No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment protects a general right to make private contracts, and that a state may not interfere with this liberty in the name of protecting the health of the worker. The Supreme Court continued with the liberty-of-contract doctrine in Adkins v.
A major provision of the 14th Amendment was to grant citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States,” thereby granting citizenship to formerly enslaved people.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
In enforcing by appropriate legislation the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees against state denials, Congress has the discretion to adopt remedial measures, such as authorizing persons being denied their civil rights in state courts to remove their cases to federal courts, 2200 and to provide criminal 2201 and civil 2202 ...
State Action. —The Fourteenth Amendment, by its terms, limits discrimination only by governmental entities, not by private parties. As the Court has noted, “the action inhibited by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment is only such action as may fairly be said to be that of the States.
Introduced by Representative Samuel Shellabarger of Ohio, the KKK Act –officially known as an “Act to enforce the Provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other Purposes”—was the third of a set increasingly detailed efforts to curb the violence and protect African ...
The most common defensive use of constitutional rights is by criminal defendants. Persons may also assert constitutional rights offensively, bringing a civil suit against the government or government officials for a variety of relief: declarative, injunctive and monetary.