Meaning of equal protection clause; justification for unequal treatment; unjustified unequal treatment; Fourteenth Amendment focuses on states; Supreme Court interprets Fifth Amendment to apply Equal Protection Clause to the national government; purposes of Equal Protection Clause; concept of subordination; differences between the equality of opportunity and of condition; disparate impact and disparate treatment; inequality of condition and inequality of rights; Congress and state legislatures versus the Supreme Court in regard to laws dealing with disparate impact.
Student Questions: Unit 3, Lesson 19, Sections 1-5 (pdf download)
Image credits: Sojourner Truth, 1864, Wikimedia Commons/National Portrait Gallery; At the bus station in Durham, North Carolina by Jack Delano, 1940, Wikimedia Commons/Library of Congress; wocintech(microsoft) - 161 by WOCinTech Chat, 2016, Flickr/WOCinTech Chat/CC BY 2.0.
The "separate but equal" doctrine; its justification; Plessy v. Ferguson; Brown v. Board of Education; role of NAACP in overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine; Thurgood Marshall; inherent inequality.
Difficulties in implementation of Brown decision; history of defiance; residential segregation laws; role of federal district court judges; problem with "all deliberate speed" requirement in Brown decision; eventual acceptance of Brown decision.
Expansion of interpretation and application of the Equal Protection Clause; expanded categories or classes of people to whom it is applicable; affirmative action; levels of analysis of "suspect" classes, which include strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, and minimum rationality review.
Current controversies about equal protection of the laws; issues regarding race, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation, age, and religion; areas in which constitutional amendments might be pending, which include equality of sexual orientation and a national popular vote.