Citizenship, Public and Private

Knop develops private international law as the private side of citizenship. She shows that although individuals think of citizenship as public, private international law covers some of the same ground. Private international law also harks back to a historical conception of the legal citizen as someone who could sue and be sued, and someone who belonged to a community of shared or common law that was not necessarily a territorial community. She demonstrates that Anglo-Canadian private international law has particular value as private citizenship in a post-9/11 world because its treatment of enemy aliens, illegal immigrants, and members of religious immigrant groups and other minorities offers examples of actually existing cosmopolitan within the common law.