What is the Fourteenth Amendment?

The Fourteenth Amendment provides equal protection of the laws and due process to all persons within state jurisdiction, defines United States citizenship, and gives Congress power to enforce its provisions. Ratified on July 9, 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, the amendment was the second of the three Reconstruction Amendments and is the most frequently litigated provision of the Constitution.

Section 1 contains four foundational clauses. The Citizenship Clause declares that 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, overruling the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) which had denied citizenship to people of African descent. The Privileges or Immunities Clause forbids states from abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, although the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) gave it a narrow reading. The Due Process Clause forbids states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, and through the doctrine of incorporation has applied most of the Bill of Rights against state governments. The Equal Protection Clause forbids states from denying any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Section 5 grants Congress power to enforce the amendment by appropriate legislation.

The remaining sections addressed Reconstruction-era issues: representation based on the whole population rather than the three-fifths compromise, disqualification of certain former Confederates from federal and state office, validity of the Union war debt, and repudiation of Confederate debts.

The amendment was central to the civil rights revolution. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) used the Equal Protection Clause to end public school segregation. Loving v. Virginia (1967) struck down state bans on interracial marriage. Reed v. Reed (1971) and United States v. Virginia (1996) extended equal protection scrutiny to sex-based classifications. Bush v. Gore (2000) applied it to vote counting in presidential elections.

The Due Process Clause underpins recognition of substantive rights including marital privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). Through incorporation, the Fourteenth Amendment has applied First Amendment freedoms to state governments since Gitlow v. New York (1925), the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule since Mapp v. Ohio (1961), and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel since Gideon v. Wainwright (1963).

Naturalization candidates should know that the Fourteenth Amendment is the constitutional source of birthright citizenship for those born in the United States and the principal guarantee of equality under state law.