Equal Protection Clause
Congressman John Bingham of Ohio was the
principal framer of the Equal Protection
Clause.
The Equal Protection Clause, part of the
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States
Constitution, provides that "no state shall ...
deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws".[1] The Equal
Protection Clause can be seen as an attempt
to secure the promise of the United States’
professed commitment to the proposition that
"all men are created equal"[2] by empowering
the judiciary to enforce that principle against
the states.
More concretely, the Equal Protection
Clause, along with the rest of the Fourteenth
Amendment, marked a great shift in Americ-
an constitutionalism. Before the enactment of
the Fourteenth Amendment, the Bill of Rights
protected individual rights only from invasion
by the federal government. After the Four-
teenth Amendment was enacted, the Consti-
tution also protected rights from abridgment
by state leaders and governments, even in-
cluding some rights that arguably were not
protected from abridgment by the federal
government. In the wake of the Fourteenth
Amendment, the states could not, among oth-
er things, deprive people of
the equal
protection of the laws. What exactly such a
requirement means, of course, has been the
subject of great debate, and the story of the
Equal Protection Clause is the gradual explic-
ation of its meaning.
One of the main limitations in the Equal
Protection Clause is that it limits only the
powers of government bodies, and not the
private parties on whom it confers equal pro-
tection. This limitation has existed since 1883
and has not been overturned. However, since
the 1960s, Congress has passed most civil
rights legislation under its Commerce Clause
power.
Background
The words inscribed above the entrance to
the U.S. Supreme Court are: "Equal justice
under law."
The Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in
1868, shortly after the Union victory in the
American Civil War. After the Thirteenth
Amendment, which was proposed by