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From Bad To Worse?: Some Early Speculation About The Roberts Court & The Constitutional Fate Of The Poor, Andy Siegel

Faculty Articles

Conventional wisdom - supported in large measure by blackletter law - suggests that discrimination on the basis of wealth or class largely escapes constitutional sanction. If the conventional wisdom is correct, then issues of class and equal protection represent one area in which advocates of a more robust individual rights jurisprudence have little to fear from the Roberts Court. In this essay, prepared for a Symposium on "The Roberts Court and Equal Protection: Gender, Race, and Class," Professor Siegel offers a contrary view. He makes three related observations. First, existing caselaw is more complex than usually acknowledged, offering substantial interstitial …