The Fourteenth Amendment

Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and guarantees due process and equal protection of the laws against state action. It is the most consequential amendment after the Bill of Rights.

The Fourteenth Amendment was one of three Reconstruction Amendments passed in the years after the Civil War. The Thirteenth abolished slavery. The Fifteenth protected the right to vote regardless of race. The Fourteenth, ratified in July 1868, did three things at once. Section 1 declared that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens, overturning the Dred Scott decision's holding that Black Americans could not be citizens. It then forbade any state from abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens, from denying due process, or from denying equal protection of the laws. Section 2 reduced the congressional representation of states that disenfranchised eligible voters. Section 3 barred former officeholders who had supported the Confederacy from holding office. Section 4 invalidated Confederate debts. Section 5 gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment by appropriate legislation. The amendment was the constitutional engine of Reconstruction. It was largely unenforced for most of the next century, as the Supreme Court read it narrowly and federal authorities withdrew from the South. Its revival began with Brown v. Board in 1954 and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. The amendment is also the textual basis through which the Court has applied most of the Bill of Rights against the states, a doctrine called incorporation. Almost every major civil rights case of the past century has been a Fourteenth Amendment case in one form or another.