DISABILITIES OF AMERICAN WOMEN MARRIED ABROAD. FOREIGN TREATIES OF THE UNITED STATES IN CONFLICT WITH STATE LAWS RELATIVE TO THE TRANSMISSION APPENDIX: CONVENTIONS OF NATURALIZATION AND FOR THE ABOLITION OF OF MARRIED WOMEN. BY WILLIAM BEACH LAWRENCE, LL.D., 66 AUTHOR OF "LAWRENCE'S WHEATON," AND OF THE COMMENTAIRE SUR LE DROIT INTERNATIONAL," ETC. NEW YORK: BAKER, VOORHIS & COMPANY, 66 NASSAU STREET. 1871. ADVERTISEMENT. IN preparing this brochure for the press, our original intention was merely to present, in an accessible form, the letter which we addressed last year to Governor Hoffman, soliciting his attention to an anomaly in the laws of New York, by which female citizens of the United States were subjected by the act of contracting foreign marriages, to the disinherison of their offspring, while no such consequences followed to his descendants from the marriage abroad of a male citizen. In the course of our investigations, we could not but remark that the operation of the Naturalization Convention had been thoroughly examined by the ablest jurists of England, and, that in advance of the conclusion of the treaty, important legislative changes, to meet the alterations which it was foreseen it must induce in the existing laws, were made by Parliament; while, on the other hand, no attention has been given in the United States, either by Congress or the State legislatures, to the questions respecting descent, succession, title to property, and other matters connected with the political status of individuals, to which our Expatriation Act and the conventions entered into not only with Great Britain, but with Germany and other States, must inevitably give rise. Nor do they, indeed, appear to have ever been considered by American jurists and publicists. It is not merely the interests of American women married abroad, who are divested of all nationality, other than that of their husbands, and subjected to the same disabilities of alienage, which already existed on the part of their children, that will be affected by the new international code. No double nationality being longer permitted, there can be no descent or succession of real property, where the rules respecting alienage are maintained, from or to members of the same family established in different countries; while, as the treaties permit a naturalized citizen to resume his original nationality at pleasure, or by complying with certain prescribed formalities, and again to change it, as his temporary interests may dictate, it is evident that, without the entire abrogation of the droit d'aubaine, titles to real estate must be exposed to inextricable confusion. Moreover, in directing our attention to the conventions which the United |