The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine [Book Review]

Abstract

Historians have largely left controversies over the intent of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment to lawyers and legal historians. Was the Amendment an attempt to enunciate a broad guarantee of natural rights, or of the first eight Amendments, or merely to insure that whatever rights or benefits states decided to grant had to be shared equally by every person or citizen? Was it, yet .more narrowly, a restriction on only the grossest inequalites or even a constricted, rather trivial effort merely to constitutionalize the 1866 Civil Rights Bill? How much did the framers mean to expand national power at the expense of the states, and how much did they intend for judges, rather than members of Congress, to become the principal guardians of whatever rights the Fourteenth Amendment protected? Were its origins deep within the antebellum antislavery movement, or superficial, in the experiences of the immediate post-Civil War South and the political exigencies of the Republican Party? Indeed, did the Fourteenth Amendment have any determinable meaning at all, and how, if the evidence on any or all of these points conflicts, can we resolve the contradictions?