship and personhood have an ambiguous relationship in constitutional thought.Often, they are understood as aligned, even as identical.Claims for " equal citizenship " and " democratic citizenship " are, in effect, claims on behalf of the rights and recognition of individuals qua persons.American constitutional theorist Kenneth Karst made this presumed equivalence plain when he wrote that the principle of equal citizenship protects the " crucial interest in being treated by the society as a person, one who belongs." 1 Frequently, though, citizenship and personhood are regarded as opposing concepts.Whereas citizenship references national belonging and its associated rights, personhood evokes the rights and dignity of individuals independent of national status.Personhood stands for the universal, in contrast to citizenship, which is ultimately exclusionary.The most well-known exponent of this view is Alexander Bickel, who eschewed a citizenship-centric constitutionalism on grounds it was " regressive " and " parochial " .He maintained that " the authentic voice of the American Constitution " fi nds expression through its protection of persons. 2 Much of the ambiguity of the personhood -citizenship relationship results from the multivalence of the idea of citizenship itself.Analytically, the term is used to indicate both relations among existing members of a political community and the process of constituting that community in the fi rst place.Normatively, citizenship is understood as committed to universalism within the community, but in its community-constitutive mode, it is associated with bounded national commitments.Some citizenship proponents regard citizenship as a concept that seeks to mediate between universality and boundedness and, ultimately, to accommodate them; in this view, that is precisely citizenship's function and its value.Citizenship is thus represented as personhood instantiated or concretized in a particular political communityas