The broad language of the amendment strongly suggests that its framers were proposing to write into the Constitution not a laundry list of specific civil rights but a principle of equal citizenship that forbids organized society from treating any individual as a member of an inferior class. Yet for the first eight decades of the amendments existence, the Supreme Courts interpretation of the amendment betrayed this ideal of equality. In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, for example, the Court invented the state action limitation, which asserts that private decisions by owners of public accommodations and other commercial businesses to segregate their facilities are insulated from the reach of the Fourteenth Amendments guarantee of equal protection under the law.
第二段:14修正案所用的broad language强烈地表明了提案者的目的并不是要提出谁的权力应该受保护的名单,而是要在宪法中建立建立这样一个原则:任何一个个人都不应该被当做低等阶层对待。但是14修正案提出后的80年间,最高法院对它的解释违背了它的这个平等的想法。举例:1883年的Civil Rights Cases中最高法院发明了state action这样的一个限制,将public accommodations and other commercial businesses所有者的四人决定孤立于14修正案的法律平等保护之外。
After the Second World War, a judicial climate more hospitable to equal protection claims culminated in the Supreme Courts ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racially segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Two doctrines embraced by the Supreme Court during this period extended the amendments reach. First, the Court required especially strict scrutiny of legislation that employed a suspect classification, meaning discrimination against a group on grounds that could be construed as racial. This doctrine has broadened the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to other, nonracial forms of discrimination, for while some justices have refused to find any legislative classification other than race to be constitutionally disfavored, most have been receptive to arguments that at least some nonracial discriminations, sexual discrimination in particular, are suspect and deserve this heightened scrutiny by the courts. Second, the Court relaxed the state action limitation on the Fourteenth Amendment, bringing new forms of private conduct within the amendments reach.
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