En Banc an essay on the Fisher case. Mark L. February 19—Friday am Morning Keynote Address Eric Holder Former Attorney General Eric Holder — The Weil Lecture on American Citizenship, Exploring his own view of the proper scope of the Equal Protection Clause and his own experience trying to protect the right of all Americans, including African Americans whose right to vote has been, and continues to be, denied suppressed, gerrymandered, and minimalized.
In the wake of the Civil War, three amendments were added to the U. This Supreme Court decision attempted to settle the legal status of slaves in free territories to avert a civil war, but it provoked one instead.
The First Amendment is widely considered to be the most important part of the Bill of Rights. Monk, Constitutional scholar.
Explore More Equality Topics. Learn More. Dred Scott v. Sandford This Supreme Court decision attempted to settle the legal status of slaves in free territories to avert a civil war, but it provoked one instead. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age , and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
In Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, police officers led bloody massacres that left hundreds of Black people dead and many more badly beaten. This history has been brushed aside. Tahir Duckett: The hidden constitutional costs of the carceral system. Ohio and repeatedly expanded during the Warren Burger and William Rehnquist Courts, permit the police to subject people of color to arbitrary, degrading, and humiliating intrusions on a regular basis. The upshot is that stop-and-frisk bears a startling resemblance to the enforcement of vagrancy laws that the Fourteenth Amendment took aim at.
However, by turning a blind eye to the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court has allowed racial profiling to run amok. The Court consistently ignores the role of race, even as it pervades policing. As we have seen so often, what begins with a stop often ends in brutal police violence. In fact, as the killings of George Floyd, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and many others show, police stops for trivial offenses can easily end in death for Black people. But the Supreme Court has never recognized that ending state-sponsored racial police violence was a core purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment.
By blessing police violence if reasonable —without any showing that it is necessary to respond to an imminent threat—the Court has allowed the vicious cycle of racist police violence to repeat. It is a basic idea that we can better understand the meaning of the Constitution by looking at the context of its adoption and the abuses it aimed to eliminate.
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