Introduction
The notion of identical protection of laws arises from the 14 th Amendment of the Charter of the United States. In part, it states: “No State will create or impose any law which will lessen the prerogatives or exceptions of United States’ citizens, nor will State strip any individual of property, life or liberty, without the law’ due process; nor repudiate to any individual in its authority the equal protection of laws” ( Bray et al., 2016 ). The clause seems simple but it has resulted in important general debates about how it is interpreted and used. One of the debates is if the framers were primarily concerned with the protection of the laws of equality of the laws. Different interpretations have resulted in a vocabulary of popular ideas like separate but equal and its talk of separate as intrinsic race-conscious, unequal or color blind, and also the terms of preferential treatment, equal opportunity, affirmative decision, and its complement reverse discrimination. These rivaling formulations frame bigger political, legal and social debates created by the equal protection provision.
Historical Perspective
The fourteenth Amendment was sanctioned in 1868, after the thirteenth Amendment, which terminated involuntary servitude and slavery, and two years before the 15 th Amendment, which granted citizens’ rights to vote. The equal protection provision of the 14 th Amendment appeared purposed to offer ex-slaves similar protection of the law like the white citizens. It is a surprise that the earliest litigation of the 14 th amendment did not have many dealings with race. In the current century, litigation under the equal protection of law entails questions on age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other categories. In 1877, the federal soldiers retrieved from the South and ended the Reconstruction period. Several Border and Southern States imposed Jim Crow statutes. Example of a Jim Crow case is the Plessy v. Ferguson case. It is the source of the separate but equal doctrine and a minority perception the Charter as color-blind.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
We can illustrate the relevance of the clause to race. For instance, Homer Plessy used the equal protection provision of the 14 th revision to challenge a Louisiana law that instructed for railway coaches be partitioned by race. The state law needed the blacks to travel in separate, third-class passenger vehicles. Plessy was apprehended for boarding a train with first-class ticket normally intended for white patrons. The Court complied with the law, and found that the equal protection provision did not include" equality in social matters", but instead protected just "equality of civil rights" (Bray et al., 2016).
Interpretation Change
The interpretation of the “equal protection” as “separate but equal” provision was eventually successfully objected to in 1954 in the milestone case of Brown versus Topeka’ Education Board ( Bray et al., 2016 ). In this scenario, concerning the segregation of public schools, the Tribunal Court of the United States passed a judgment that separate education institutions were intrinsically unequal and breached the equal protection provision of the fourteenth. The significant change to interpreting the equal protection of laws as discriminatory just under separate treatment of minority groups. The Court conceded that racial classes cannot be treated independently from social conditions that conserve inferior treatment.
In the 1960s, civil rights promoters showed concern on structural discrimination. They argued that the color-blind policy- which may seem as impartial and fair on its surface-in effect preserve structural discrimination as a practical thing by status quo replication. They also claimed that race-conscious policies were significant to rectify historic injustices. They pushed towards the provision of equal chances for historically marginalized individuals via affirmative action policies. These provisions would give special preferences to under-represented populations. The goal of the affirmative action was to compensate, correct past discrimination for social inequities through providing preferential treatment to people based on group membership to facilitate their equal opportunity to partake in political and social institutions. The objective was to raise the representation of the minorities in regions they had been previously under-represented.
References
Bray, S. L., Paulsen, M. S., Calabresi, S. G., McConnell, M. W., & Baude, W. (2016). The Constitution of the United States . Foundation Press.
