What was the Fourteenth Amendment?

The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection of the laws, established birthright citizenship, prohibited states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process, and reshaped American constitutional law more profoundly than any single amendment except perhaps the original Bill of Rights. Congress proposed the amendment on June 13, 1866 and the necessary three quarters of states ratified by July 9, 1868.

The amendment has five sections. Section 1, the most consequential, defines citizenship and protects civil rights. It 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 in which they reside. This explicitly overruled the Supreme Court's Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of March 6, 1857, which had held that no person of African descent could be a citizen.

Section 1 also forbids states from making or enforcing any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens, depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or denying to any person the equal protection of the laws. These three clauses (Privileges or Immunities, Due Process, and Equal Protection) became the constitutional basis for most federal civil rights litigation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Section 2 apportions House representation by counting the whole number of persons in each state, repealing the Three-Fifths Clause of the original Constitution. It also penalizes any state that abridges the right to vote of any of its male citizens, although the penalty was rarely applied. Section 3 disqualifies from federal or state office any person who having previously taken an oath to support the Constitution then engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States. Section 4 affirms the validity of the federal debt incurred to suppress insurrection and repudiates Confederate debt. Section 5 grants Congress power to enforce the amendment by appropriate legislation.

Ratification was contentious. Former Confederate states were required to ratify the amendment as a condition of regaining congressional representation under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. The Supreme Court initially read the amendment narrowly. In the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), the Court limited the Privileges or Immunities Clause. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court approved separate but equal.

The amendment's full force emerged only with twentieth century cases including Brown v. Board of Education (1954) striking down school segregation, Loving v. Virginia (1967) protecting interracial marriage, and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) protecting same-sex marriage. The Due Process Clause has also been used to incorporate most of the Bill of Rights against state governments through the doctrine of selective incorporation.