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Full-Text Articles in Fourteenth Amendment
Originalism And The Other Desegregation Decision, Ryan C. Williams
Originalism And The Other Desegregation Decision, Ryan C. Williams
All Faculty Scholarship
Critics of originalist approaches to constitutional interpretation often focus on the “intolerable” results that originalism would purportedly require. Although originalists have disputed many such claims, one contention that they have been famously unable to answer satisfactorily is the claim that their theory is incapable of justifying the Supreme Court’s famous 1954 decision in Bolling v. Sharpe. Decided the same day as Brown v. Board of Education, Bolling is the case that is most closely associated with the Supreme Court’s so-called “reverse incorporation” doctrine, which interprets the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment as if it effectively "incorporates" the Fourteenth …
Willful [Color-] Blindness: The Supreme Court's Equal Protection Of Ascription, Aaron J. Shuler
Willful [Color-] Blindness: The Supreme Court's Equal Protection Of Ascription, Aaron J. Shuler
Aaron J Shuler
Rogers Smith in his "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America," warns of novel legal systems reconstituting ascriptive American inequality. The post-Warren Courts' approach to Equal Protection, specifically their unwillingness to consider disparate impact and the difference between invidious and benign practices, betrays an "ironic innocence" as described by James Baldwin to a history of racial discrimination and domination, and a disavowal of a hiearchy that the Court perpetuates.
Inextricably Political: Race, Membership And Tribal Sovereignty, Sarah Krakoff
Inextricably Political: Race, Membership And Tribal Sovereignty, Sarah Krakoff
Sarah Krakoff
Courts address equal protection questions about the distinct legal treatment of American Indian tribes in the following dichotomous way: are classifications concerning American Indians “racial or political?” If the classification is political (i.e. based on federally recognized tribal status or membership in a federally recognized tribe) then courts will not subject it to heightened scrutiny. If the classification is racial rather than political, then courts may apply heightened scrutiny. This article challenges the dichotomy itself. The legal categories “tribe” and “tribal member” are themselves political, and reflect the ways in which tribes and tribal members have been racialized by U.S. …