The broad language of the amendment strongly suggests that itsframers were proposing to write into the Constitution not a laundry list ofspecific civil rights but a principle of equal citizenship that forbidsorganized society from treating any individual as a member of an inferior class. Yet for thefirst eight decades of the amendments existence, the SupremeCourts interpretation of the amendment betrayed this ideal of equality. In theCivil Rights Cases of 1883, for example, the Court invented the state action limitation, whichasserts that private decisions by owners of public accommodations and other commercialbusinesses to segregate their facilities are insulated from the reach of theFourteenth 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 climatemore hospitable to equal protection claims culminated in the Supreme Courts ruling inBrown v. Board of Education that racially segregated schools violated theequal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Twodoctrines embraced by the Supreme Court during this period extended theamendments reach. First, the Court required especially strict scrutiny of legislation thatemployed a suspect classification, meaning discrimination against a group on grounds that could beconstrued as racial. This doctrine has broadened the application of the FourteenthAmendment to other, nonracial forms of discrimination, for while somejustices have refused to find any legislative classification other than race tobe constitutionally disfavored, most have been receptive to arguments that at least some nonracialdiscriminations, sexual discrimination in particular, are suspect and deservethis heightened scrutiny by the courts. Second, the Courtrelaxed the state action limitation on the Fourteenth Amendment, bringingnew forms of private conduct within the amendments reach.
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