Tainted Law? Why History Cannot provide the Justification for Abandoning Ius Sanguinis Jannis Panagiotidis In his thought provoking piece, Costica Dumbrava rejects ius sanguinis as 1) historically tainted, 2) increasingly inadequate and 3) normatively unnecessary. In my response, I will mainly focus on the first, historical dimension. Drawing on examples from the case of Germany, often used as the prime example to show what is wrong with ius sanguinis, I will contest the idea that ius sanguinis as such has been discredited by history. Regarding the second and third points, I will restrict myself to the following brief observations, which are broadly in line with Rainer Bauböck’s comments: while the issue of ART and citizenship raised by Dumbrava is indeed intriguing, I would go along with his own observation that this is more about the determination of legal parentage than about ius sanguinis, and with Bauböck’s emphasis on social rather than biological parenthood. Discarding the ius sanguinis principle due to certain specific cases it might not adequately cover would mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I am also simultaneously intrigued and sceptical regarding the suggestion to introduce a sort of ‘a-national’, universal status for children. Against the backdrop of recent historical research into children as the object of nationalist contestation and agitation during the first half of the twentieth century, a scenario in which ‘children belonged more rightfully to national communities than to their own parents’, this idea appears intuitively attractive.1 Having said that, one can turn the argument around and see the suggested disconnection of parent and child citizenship as another attempt to claim children from their parents, this time on behalf on an imaginary inter- or supranational community. Yet in a world still (and for the foreseeable future) structured by nation states, where most so-called human rights are in fact citizens’ rights, 1 Zahra, T. (2008), Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 3; See also: Zahra, T. (2011), The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 20. © The Author(s) 2018 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating Transformations of National Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92719-0_18 91