Fourteenth Amendment Commons^™

Disability And Constitutional Legitimacy, Katherine A. Macfarlane

Washington Law Review

Disability classifications can take one of two forms. The more familiar form targets people with disabilities on account of their disability and harms them. This type of government classification receives deferential rational basis review and is therefore difficult to challenge. But government action that benefits people with disabilities also classifies on the basis of disability and receives rational basis review. This Article focuses on classifications that provide preferential treatment to disabled people precisely because of their disability—through disability affirmative action programs—and argues that their legitimacy is bolstered, not weakened, by the rational basis standard. It does so by distinguishing the …

Facing State-Created Danger In Facial Recognition Technology, Esha Jain

Washington Law Review

When the police wrongfully arrest someone, that person faces distinct harms. Various scholarship, news articles, and studies document that AI-powered facial recognition technology (FRT) disproportionately misidentifies individuals from marginalized racial groups when used irresponsibly. Many of those sources indicate that police reliance on FRT without adequate vetting results in wrongful arrests. Yet law enforcement continues to misuse FRT.

This Comment contends that the 42 U.S.C. § 1983 state-created danger doctrine offers a potential remedy for plaintiffs harmed by police reliance on FRT. To prevail under this doctrine, plaintiffs must prove affirmative conduct, deliberate indifference, and proximate causation. If successful, these …

Beyond Equality To Belonging: The Missing Value In Equal Protection Law Involving Education, Danieli Evans

Washington Law Review

Belonging is a fundamental need without which people cannot function optimally. Accordingly, school belonging—students’ perceptions of mattering or feeling cared about, accepted, respected and valued by faculty, staff, and peers—impacts students’ well-being, academic motivation and outcomes.

Equal Protection jurisprudence governing education largely overlooks the value of school belonging. Instead, it centers on a formal conception of equality, or an “anti-classification” principle, which essentially prohibits purposeful discrimination based on a fixed set of suspect traits. This formalistic “anti-classification” approach permits many policies and practices that undermine students’ sense of school belonging and inhibits schools from taking certain measures to foster belonging. …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Scholars For The Advancement Of Children's Constitutional Rights And Students Engaged In Advancing Texas In Support Of Respondents, Mahmoud V. Taylor, U.S. Supreme Court (No. 24-297), Tanya Washington, Jeremiah Chin, Sarah Medina Camiscoli, Travis F. Chance, Amalia Y. Sax-Bolder, Catherine E. Smith

Court Briefs

Amici are members of Students Engaged in Advancing Texas and United States legal scholars of children and the law, education law, family law, and anti-discrimination law.

Students Engaged in Advancing Texas is a nonprofit organization founded by young people to develop civic leadership and belonging and represents students of various faiths and identities who have an interest in the outcome of this case.

Amici draw this Court’s attention to the constitutional harms that public school students and LGBTQ+ students and students with LGBTQ+ parents would bear should the Court grant Petitioners’ injunctive relief.

Reasonable In Time, Unreasonable In Scope: Maximizing Fourth Amendment Protections Under Rodriguez V. United States, Thomas Heiden

Washington Law Review

In Rodriguez v. United States, the Supreme Court held that a law enforcement officer may not conduct a drug dog sniff after the completion of a routine traffic stop because doing so extends the stop without reasonable suspicion in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable seizures. Tracing the background of Rodriguez from the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Terry v. Ohio, this Comment argues that Rodriguez is best understood as a reaction to the continued erosion of Fourth Amendment protections in the investigative stop context. Based on that understanding, this Comment argues for a strict reading of Rodriguez, …

Taking The Long Road: The Excessive Fines Clause As A Tool For Protecting Washington's Unsheltered Population, Anna Ferron

Washington Law Review

Over the last decade, Washington State has seen a substantial increase in its unhoused population and an increase in laws that harm this group. Many of these laws subject unhoused and unsheltered people to fines, fees, and forfeitures that are exceedingly difficult for them to afford. The ExcessiveFinesClauses in the United States and Washington Constitutions protect citizens from fines deemed constitutionally excessive and could be used to shield unsheltered people from the burden of paying unjust fines they cannot afford. In City of Seattle v. Long, the Washington State Supreme Court analyzed the ability to pay of a person who …

Evaluating Congress's Constitutional Basis To Abolish Felony Disenfranchisement, James E. Lauerman

Washington Law Review

In the past three years, members of Congress unsuccessfully introduced a series of federal voting rights legislation, most recently the Freedom to Vote Act. One goal of the legislation is to abolish felony disenfranchisement. Felony disenfranchisement is the practice of revoking a citizen’s right to vote due to a prior felony conviction. The Freedom to Vote Act aims to restore voting rights for every citizen who has completed their prison sentence. A ban on felony disenfranchisement would be historic, as the practice stretches back to ancient Greece and Rome. Moreover, the United States Supreme Court consistently upholds the practice by …

