Akron Law Review, Vol. 57 [2025], Iss. 1, Art. 2 52 AKRON LAW R EVIEW [57:49 whether a person is recognized as a U.S. citizen. State recognition is necessary but insufficient for a person to secure federal recognition of a claim to citizenship, because federal agencies and courts can revisit the facts of birth and deny a claim to U.S. citizenship recognized by a state government. As a result, delayed birth registration also presents a new model of federal-state cooperation: 12 dual-concurrence federalism, in which the state and federal governments must both accept the facts of birth for an individual to be recognized as a citizen and to gain the benefits of citizenship. Finally, Part V reflects on the relationship between statelessness and citizenship in the United States. It argues that when a person is entitled to citizenship in the United States but is not recognized by the U.S. government or any other state as a citizen, international law offers a term for that person’s citizenship status: stateless. 13 The definition of a stateless person is someone whom “no State considers to be its national under the operation of its law” 14 —a situation that includes when a person ought to be recognized as a national. Because most births in the United States are registered promptly, the experiences of individuals whose births are unregistered offer insight into the impact of the federal birth registration system on individuals’ access to recognition of their entitlement to U.S. citizenship. II. BIRTH REGISTRATION Birth registration is “the continuous, permanent and universal recording within the civil registry of the occurrence and characteristics of birth, in accordance with the national legal requirements.” 15 Birth registration is key to establishing legal identity: “the basic characteristics of an individual’s identity, for example, name, sex, and place and date of birth, conferred through registration and the issuance of a certificate by an 12. Bridget Fahey, Coordinated Rulemaking and Cooperative Federalism’s Administrative Law, 132 YALE L.J. 1320, 1323 (2023) (noting the absence of theory for administrative law in cooperative federalism). 13. While this situation may sometimes be referred to as de facto statelessness, many scholars consider this term unhelpful, because de facto statelessness has no legal definition or impact, and in many instances are best considered to be, simply, stateless, under a correct application of the definition of statelessness, as explored further in Part VI. See generally, LAURA VAN WAAS, NATIONALITY MATTERS: S TATELESSNESS UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW 20-25 (2008). 14. Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons art. 1, opened for signature Sept. 28, 1954, 360 U.N.T.S. 117 [Hereinafter, Stateless Convention] . 15. Off. of the U.N. High Comm’r for Hum. Rts., Birth Registration and the Right of Everyone to Recognition Everywhere as a Person Before the Law, ¶ 4, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/27/22 (June 17, 2014). https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/akronlawreview/vol57/iss1/2 4