Fourteenth Amendment Commons^™

The Wages Of Crying Roe: Some Realism About Dobbs V. Jackson Women’S Health Organization, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court’s reasoning in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizationcannot be taken seriously. The Court’s stated rationale for rejecting continued protection of the abortion right—that abortion is not deeply rooted in nineteenth century history and tradition—applies with equal force to other substantive due process rights that the DobbsCourt repeatedly insisted were not under threat even without considering stare decisis, including contraception, sexual intimacy between consenting adults, and same-sex marriage. One should add inter-racial marriage and protection from involuntary sterilization to that list. Rather than applying its draconian version of the “history and tradition” test in a …

Narrow But Deep: The Mcculloch Principle, Collective-Action Theory, And Section Three Enforcement, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In Trump v. Anderson, 144 S. Ct. 662 (2024), the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Colorado Supreme Court erred in excluding President Donald J. Trump from the Republican Party's primary ballot in the state.  The Court reasoned that the Constitution makes Congress, not the states, solely responsible for enforcing Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Scholars of Section 3 have demonstrated that Section 3 is self-executing, so the Court's rationale lacks a sound basis in the original or contemporary meaning of the text of the Civil War Amendments, the original intent of their drafters, or …

Political Equality, Gender, And Democratic Legitimation In Dobbs, Aliza Forman-Rabinovici, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, demonstrating how the Court deploys new arguments about women’s political equality — alongside long-standing arguments about federalism and judicial minimalism — to legitimate the overruling of Roe v. Wade. In contending that abortion rights are better determined by legislatures, the Dobbs Court advances a thin conceptual account of democracy and political equality that ignores a range of anti-democratic features of the political process that shape abortion policy — such as partisan politics and gerrymandering — as well the absence of women in the …

Killing Precedent: The Slaughter-House Constitution, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay offers a revisionist account of the Slaughter-House Cases. It argues that the opinion’s primary significance lies not in its gutting of the Privileges or Immunities Clause but in its omission of a people’s archive of slavery.

Decades before the decision, Black abolitionists began compiling the testimonies of refugees who had fled slavery. By 1872, this archival practice had produced a published record of Black struggle and become a platform for the celebration of Black resistance and a new era of Black leadership. Although the lead compiler of this record sent a copy to the Chief Justice, the …

The Unbearable Emptiness Of Formalism: Autonomy, Equality, And The Future Of Affirmative Action, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Debates over affirmative action in higher education generally focus on equality interests under the Fourteenth Amendment but ignore liberty interests under the First Amendment. That tendency persists, even though the academic freedom to enroll a diverse student body has allowed colleges and universities to defend race-conscious admissions programs against legal challenges for decades. Today, the rise of formalism in judicial interpretation poses new perils for these programs. Justice Powell’s seminal decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke was a pragmatic compromise that used diversity to temper the polarized debate over equality that sharply divided the Court. In …

The Constitutional Costs Of School Policing, Maryam Ahranjani, Natalie Saing

Faculty Scholarship

Abstract

Responding to fears of violence and liability on K-12 campuses, local school boards and superintendents have made on-site or embedded school police omnipresent in American public schools. Yet, very little attention is paid to the many costs associated with their presence. When situating law enforcement’s presence squarely in the racist history of policing and school policing, the juxtaposition with the civic purpose of public education reveals significant constitutional costs. This Article builds on existing scholarship by bringing attention to the conflict between the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments and the dimensions of embedded school police. Ultimately, schools …

Felon Re-Enfranchisement And The Problem Of “Lost” Rights, Josh Feinzig

Faculty Scholarship

By conditioning the restoration of political rights on financial repayment, states have prevented hundreds of thousands of citizens with felony convictions from participating politically—profoundly altering the shape of the American electorate. Courts have upheld the practice by treating restoration as an exercise of legislative grace to nonmembers of the political community. Critics argue that the practice conditions political participation on wealth status and is therefore subject to heightened review.

