The legal status of citizenship is constitutive in that it determines the boundaries of formal membership of a nation-state and, by implication, the lines of exclusion. The ways in which Australian law has defined membership over time – from subject status to citizen – provide a case study of the factors at play in understanding citizenship within a constitutional setting. We see that the constitution of citizenship may be a complex and unsettled evolutionary process.

Elisa Arcioni, Constituting Citizenship – The Evolution of Australian Citizenship Law, SSRN Papers, 2020.