Equal Protection Key Part Of The Fourteenth Amendment example essay topic

EQUAL PROTECTION UNDER THE Latin school especially, as well as throughout our daily lives, we learn in America to live by the idea of freedom and equality for all. We do not allow race, class, or creed to determine a person's stature in the community. It may seem as if this is the standard of society, but these ideas of equality have been fought over since the beginning of written history, and even in America today, prejudice still exists. To address these and similar problems, the founding fathers of this nation created a Constitution which included laws that dealt with individual freedoms. However great the founding fathers envisioned the United States Constitution, it did not form a perfect union and justice for all. America would have to amend, or add to, the Constitution in order to serve its constituents better.

The most powerful constitutional act towards equality would come with the fourteenth amendment. This amendment permanently changed constitutional law by empowering the Federal government's jurisdiction to include local and state governments which would be required to abide by new standards of civil rights and privileges. In 1791, the states ratified ten amendments to the United States Constitution. These became known as the Bill of Rights, a cornerstone in providing individual liberty. The United States Senate dropped one of the original proposals stating, "No state shall violate the equal rights of conscience or the freedom of press or trial by jury in criminal cases", something that the fourteenth amendment would address. James Madison, one of the Bill of Rights creators knew the importance of this vital clause and commented, "There is more danger of those powers being abused by state government then by the government of the United States".

This decision by the Senate to leave out Madison's revered clause would leave laws protecting individual liberty for state and local governments to create and uphold. Because of the inconsistency by states towards individual freedom as well as fairness in the eyes of the law, it would be extremely important for an amendment like the fourteenth to unify American equality. The fourteenth amendment is made up of five sections. Today only two of them hold any relevance: the first and the fifth. The second, third, and fourth sections all deal with managing the southern states that had left the union before the civil war. The first section contains perhaps the two most important phrases in American constitutional law, due process and equal protection.

Equal protection has come to be interpreted as all people being treated equally under the law. It reads", no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States". It provides that the state must use fair procedures when it acts to limit a person's life, liberty, or property. The fourteenth amendment is known for creating, "equal protection under the law", but before this amendment not all people would be considered eligible for these kinds of protection. Amendment fourteen begins by defining citizenship as, "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" thus reversing a Supreme Court decision in which African Americans were not and could not be citizens.

This racial issue was a main reason for which the amendment was written. By including African Americans, the fourteenth amendment would take bold steps towards a new more equal America. Another key part of the fourteenth amendment is the due process clause. The idea of due process is that the government must obey the law and act in a reasonable fashion.

Section five of the fourteenth amendment contained another important part which gave Congress the power to pass any other needed laws to protect the due process and equal protection rights of Americans. Thus it gave Congress the assumed privileges of making laws to better enforce the fourteenth amendment. Prior to the fourteenth amendment the Bill of Rights restrained only the federal government, not the various state and local governments. There was no constitutional law in place that properly controlled the state governments on how they acted towards their citizens. It would be these governments that would be the greatest threat towards individual rights as most interactions come between a citizen and local officials. The fourteenth amendment worked to fix the loop hole that allowed for non-federal government officials to get away with violating constitutional rights.

Amendment fourteen is an example of a pivotal moment in American history. The fourteenth amendment would support and build on many parts of the Constitution already in place. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal", makes up the Preamble to the Constitution, but without the fourteenth amendment, a different interpretation might still be in place. Because of these words of equality and the amendments that came after, a powerful structure of government was created, leading to the robust America we have today. Although the fourteenth amendment made African Americans citizens and extended the reach of the Bill of Rights it did not end inequality. Because of our system that allows for interpretation, it would take the decisions of the Supreme Court throughout the twentieth century before the protections of the Bill of Rights would be entirely extended to all the states.

Nonetheless it was truly a milestone in legislature which pushed for equal rights as well as unified state and federal governments. The fourteenth amendment helped previous laws, which had only a limited affect and only reached a select few, to provide legal structure for equality across the whole United States..