This Essay traces the disagreement back to an overlooked first-order question: how should the juridical status of a disenfranchised citizen’s “lost” rights be understood? The conventional position assumes that disenfranchisement casts …

163 U.S. 537 Supreme Court Of The United States: Plessy V. Ferguson No. 210, Trina Jones

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Gender, Voting Rights, And The Nineteenth Amendment, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

One hundred years after the woman suffrage amendment became part of the United States Constitution, a federal court has held—for the first time—that a plaintiff must establish intentional discrimination to prevail on a direct constitutional claim under the Nineteenth Amendment. In adopting that threshold standard, the court simply reasoned by strict textual analogy to the Fifteenth Amendment and asserted that “there is no reason to read the Nineteenth Amendment differently from the Fifteenth Amendment.” This paper’s thesis is that, to the contrary, the Nineteenth Amendment is deserving of judicial analysis independent of the Fifteenth Amendment because it has a distinct …

The Insular Cases Run Amok: Against Constitutional Exceptionalism In The Territories, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

The Insular Cases have been enjoying an improbable — and unfortunate — renaissance. Decided at the height of what has been called the “imperialist” period in U.S. history, this series of Supreme Court decisions handed down in the early twentieth century infamously held that the former Spanish colonies annexed by the United States in 1898 — Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam — “belong[ed] to, but [were] not a part of, the United States.” What exactly this meant has been the subject of considerable debate even as those decisions have received unanimous condemnation. According to the standard account, the …

Tinhatting The Constitution: Originalism As A Fandom, Stacey M. Lantagne

Faculty Scholarship

Several recent Supreme Court cases, most notably Bruen and Dobbs, have employed originalist methods to interpreting the Constitution, seeking to give the Second and Fourteenth Amendments, respectively, the meaning that was understood by the public in 1791 and 1868. In this imaginative exercise compiling massive amounts of textual evidence to arrive at conclusions regarding what unknown people were thinking, originalism resembles a type of fandom practice called RPF, or Real Person Fiction. This type of fan activity likewise compiles massive amounts of textual evidence to arrive at conclusions regarding what unknown people were thinking. It’s just that RPF revolves …

Immigration Detention: Eroding Or Reinforcing A Theory Of Immigration Exceptionalism?, Kate Aschenbrenner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Due Process Of Bail, Jenny E. Carroll

Faculty Scholarship

The Due Process Clause is a central tenet of criminal law’s constitutional canon. Yet defining precisely what process is due a defendant is a deceptively complex proposition. Nowhere is this more true than in the context of pretrial detention, where the Court has relied on due process safeguards to preserve the constitutionality of bail provisions. This Essay considers the lay of the bail due process landscape through the lens of the district court’s opinion in O’Donnell v. Harris County and the often convoluted historical description of pretrial due process. Even as the O’Donnell court failed to characterize pretrial process as …

Civil Rights In Living Color, Vinay Harpalani

Faculty Scholarship

This Article will examine how American civil rights law has treated “color” discrimination and differentiated it from “race” discrimination. It is a comprehensive analysis of the changing legal meaning of “color” discrimination throughout American history. The Article will cover views of “color” in the antebellum era, Reconstruction laws, early equal protection cases, the U.S. Census, modern civil rights statutes, and in People v. Bridgeforth—a landmark 2016 ruling by the New York Court of Appeals. First, the Article will lay out the complex relationship between race and color and discuss the phenomenon of colorism—oppression based on skin color—as differentiated from …

The Rise And Fall Of Transcendent Constitutionalism In The Civil War Era, Cynthia Nicoletti

Faculty Scholarship

In the aftermath of the Civil War, American intellectuals saw the war itself as a force of transcendent lawmaking. They viewed it as a historical catalyst that had forged the United States into a nation. In writing the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress sought to translate the war's nationalistic spirit into text. But in the eyes of many contemporary thinkers, the war's centripetal energy was a doubleedged sword. It could create a nation out of disparate parts, but it was also potentially uncontainable, divorced from the regular lawmaking process and beyond the control of human actors. As a result, many American jurists …

