The Fourteenth Amendment's Long Arc

The Fourteenth Amendment is the hinge on which modern American rights turn — one Reconstruction amendment carrying both of the law's shields.

Start where it started: the amendment arrived in 1868, part of the settlement that erased the arithmetic of Gov 030 from the Constitution. Then follow its two clauses down separate centuries. The due process clause aimed a rights guarantee at the states for the first time (Gov 101), and the Supreme Court spent the next hundred years turning it into selective incorporation — the Bill of Rights carried to the states one provision at a time (Gov 102), so that liberties against states are younger than the liberties themselves (the twin at Gov 103). The equal protection clause traveled a harder road: betrayed early by *Plessy v. Ferguson* for fifty-eight years (Gov 125), reclaimed in *Brown v. Board of Education* (Gov 126), enforced at last by statutes (Gov 128, Gov 129), and measured today through tiered review (Gov 122 through 124). Now stand back and see what the arc built: most of the constitutional litigation in Unit 9's courts runs through this one amendment; the modern edge of Unit 2's federalism — what states may not do — is drawn by it; and the two shields of Gov 134 hang from it, one clause each. The framers of 1787 built the machine; the framers of 1868 rebuilt whom it must serve.