Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The U.S. Supreme Court held in Civil Rights Cases (1883)[6] that the amendment was limited to "state action" and, therefore, did not authorize the Congress to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals or organizations.

"[7] The Radical Republicans who advanced the Thirteenth Amendment hoped to ensure broad civil and human rights for the newly freed people—but its scope was disputed before it even went into effect.

[8] The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment wanted these principles enshrined in the Constitution to protect the new Civil Rights Act from being declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and also to prevent a future Congress from altering it by a mere majority vote.

[24][25] The Civil Rights Act of 1866 had granted citizenship to all people born in the United States if they were not subject to a foreign power, and this clause of the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized this rule.

According to Garrett Epps, professor of constitutional law at the University of Baltimore, "Only one group is not 'subject to the jurisdiction' [of the United States] – accredited foreign diplomats and their families, who can be expelled by the federal government but not arrested or tried.

[26]There are varying interpretations of the original intent of Congress and of the ratifying states, based on statements made during the congressional debate over the amendment, as well as the customs and understandings prevalent at that time.

[33][34] Senator James Rood Doolittle of Wisconsin asserted that all Native Americans were subject to United States jurisdiction, so that the phrase "Indians not taxed" would be preferable,[35] but Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lyman Trumbull and Howard disputed this, arguing that the federal government did not have full jurisdiction over Native American tribes, which govern themselves and make treaties with the United States.

As the Court has held before, such due process "demands only that the law shall not be unreasonable, arbitrary, or capricious, and that the means selected shall have a real and substantial relation to the object sought to be attained.

[78] Furthermore, as observed by Justice John M. Harlan II in his dissenting opinion in Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 541 (1961), quoting Hurtado v. California, 110 U.S. 516, 532 (1884), "the guaranties of due process, though having their roots in Magna Carta's 'per legem terrae' and considered as procedural safeguards 'against executive usurpation and tyranny', have in this country 'become bulwarks also against arbitrary legislation'.

[81] The Supreme Court stated in Zadvydas v. Davis (2001) freedom from imprisonment-from government custody, detention, or other forms of physical restraint-lies at the heart of the liberty that the Due Process clause protects.

[88] In Meyer v. Nebraska (1923),[89] the Court stated that the "liberty" protected by the Due Process Clause [w]ithout doubt ... denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints ... and which also recognizes, what a reasonable and sensitive judgment must, that certain interests require particularly careful scrutiny of the state needs asserted to justify their abridgment.

[103] The above-mentioned broad view of liberty embraced by dissenting Justice John Marshall Harlan II in Poe v. Ullman (1961) was adopted by the Supreme Court in Griswold v.

For example, such process is due when a government agency seeks to terminate civil service employees, expel a student from public school, or cut off a welfare recipient's benefits.

[118] However, the Supreme Court has subsequently held that most provisions of the Bill of Rights apply to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment under a doctrine called "incorporation".

[143] In the decades following the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court overturned laws barring blacks from juries (Strauder v. West Virginia, 1880)[144] or discriminating against Chinese Americans in the regulation of laundry businesses (Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 1886),[135] as violations of the Equal Protection Clause.

However, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896),[145] the Supreme Court held that the states could impose racial segregation so long as they provided similar facilities—the formation of the "separate but equal" doctrine.

By the early 20th century, the Equal Protection Clause had been eclipsed to the point that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. dismissed it as "the usual last resort of constitutional arguments.

The Court reasoned that illegal aliens and their children, though not citizens of the United States or Texas, are people "in any ordinary sense of the term" and, therefore, are afforded Fourteenth Amendment protections.

In Shaw v. Reno (1993),[176] the Court prohibited a North Carolina plan aimed at creating majority-black districts to balance historic under-representation in the state's congressional delegations.

[180] In League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry (2006),[181] the Court ruled that House majority leader Tom DeLay's Texas redistricting plan intentionally diluted the votes of Latinos and thus violated the Equal Protection Clause.

[193] The amendment failed in the Senate, partly because radical Republicans foresaw that states would be able to use ostensibly race-neutral criteria, such as educational and property qualifications, to disenfranchise the freed slaves without negative consequence.

[214] Between Reconstruction and 2021, Section 3 was invoked only once, being used to block Socialist Party of America member Victor L. Berger of Wisconsin—convicted of violating the Espionage Act for opposing U.S. entry into World War I—from assuming his seat in the House of Representatives in 1919 and 1920.

[231] Couy Griffin, an Otero County, New Mexico commissioner, was barred from holding public office for life in September 2022 by District Court Judge Francis Mathew, who found his participation as the leader of the Cowboys for Trump group during the attack on the Capitol was an act of insurrection under Section 3.

[242][243][244] On December 19, 2023, in the case Anderson v. Griswold, the Colorado Supreme Court held that Trump was disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

[258][259][260] Also on December 19, 2023, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick suggested that President Joe Biden could be removed from the ballot via Section 3 due to his immigration policy having permitted "invasion".

[289]In the final years of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era that followed, Congress repeatedly debated the rights of black former slaves freed by the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment, the latter of which had formally abolished slavery.

The Black Codes attempted to return ex-slaves to something like their former condition by, among other things, restricting their movement, forcing them to enter into year-long labor contracts, prohibiting them from owning firearms, and preventing them from suing or testifying in court.

[303] This amendment passed the House, but was blocked in the Senate by a coalition of Radical Republicans led by Charles Sumner, who believed the proposal a "compromise with wrong", and Democrats opposed to black rights.

[307] For example, Thaddeus Stevens, a leader of the disappointed Radical Republicans, said: "I find that we shall be obliged to be content with patching up the worst portions of the ancient edifice, and leaving it, in many of its parts, to be swept through by the tempests, the frosts, and the storms of despotism.