The Long Road To Justice: Why State Courts Should Lower The Evidentiary Burden For Proving Racialized Traffic Stops And Adopt The Exclusionary Rule As A Remedy For Equal Protection Violations, Abby M. Fink

Washington Journal of Social & Environmental Justice

Racist and brutal policing continues to pervade the criminal legal system. Black and brown people who interact with the police consistently face unequal targeting and treatment. Routine traffic stops are especially dangerous and harmful and can lead to death. Under Whren, a police officer’s racist motivations or implicit bias towards a driver do not influence the constitutionality of a traffic stop. An officer only needs to show there was probable cause to believe a traffic stop occurred. Although the unconstitutionality of pre-textual traffic stops has been widely explored since Whren, both federal and state courts have struggled to find legal …

Beware What You Google: Fourth Amendment Constitutionality Of Keyword Warrants, Chelsa Camille Edano

Washington Law Review

Many Americans have potentially had their privacy rights invaded through invisible, widespread police searches. In recent years, local and federal governments have compelled Google and other search engine companies to produce the personal information of users who have conducted a search query related to a crime. By using keyword warrants, the government can conduct a dragnet search for suspects, imposing suspicion on users and exposing their personal information. The keyword warrant is a symptom of the erosion of the Fourth Amendment protection against suspicionless searches. Not only is scholarship scarce on keyword warrants, but also instances of these warrants are …

A Call To Abolish Determinate-Plus Sentencing In Washington, Rachel Stenberg

Washington Law Review

For certain incarcerated individuals who commit sex offenses, Washington State’s determinate-plus sentencing structure requires a showing of rehabilitation before release. This highly subjective “releasability” determination occurs after an individual has already served a standard sentence. A review of recent releasability determinations reveals sentences are often extended on arbitrary and inconsistent grounds—especially for individuals who face systemic challenges in prison due to their identity or condition. This Comment shows that the criteria to determine whether individuals are releasable is an incomplete picture of their actual experience in the carceral setting, using the distinct example of incarcerated individuals with mental illness. While …

Let Us Not Be Intimidated: Past And Present Applications Of Section 11(B) Of The Voting Rights Act, Carly E. Zipper

Washington Law Review

As John Lewis said, “[the] vote is precious. Almost sacred. It is the most powerful non-violent tool we have to create a more perfect union.” The Voting Rights Act (VRA), likewise, is a powerful tool. This Comment seeks to empower voters and embolden their advocates to better use that tool with an improved understanding of its little-known protection against voter intimidation, section 11(b).

Although the term “voter intimidation” may connote armed confrontations at polling places, some forms of intimidation are much more subtle and insidious—dissuading voters from heading to the polls on election day rather than confronting them outright when …

Autonomous Corporate Personhood, Carla L. Reyes

Washington Law Review

Several states have recently changed their business organization law to accommodate autonomous businesses—businesses operated entirely through computer code. A variety of international civil society groups are also actively developing new frameworks— and a model law—for enabling decentralized, autonomous businesses to achieve a corporate or corporate-like status that bestows legal personhood. Meanwhile, various jurisdictions, including the European Union, have considered whether and to what extent artificial intelligence (AI) more broadly should be endowed with personhood to respond to AI’s increasing presence in society. Despite the fairly obvious overlap between the two sets of inquiries, the legal and policy discussions between the …

Due Process In Prison Disciplinary Hearings: How The “Some Evidence” Standard Of Proof Violates The Constitution, Emily Parker

Washington Law Review

Prison disciplinary hearings have wide-reaching impacts on an incarcerated individual’s liberty. A sanction following a guilty finding is a consequence that stems from hearings and goes beyond mere punishment. Guilty findings for serious infractions, like a positive result on a drug test, can often result in a substantial increase in prison time. Before the government deprives an incarcerated individual of their liberty interest in a shorter sentence, it must provide minimum due process. However, an individual can be found guilty of serious infractions in Washington State prison disciplinary hearings under the “some evidence” standard of proof—a standard that allows for …

Copyright’S Deprivations, Anne-Marie Carstens

Washington Law Review

This Article challenges the constitutionality of a copyright infringement remedy provided in federal copyright law: courts can order the destruction or other permanent deprivation of personal property based on its mere capacity to serve as a vehicle for infringement. This deprivation remedy requires no showing of actual nexus to the litigated infringement, no finding of willfulness, and no showing that the property’s infringing uses comprise the significant or predominant uses. These striking deficits stem from a historical fiction that viewed a tool of infringement, such as a printing plate, as the functional equivalent of an infringing copy itself. Today, though, …

