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The Antebellum Political Background Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Garrett Epps

All Faculty Scholarship

Understanding the Fourteenth Amendment is the key question of Constitutional law, both as it pertains to individual rights and, in many areas, as it relates to questions of Congressional power as opposed to the reserved powers of the states. The Amendment is often disaggregated and read clause by clause - but the intellectual and political background of its framers suggests that the Amendment in fact forms a coherent whole and that reading it as a whole might be a fertile source of new meanings. The Amendment was written by politicians who had spent their careers deeply involved in anti-slavery politics. …