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Recent Equal Protection Decisions--Fundamental Right To Travel Or "Newcomers" As A Suspect Class?, Thomas R. Mccoy

Vanderbilt Law Review

The thesis of this article is two-fold. First, the Court's acceptance and application of the Shapiro-Dunn reasoning in Maricopa unintentionally demonstrated the intellectual inadequacy of that much-discussed line of reasoning. Read together, the Court's opinions in Shapiro, Dunn, and Maricopa establish a set of theoretical principles whose derivation is logically defective, whose consistent application would require unacceptable results in many other cases,and whose existence now forces the Court to distinguish arbitrarily other cases that, in terms of those theoretical principles, simply are not distinguishable from Shapiro, Dunn, and Maricopa. Secondly, despite the logical inadequacy and practical disutility of the theoretical …