Police Or Pirates? Reforming Washington's Civil Asset Forfeiture System, Jasmin Chigbrow

Washington Law Review

Civil asset forfeiture laws permit police officers to seize property they suspect is connected to criminal activity and sell or retain the property for the police department’s use. In many states, including Washington, civil forfeiture occurs independent of any criminal case—many property owners are never charged with the offense police allege occurred. Because the government is not required to file criminal charges, property owners facing civil forfeiture lack the constitutional safeguards normally guaranteed to defendants in the criminal justice system: the right to an attorney, the presumption of innocence, the government’s burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, …

Socioeconomic Status Discrimination, Danieli Evans

Articles

This Article makes the case for protecting socioeconomic status (SES) under discrimination statutes that govern employment, housing, education, voting, public accommodations, and credit/lending. While others have argued that poverty should be a protected class under the Fourteenth Amendment, the courts have rejected this idea. The possibility of protecting SES under discrimination statutes has received little consideration. I argue that this idea deserves more serious attention. I advance four arguments in favor of adding SES to the list of protected traits. Two moral, one political, and one legal.

First and most straightforward, the values animating discrimination law apply to poverty: Existing …

Fundamental Rights In A Post-Obergefell World, Peter Nicolas

Articles

In this Article, I identify and critically examine three substantive criticisms raised by the dissents in the Supreme Court's 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which struck down state laws and constitutional provisions barring same-sex couples from marrying within the state or having their out-of-state marriages recognized by the state. First, that the majority improperly framed the right at issue broadly as the right to marriage instead of narrowly as the right to same-sex marriage, conflicting with the Court's holding in Washington v. Glucksberg that in fundamental rights cases the right at issue must be framed narrowly, and in …

Obergefell'S Squandered Potential, Peter Nicolas

Articles

No abstract provided.

Gayffirmative Action: The Constitutionality Of Sexual Orientation-Based Affirmative Action Policies, Peter Nicolas

Articles

Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court established a consistency principle in its race-based equal protection cases. That principle requires courts to apply the same strict scrutiny to racial classifications designed to benefit racial minorities—such as affirmative action policies—as they do to laws invidiously discriminating against them. The new consistency principle, under which discrimination against whites is subject to strict scrutiny, conflicted with the Court's established criteria for declaring a group to be a suspect or quasi-suspect class entitled to heightened scrutiny, which focused on such considerations as the history of discrimination against the group and its political powerlessness.

As …

The Constitutional Structure Of Voting Rights Enforcement, Franita Tolson

Washington Law Review

Scholars and courts have hotly debated whether the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act is constitutional under the Reconstruction Amendments. In answering this question, this Article is the first to consider the effect of section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment on the scope of Congress’s enforcement authority. Section 2 allows Congress to reduce the size of a state’s delegation in the House of Representatives if the state abridges the right to vote in state and federal elections for any reason, “except for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” This Article contends that section 2 influences the scope of congressional …

The Constitutional Structure Of Voting Rights Enforcement, Franita Tolson

Washington Law Review

Scholars and courts have hotly debated whether the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act is constitutional under the Reconstruction Amendments. In answering this question, this Article is the first to consider the effect of section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment on the scope of Congress’s enforcement authority. Section 2 allows Congress to reduce the size of a state’s delegation in the House of Representatives if the state abridges the right to vote in state and federal elections for any reason, “except for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” This Article contends that section 2 influences the scope of congressional …

Straddling The Columbia: A Constitutional Law Professor's Musings On Circumventing Washington State's Criminal Prohibition On Compensated Surrogacy, Peter Nicolas

Articles

In this Article, I recount—through both the prisms of an intended parent and a constitutional law scholar—my successful efforts to become a parent via compensated surrogacy and egg donation. Part I of this Article provides a narrative of my experience in becoming a parent via compensated surrogacy, and the various state and federal legal roadblocks and deterrents that I encountered along the way, including Washington State's criminal prohibition on compensated surrogacy as well as federal guidelines issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regarding the use of sperm by gay donors in the process of in vitro fertilization.

