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Full-Text Articles in Law
Madisonian Equal Protection, James S. Liebman, Brandon L. Garrett
Madisonian Equal Protection, James S. Liebman, Brandon L. Garrett
Faculty Scholarship
James Madison is considered the "Father of the Constitution," but his progeny disappointed him. It had no effective defense against self-government's "mortal disease" – the oppression of minorities by local majorities. This Article explores Madison's writings in an effort to reclaim the deep conception of equal protection at the core of his constitutional aspirations. At the Convention, Madison passionately advocated a radical structural approach to equal protection under which the "extended republic's" broadly focused legislature would have monitored local laws and vetoed those that were parochial and "unjust." Rejecting this proposal to structure equal protection into the "interior" operation of …
Equality And Diversity: The Eighteenth-Century Debate About Equal Protection And Equal Civil Rights, Philip A. Hamburger
Equality And Diversity: The Eighteenth-Century Debate About Equal Protection And Equal Civil Rights, Philip A. Hamburger
Faculty Scholarship
Living, as we do, in a world in which our discussions of equality often lead back to the desegregation decisions, to the Fourteenth Amendment, and to the antislavery debates of the 1830s, we tend to allow those momentous events to dominate our understanding of the ideas of equal protection and equal civil rights. Indeed, historians have frequently asserted that the idea of equal protection first developed in the 1830s in discussions of slavery and that it otherwise had little history prior to its adoption into the U.S. Constitution. Long before the Fourteenth Amendment, however – long before even the 1830s …