This act, a companion piece to the Fourteenth Amendment, was approved on July 27, 1868. The law allowed Americans to voluntarily give up their citizenship. Though it did not provide specific requirements to do that, subsequent court cases, such as that of Nellie Grant Sartoris, ruled that marriage to an alien was a voluntary expatriation. Further clarifications from rulings maintained that a married woman could lose her citizenship if she lived abroad with her alien spouse or if her marriage automatically bestowed upon her the nationality of her husband.