Part …

The "Nixon Sabotage": The Political Origins Of The Equal Protection Challenge To The Voting Rights Act, Danieli Evans

Articles

Critics of the Voting Rights Act argue that the anti-discrimination law requires states to engage in unconstitutional discrimination, as state decisionmakers must be conscious of race in order to ensure that voting policies do not weaken minority representation. This argument relies on the idea that subjective racial motivation is the essence of unconstitutional discrimination (even if benevolent, or to promote racial inclusion). The conventional understanding among constitutional scholars is that this “search for the bigoted decisionmaker” developed in employment and housing discrimination decisions between 1976 and 1979. Previous accounts have not recognized the role that the 1971 school desegregation decision …

Independence For Washington State's Privileges And Immunities Clause, P. Andrew Rorholm Zellers

Washington Law Review

Article I, section 12 of the Washington State Constitution prohibits special privileges and immunities. It provides: “No law shall be passed granting to any citizen, class of citizens, or corporation other than municipal, privileges or immunities which upon the same terms shall not equally belong to all citizens, or corporations.” Since the 1940s, the Washington State Supreme Court has analogized article I, section 12 to the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As a result, it has treated claims under article I, section 12 and the Equal Protection Clause as a single inquiry and applied …

Banishing Habeas Jurisdiction: Why Federal Courts Lack Jurisdiction To Hear Tribal Banishment Actions, Mary Swift

Washington Law Review

The Indian Civil Rights Act (ICRA or “the Act”) of 1968 grants members of federally recognized Indian tribes individual civil rights similar to those enumerated in the federal Bill of Rights and Fourteenth Amendment. However, the Act provides only one explicit federal remedy for violations of the rights secured therein: the writ of habeas corpus. The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to read an implied cause of action into the Act. Some federal courts assert habeas jurisdiction to review tribal banishment actions alleged to violate ICRA, but not over disenrollment actions. Tribal banishment means an individual tribal member is cast …

The Once And Future Equal Protection Doctrine?, Mario L. Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky

Articles

This Essay is the third in a series of pieces assessing Equal Protection Doctrine and jurisprudence. Here, we endeavor to do two things: (1) to utilize constitutional structure, text, and history to interrogate the concept of equality protected under the Fourteenth Amendment; and (2) to critique the Supreme Court's present approach to adjudicating constitutional discrimination claims. With regard to the meaning of equality, we assert that if the text of the Reconstruction Amendments and the stated goals of Reconstruction are used to inform constitutional analysis, then equality should be understood as a substantive rather than formalist concept. Reconstruction, however, was …

Penalizing Punitive Damages: Why The Supreme Court Needs A Lesson In Law And Economics, Steve P. Calandrillo

Articles

The recent landmark Supreme Court decision addressing punitive damages in the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill case has brought the issue of punitive awards back into the legal limelight. Modern Supreme Court jurisprudence, most notably BMW of North America, Inc. [517 U.S. 559 (1996)], State Farm [538 U.S. 408 (2003)], Philip Morris [549 U.S. 346 (2007)], and now Exxon Shipping Co. [128 S.Ct. 2605 (2008)] in 2008, has concluded that such judgments are justified to punish morally reprehensible behavior and to send a message to evildoers. The Court, however, has increasingly emphasized that the U.S. Constitution's Due Process Clause presumptively …

Zero Privacy: Schools Are Violating Students' Fourteenth Amendment Right Of Privacy Under The Guise Of Enforcing Zero Tolerance Policies, Elisabeth Frost

Washington Law Review

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides a right of privacy that protects against unwarranted governmental interference with an individual's contraceptive choices. This privacy right protects minors as well as adults. School officials serve as government actors for the purpose of Fourteenth Amendment analysis. Zero tolerance drug policies are school disciplinary policies that mandate predetermined and frequently severe consequences for specific offenses, often including the possession of legally prescribed or legally obtained over-the-counter medication. Zero tolerance drug policies have resulted in the often very public discipline of students for possessing a wide array of otherwise legal medication, including …

Political Apportioning Is Not A Zero-Sum Game: The Constitutional Necessity Of Apportioning Districts To Be Equal In Terms Of Both Total Population And Citizen Voter-Age Population, Timothy Mark Mitrovich

Washington Law Review

After each census, state legislatures must redraw voting districts for state and local elections. Each state legislature must perform this redistricting in a way that protects two important citizen rights. First, each citizen's vote must carry equal weight. Second, each citizen must have equal access to his or her representative. To this end, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that all state and local electoral apportionments must result in districts with equal populations. In Reynolds v. Sims, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment requires all state and local electoral apportionments to result in districts with equal populations. However, …

The Equal Pay Act As Appropriate Legislation Under Section 5 Of The Fourteenth Amendment: Can State Employers Be Sued?, Thane Somerville

Washington Law Review

Congress may constitutionally abrogate state sovereign immunity only through legislation enacted pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents, the U.S. Supreme Court held the Age Discrimination in Employment Act to be inappropriate Section 5 legislation. Kimel was the first time the Court held an anti-discrimination statute enacted to protect civil rights inapplicable to the states. Based on the Kimel decision, other civil rights statutes, such as the Equal Pay Act (EPA), may face similar challenges. This Comment argues that the EPA is appropriate Section 5 legislation. Unlike …