Equal Protection

Definition of Equal Protection

Note: See a more comprehensive approach to the Equal Protection legal concept in the American Law Encyclopedia

Prohibition of discrimination and the use of unreasonable classifications. The protection is drawn from the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This clause was added to the Constitution after the Civil War. At the time of ratification, the protection was intended to guarantee former slaves equal treatment under the law as well as certain basic civil rights. The Supreme Court made an effort to confine the language of the clause to blacks in the Slaughterhouse Cases (16 Wallace 36: 1873). Slaughterhouse held that the clause was to be used when state laws “discriminated with gross injustice and hardship” against “newly emancipated negroes.” The Court said federal authority could be used only when racial discrimination resulted from the actions of a state because the coverage of the clause was aimed only at “that race and that emergency.” After confining the clause to racial classifications, the Court set out in subsequent years to define the nature of the protections afforded blacks under the clause. In 1883, the Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, ruling that the Equal Protection Clause applied only to state actions. The holding in the Civil Rights Cases (103 U.S. 3: 1883) was consistent with the Court's position in Slaughterhouse. It placed private acts of discrimination outside the reach of the clause and the courts. The Court categorically rejected the argument that the clause authorized Congress to “create a code of municipal law for the regulation of private rights.” The Fourteenth Amendment authorized only corrective, rather than general, legislation that “may be necessary and proper for counteracting such laws as the State may adopt.” Regulation of private discrimination, if it were to occur at all, was left to state discretion and initiative. Soon thereafter a comprehensive network of state segregation statutes or Jim Crow laws was enacted. The Court found the segregative approach to be constitutional in Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537: 1896), using the separate but equal doctrine. The Court said Jim Crow statutes only made a legal distinction between races and had “no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races.” No constitutional provision could go further and “abolish distinction based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” Little attention was paid to the equiva- lent-treatment-under-separate-circumstances idea until certain professional education cases came to the Court in the 1950s. Then the equality of the separate but equal doctrine was carefully examined. The doctrine was struck down in the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education I (347 U.S. 483: 1954). The Court found that racial segregation imposed by law materially interfered with equal educa-tional opportunity. Subsequently the Court used the Equal Protection Clause to require that affirmative steps be taken to desegregate where constitutional violations could be shown. The authority of the federal courts to mandate relief in such situations was utilized extensively. The Supreme Court went on to hold that race can be a permissible consideration in university admission procedures and in establishing policies extending preferential treatment to those subjected to past discrimination. The state action requirement still provides some insulation for private discrimination, however, even though the Court has become more receptive to claims that private discriminators are acting closely enough to state authority to be reached. While softening the line of demarcation between public and private acts, the Court has kept purely private discrimination outside the scope of the equal Protection Clause and has modified the nature of state action criteria by holding that prohibited behavior turns on discriminatory intent rather than discriminatory impact.

See Also

Affirmative Action (Law of the United States), 290; State Action (Law of the United States).

Resources

Equal Protection Related Resources

• Equal Protection in the United States Legal Encyclopedia
• Judicial Effects and Policies Keywords in the United States Legal Encyclopedia
• Judicial Policies Keywords in the International Legal Dictionary

Notes

• “Equal Protection”, The American Law Dictionary, 1991, California

Equal Protection (Judicial Policies)