Titles of Nobility Amendment

[1] It would strip United States citizenship from any citizen who accepted a title of nobility from an "emperor, king, prince or foreign power".

If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain, any title of nobility or honour, or shall, without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them.

One theory for why the Congress proposed the amendment is that it was in response to the 1803 marriage of Napoleon Bonaparte's younger brother, Jerome, and Betsy Patterson of Baltimore, Maryland, who gave birth to a boy for whom she wanted aristocratic recognition from France.

A law, passed April 20, 1818, placed official responsibility for overseeing the amendment process into the hands of the Secretary of State, where it remained until 1950.

The error arose in 1815 when the Philadelphia printing house of Bioren and Duane published, under a government contract, a five-volume set titled Laws of the United States.

The text also included a statement (in § 1346) that the Titles of Nobility Amendment had not been adopted "probably from a growing sense that it is wholly unnecessary".

As included in that compilation, the Thirteenth Amendment would strip an individual of United States citizenship if they accept any title of nobility or honor.

Although some people claim that state publication of the erroneous Thirteenth Amendment makes it valid, Article V of the Constitution does not so provide.

[23] In a 2004 case, Sibley v. Culliver, a federal district court found that the defendant's invocation of this amendment worked to his detriment.

The court took note of documents produced by the defendant, a convicted murderer who submitted documents in support of his appeal claiming that it rendered his conviction invalid:These documents allege in great detail a complex conspiracy by an illegal monopoly, the American Bar Association, which resulted in a take-over of the judicial systems of this country, both federal and state, by the ABA and its related entities, including the Alabama State Bar Association and Alabama's Unified Court System.

Since lawyers and judges accept the titles "Esquire"/"The Honorable", it is argued, they are not citizens and the entire judicial system is illegal.

The Court interprets Belt's claim of a noble title and another nationality as further indications of his attempt to renounce his citizenship and therefore contest the Government's ability to keep him imprisoned.

The current Thirteenth Amendment does not resemble the one Casteel cites, nor is he correct that a lawyer's license to practice is granted by a foreign power.