Early 14th Amendment Decision V Art 6 Us Constitution
Originally adopted later the Civil War to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people, the 14th Amendment has exponentially expanded the protection of civil rights for all Americans over the past 150 years. Information technology'south been cited in more litigation than any other amendment to the U.Southward. Constitution, and has been at the center of many of the most famous Supreme Court decisions, including schoolhouse desegregation (Brownish v. Board of Education), abortion (Roe five. Wade) and same-sex matrimony (Obergefell 5. Hodges).
Under U.S. police, these essential rights vest not merely to American citizens, just also corporations—thanks to a few key Supreme Court cases and a controversial legal concept known every bit corporate personhood.
Then, what is the 14th Amendment again?
Ratified in 1868, it was one of three amendments to the U.Due south. Constitution designed to grant full citizenship rights to formerly enslaved people. While the 13th and 15th Amendments were relatively limited in scope—the first abolished slavery and the second granted voting rights to black men—the 14th Amendment exponentially expanded the protection of ceremonious rights for all Americans.
The two about important provisions of the 14th Subpoena guarantee that states, similar the federal government, cannot "deprive any person of life, liberty or holding, without due process of constabulary; nor deny to whatsoever person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
What is due process and how does it work?
The cardinal principle of due process goes back to the Magna Carta, the 13th century English charter that inspired the framers of the U.Due south. Constitution. Due process ensures that all levels of authorities operate within the law and provide off-white procedures for everyone. In exercise, the Supreme Court has used the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment to guarantee some of the most cardinal rights and liberties we relish today. It protects individuals (or corporations) from infringement by the states as well as the federal government.
In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court ruled that a state ban on the utilise of contraceptives violated a couple'southward right to marital privacy, which according to the Court was an essential freedom protected under the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause. The ruling famously drew that right to privacy from the "penumbras" (or shadowy zones) bandage by other specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights, including free speech (Kickoff Amendment), liberty from forced quartering of troops (Third Subpoena), unreasonable searches and seizures (Fourth Subpoena), forced cocky-incrimination (Fifth Subpoena) and other unenumerated rights (Ninth Amendment).
Later verdicts would aggrandize this right to privacy, including Roe v. Wade (1973), when the Courtroom found that a woman'southward right to an abortion barbarous within the zone of privacy protected nether the 14th Amendment.
View of the Fourteenth Amendment as posted on the wall of Little Rock Primal High Schoolhouse National Historic Site in Lilliputian Rock, Arkansas. (Credit: Paul Natkin/Getty Images)
Whorl to Continue
How "equal protection" has played a key role in Supreme Courtroom decisions.
Originally aimed at guaranteeing all the rights of citizenship to formerly enslaved people, the Equal Protection Clause has played a leading part in many landmark civil rights cases. In perchance the most famous, the U.South. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Teaching that segregated schoolhouse facilities were unconstitutional, every bit they failed to protect blackness and white students equally under the law.
The Equal Protection Clause would also play a crucial role in major Supreme Court rulings involving interracial marriage (1967'south Loving 5. Virginia), affirmative action (1978's Regents of the University of California v. Bakke) and same-sex activity marriage (2015'south Obergefell v. Hodges).
An 1886 headnote forever shifted the meaning of the 14th Amendment.
Corporations aren't specifically mentioned in the 14th Amendment, or anywhere else in the Constitution. Merely going dorsum to the earliest years of the republic, when the Bank of the United States brought the first corporate rights case before the Supreme Court, U.Due south. corporations take sought many of the same rights guaranteed to individuals, including the rights to own property, enter into contracts, and to sue and exist sued just like individuals.
But it wasn't until the 1886 case Santa Clara Canton v. Southern Pacific Rail Road that the Court appeared to grant a corporation the aforementioned rights every bit an private nether the 14th Subpoena. The case is remembered less for the decision itself—the country had improperly assessed taxes to the railroad visitor—than for a headnote added to information technology past the courtroom reporter at the time, which quoted Principal Justice Morrison Waite as saying: "The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to whatsoever person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. Nosotros are all of stance that it does."
In later cases, this headnote would be treated as an official office of the verdict, and Waite'southward decision reaffirmed in subsequent decisions by the Court, from an 1888 case involving a steel-mining visitor to the 1978 Bellotti decision, which granted corporations the right to spend unlimited funds on election initiatives equally part of their First Amendment right to freedom of speech communication.
In the 2010 case Citizens United v. Federal Ballot Commission (FEC), the most sweeping expansion of corporate rights withal, the Supreme Courtroom cited Bellotti in its highly controversial 5-4 ruling that political spoken language by corporations is a grade of free speech that is too covered under the First Amendment. In 2014's Burwell 5. Hobby Lobby Stores, another v-iv ruling past the Court granted the correct of closely-held companies, which aren't traded on the stock market, to file for exemptions to federal laws on religious grounds.
The legacy of the 14th amendment.
Not anybody agrees with this expanding estimation of corporate personhood. In his dissent in Bellotti, Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that corporations were "bogus" persons rather than "natural" persons, and that granting them the correct to political expression could "pose special dangers in the political sphere." Forth similar lines, Justice John Paul Stevens argued in his dissent to Citizens United that "Corporations…are not themselves members of 'We the People' past whom and for whom our Constitution was established." And presently after the ruling, then-President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address that the decision would "open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections."
While cases like Citizens United and Hobby Foyer have brought the debate over corporate personhood squarely to the forefront of American political life, they're actually just the most recent chapters in a long story. Corporations have been pushing for more and more ramble rights since the get-go years of our nation'southward authorities, and so far there's no indication they'll be stopping anytime soon.
Source: https://www.history.com/news/14th-amendment-corporate-personhood-made-corporations-into-people
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