Definition
Citizens is the plural of citizen — persons who hold the status of membership in a political community, whether a nation-state or, in American law, a state within the federal union. The legal significance of citizen status operates across several distinct frameworks:
1. Constitutional citizenship. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside. This dual citizenship — federal and state — is the foundation of constitutional rights doctrine. The word "citizens" in this context refers collectively to that class of rights-holders.
2. Federal diversity jurisdiction. Article III of the Constitution and 28 U.S.C. § 1332 authorize federal courts to hear cases between citizens of different states. Here, "citizens" carries a technical meaning: for individuals, it tracks domicile, not mere residence or physical presence. For corporations, citizenship is defined by state of incorporation and principal place of business — a statutory gloss with no analog in the constitutional text.
3. Citizens as rights-bearing class. Constitutional provisions addressing speech, assembly, the right to vote, the right to travel, and the Privileges or Immunities Clause all reference "citizens" as the protected class. The scope of who counts — and whether non-citizens share parallel protections under the Due Process Clause — is a recurring area of constitutional litigation.
4. Citizens as enforcement actors. Federal and state statutes increasingly authorize private citizens to bring enforcement actions — citizen suits — against regulatory violators or against agencies that have failed to act. In this usage, "citizens" functions as a standing category defined by statute, not constitutional status.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of citizen; persons who are members of a state or nation by birth, naturalization, or other recognized means.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Citizens" — plural of citizen; persons who are members of a state, entitled to its privileges and subject to its authority; distinguished from aliens and foreigners.
The gap between common and legal meaning is real but subtle. In ordinary English, "citizens" simply means members of a country. In legal usage, the term is precision-loaded: it triggers specific constitutional provisions, determines federal court jurisdiction, defines who holds certain rights as against non-citizens, and, in administrative law, identifies who has standing to sue under citizen-suit provisions. A researcher who treats "citizens" as merely meaning "people" will miss these load-bearing distinctions.
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Common Confusion
Citizens vs. persons. The Constitution uses both words deliberately. "Persons" is broader — it encompasses corporations, non-citizens, and others — while "citizens" denotes a narrower class with specific protections. Conflating the two in historical sources can lead to misreading the scope of a constitutional guarantee.
Citizens vs. residents. In diversity jurisdiction, citizenship tracks domicile (intent to remain indefinitely), not mere residence. A person can reside in a state without being its citizen for § 1332 purposes, and courts have litigated this distinction extensively. Historical sources that use the terms interchangeably should be read with caution.
Citizens vs. subjects. In British and early American legal sources, "subject" was the operative term for a person owing allegiance to the Crown. Post-independence American law replaced "subject" with "citizen" as the foundational membership concept — a shift with substantive implications that Rapalje & Lawrence and contemporaneous dictionaries sometimes reflect imprecisely.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter "citizens" in sources spanning constitutional law, federal procedure, administrative enforcement, and campaign finance, and the term carries different freight in each. Several traps are worth flagging:
Historical sources conflate citizenship tiers. Pre-Fourteenth Amendment sources — and some post-Amendment sources through the Reconstruction era — reflect contested and sometimes incompatible understandings of state versus national citizenship. The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause narrowed the federal citizenship concept significantly; sources written before, during, or after that decision may use "citizens" to mean quite different things.
Diversity jurisdiction citizenship has a peculiar doctrinal history. The requirement of complete diversity, the treatment of corporations, the edge cases involving partnerships and unincorporated associations — none of these are obvious from the constitutional text. Researchers working with historical treatises or older procedural materials should verify how the source defines citizenship for jurisdictional purposes.
Citizen suits are a modern statutory category. The citizen-suit device — authorizing any citizen to sue for enforcement of environmental, labor, or other regulatory statutes — is largely a post-1970 development. It has its own standing doctrine, notice requirements, and interaction with agency enforcement discretion. This usage of "citizens" is entirely absent from historical dictionaries, including Rapalje & Lawrence, and must be sourced from statutory text and modern case law.
Citizens United changed the constitutional landscape for "citizens" in campaign finance. The decision extended First Amendment protection to corporate expenditures, effectively dissolving the citizen/non-citizen distinction in that context while intensifying debate about what constitutional citizenship means as a category of rights-holding.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence does not provide a substantive entry for "citizens" as a standalone legal term. The source material indexed under this headword addresses Scots practice — the calling of a party to an action — and the citation of authorities, neither of which bears on citizenship doctrine. This is an indexing artifact, not a gap in the law. Researchers should not draw any inference from Rapalje & Lawrence's silence on the merits of citizenship as a legal concept.
The absence of a developed entry in Rapalje & Lawrence is itself informative: late nineteenth-century American legal dictionaries frequently treated "citizen" and "citizenship" as constitutional and political concepts addressed more fully in treatises and constitutional commentaries than in practice-oriented legal dictionaries. Cooley's Constitutional Limitations and Kent's Commentaries are the period sources where the operative doctrine was developed and debated. For diversity jurisdiction citizenship specifically, Story's Commentaries on the Constitution provide the foundational analysis.
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Jurisdictional Note
Citizenship doctrine is primarily federal and constitutional, but states define their own citizenship criteria for purposes of state constitutional provisions and some statutory benefits. State citizenship for Fourteenth Amendment purposes turns on domicile within the state, not on any formal state declaration or act. In diversity jurisdiction, the federal courts apply a uniform federal standard regardless of how individual states define their own membership categories.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Citizen Suits in Environmental Law — Standing, Notice, and Diligent Prosecution (The Law Mind Environmental & Energy Law Encyclopedia)
Environmental Enforcement — Citizen Suits, Penalties, and Criminal Prosecution (The Law Mind Administrative Law & Government Encyclopedia)
Campaign Finance Regulation — Contributions, Expenditures, and Citizens United (The Law Mind Administrative Law & Government Encyclopedia)
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