A Unified Constitutional View Of Financial Punishment: Synthesizing The Excessive Fines Clause And Bearden­ Based Protections, Joshua A. Feinzig

Faculty Scholarship

This Note coordinates the Eighth Amendment Excessive Fines Clause with the Fourteenth Amendment wealth-discrimination protection set forth in Bearden v. Georgia It is generally assumed that the two protections operate independently: while the Excessive Fines Clause protects individuals against exorbitant financial obligations, Bearden limits the state from converting criminal debt into a severe liberty deprivation. But in recognizing how the two doctrines are normatively and functionally reinforcing, this Note proposes a single framework for considering financial punishment's constitutionality.

If the Eighth Amendment protection applies at the imposition of a financial punishment, Bearden provides a "second look" at the constitutionality of …

Political Wine In A Judicial Bottle: Justice Sotomayor's Surprising Concurrence In Aurelius, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

For seventy years, Puerto Ricans have been bitterly divided over how to decolonize the island, a U.S. territory. Many favor Puerto Rico’s admission into statehood. But many others support a different kind of relationship with the United States: they believe that in 1952, Puerto Rico entered into a “compact” with the United States that transformed it from a territory into a “commonwealth,” and they insist that “commonwealth” status made Puerto Rico a separate sovereign in permanent union with the United States. Statehood supporters argue that there is no compact, nor should there be: it is neither constitutionally possible, nor desirable …

Equal Protection Design Defects, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

One can understand constitutional doctrine as a tool designed to effectuate the Constitution and its various provisions. Equal protection doctrine, in turn, comprises a set of Justice-made rules designed to realize the promise of equal protection under the law. The substance of that promise remains a topic of deep contestation. Nonetheless, more than forty years of constitutional jurisprudence have entrenched a vision of constitutional equality that privileges what I refer to herein as the “right to compete.” Simply put, the Supreme Court has repeatedly embraced the view that the Equal Protection Clause mandates the government to allocate public benefits — …

Dying Constitutionalism And The Fourteenth Amendment, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

The notion of a “living Constitution” often rests on an implicit assumption that important constitutional values will “grow” in such a way as to make the Constitution more attractive over time. But there are no guarantees: What can grow can also wither and die. This essay, presented as the 2018 Robert F. Boden Lecture at Marquette University Law School, marks the sesquicentennial of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification as a powerful charter of liberty and equality for black Americans. But for much of its early history, the Fourteenth Amendment’s meaning moved in reverse, overwhelmed by the end of Reconstruction, the gradual …

Purchasing Health? The Promise And Limits Of Public Health Insurance, Kristen Underhill

Faculty Scholarship

The 2010s have been a momentous decade for Medicaid. With enrollment of over seventy-two million people (19% of the country’s population), Medicaid is the nation’s largest public health insurance program, and it is the primary or sole source of health insurance for vulnerable groups such as low-income children and pregnant women, adults with disabilities, and people in need of long-term care. Since 2014, the pendulum of Medicaid policy has swung from an unprecedented expansion of coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), toward more recent federal regulations and state policy innovations that are instead predicted to limit uptake of benefits. …

Democratic Policing Before The Due Process Revolution, Sarah Seo

Faculty Scholarship

According to prevailing interpretations of the Warren Court’s Due Process Revolution, the Supreme Court constitutionalized criminal procedure to constrain the discretion of individual officers. These narratives, however, fail to account for the Court’s decisions during that revolutionary period that enabled discretionary policing. Instead of beginning with the Warren Court, this Essay looks to the legal culture before the Due Process Revolution to provide a more coherent synthesis of the Court’s criminal procedure decisions. It reconstructs that culture by analyzing the prominent criminal law scholar Jerome Hall’s public lectures, Police and Law in a Democratic Society, which he delivered in 1952 …

New Look Constitutionalism: The Cold War Critique Of Military Manpower Administration, Jeremy K. Kessler

