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Laws that were supposed to bring about equality of liberty, property and stability were instead bringing these outcomes to some while depriving others of these same outcomes.Īnd so, the states and their citizenries felt the need, via the Fourteenth Amendment, to empower the federal government with the ability to act as a distant referee of the states and their laws, making sure that state laws never applied unequally to the citizens of a state, for whatever reason.
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Only state laws that dealt with the citizen’s day to day living affected them directly in unequal ways. The federal government’s realm of power was so limited at the time that few federal laws could directly affect people in such a specific, personal and unequal way. The historical reality is this though: it wasn’t federal law that the citizenry, at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment, believed was being applied unjustly and unequally. The Constitution itself says nothing about race, religion or any other attributes that would define a group–(aside from the three-fifth compromise which stipulated that, during a census, the government would count three-fifths of those in servitude–this being the group stipulated–as part of the population of the Southern states, giving them a few more representatives based on population). The Constitution alone should have been enough for government to apply law equally to everyone. citizenry felt the need to add the equal protection clause into the Constitution. This is why the Constitution exists: to direct, confine and define the laws to which the people must be subject.
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That is what it means to be government and that is what equal protection of the laws means. The government should protect everyone from thieves, no matter who they are. How foolish would it be for us to create a government to give us laws and then say that laws protecting from thievery only apply to people with brown eyes? Meaning, if you have blue eyes, the government is not obligated to protect you from thieves– even if this bias is not codified in law. It’s flawed and unjust law if applied unequally to the population it’s tasked with protecting. The classically liberal point of law is the bring order to society and equal protection for everyone and their private property. How foolish for the government we created– to take us out of a realm of complete inequality where only the strong survive and put us in a world with some peace, stability and therefore liberty-to use its lawmaking powers to destroy the liberty of certain people under its rule. It would be silly to create a government tasked with writing laws to protect us and our private property from each other, confine its power to write law by a Constitution, and then assume that these laws will be unequally applied to the population (the employer of government) at large. deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."Įqual protection under the law is an essential part of a Constitutional and free society. Photo by Vlada Karpovich on ".Nor shall any State.