Faculty Scholarship

By reconstructing the anxious, constitutional dialogue that shaped the administration of military manpower under President Eisenhower’s New Look, this Article explores the role that administrative constitutionalism played in the development of the American national-security state, a state that became both more powerful and more legalistic during the pivotal years of the Cold War. The Article also questions the frequent identification of administrative constitutionalism with the relative autonomy and opacity of the federal bureaucracy. The back-and-forth of administrative constitutionalism continually recalibrated the degree of autonomy and opacity that characterized the draft apparatus. This evidence suggests that bureaucratic autonomy and opacity may …

An Intersectional Critique Of Tiers Of Scrutiny: Beyond “Either/Or” Approaches To Equal Protection, Devon W. Carbado, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

For the past forty years, Justice Powell’s concurring opinion in University of California v. Bakke has been at the center of scholarly debates about affirmative action. Notwithstanding the enormous attention Justice Powell’s concurrence has received, scholars have paid little attention to a passage in that opinion that expressly takes up the issue of gender. Drawing on the theory of intersectionality, this Essay explains several ways in which its reasoning is flawed. The Essay also shows how interrogating Justice Powell’s “single axis” race and gender analysis raises broader questions about tiers of scrutiny for Black women. Through a hypothetical of a …

If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Procreation: Methodology And Subject-Matter In Fourteenth Amendment Pedagogy, William Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Multiracial Malaise: Multiracial As A Legal Racial Category, Taunya L. Banks

Faculty Scholarship

One byproduct of increased interracial marriages post Loving is a growing number of multiracial children. This cohort of multiracials tends to overshadow older and larger generations of multiracial people whose genealogical mixture is more distant. Some interracial couples, their multiracial children and others support a multiracial category on the U.S. Census. Proponents argued that multiracial individuals experience a unique type of discrimination that warrants treating them as a separate racial category. This article concedes that multiracial individuals should enjoy the freedom to self-identify as they wish, and like others, be protected by anti-discrimination law. It concludes, however, that current arguments …

Eyes Wide Open: What Social Science Can Tell Us About The Supreme Court's Use Of Social Science, Jonathan Feingold, Evelyn Carter

Faculty Scholarship

In McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court rendered statistical evidence of racial disparities doctrinally irrelevant to a criminal defendant’s equal protection claim. Fifteen years later in Grutter v. Bollinger, Chief Justice Rehnquist—part of the McCleskey majority—invoked admissions data to support his conclusion that the University of Michigan Law School had unconstitutionally discriminated against White applicants. This facially inconsistent treatment of statistical data invites the following inquiry: Why do judges (including Supreme Court Justices) rely on social science in some cases, yet reject it in others? We suggest that one answer lies at the intersection of Critical Race Theory and empirical …

Citizens Of The State, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

According to conventional wisdom, state citizenship emerged out of the localism of early America and gave way to national citizenship with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. This Article offers a different account of state citizenship and, with it, new resources for analyzing the Constitution. It argues that far from a primordial category that receded into irrelevance, state citizenship provided a crucial strategic tool in America’s antislavery movement, as abolitionist lawyers used the label of state citizenship to build a coalition with white elites by reframing the issue of slavery from the rights of a black person to the sovereignty …

Arming The Second Amendment - And Enforcing The Fourteenth, William Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Contemplating Masterpiece Cakeshop, Terri R. Day

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Take The Fifth... Please!: The Original Insignificance Of The Fifth Amendment's Due Process Of Law Clause, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

The Fifth Amendment’s Due Process of Law Clause adds nothing to the Constitution’s original meaning. Every principle for limiting federal executive, judicial, and even legislative powers that can plausibly be attributed to the idea of “due process of law” – from the principle of legality forbidding executive or judicial action in the absence of law to the requirement of notice before valid judicial judgments to a limitation on arbitrary governmental action that today goes under the heading of “substantive due process” – is already contained in the text and structure of the Constitution of 1788. The Fifth Amendment Due Process …