RIGHTS GUARANTEED PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES OF CITIZENSHIP, DUE PROCESS AND EQUAL

RIGHTS GUARANTEED PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES OF CITIZENSHIP, DUE PROCESS AND EQUAL PROTECTION FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT SECTION 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES In the Dred Scott Case, 1 Chief Justice Taney for the Court ruled that United States citizenship was enjoyed by two classes of individuals: (1) white persons born in the United States as descendents of ‘‘persons, who were at the time of the adoption of the Constitution recognized as citizens in the several States and [who] became also citizens of this new political body,’’ the United States of America, and (2) those who, having been ‘‘born outside the dominions of the United States,’’ had migrated thereto and been naturalized therein. The States were competent, he continued, to confer state citizenship upon anyone in their midst, but they could not make the recipient of such status a citizen of the United States. The ‘‘Negro,’’ or ‘‘African race,’’ according to the Chief Justice, was ineligible to attain United States citizenship, either from a State or by virtue of birth in the United States, even as a free man descended from a Negro residing as a free man in one of the States at the date of ratification of the Constitution. 2 Congress, first in § 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 3 and then in the first sentence 1566 AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED condition of slavery or involuntary servitude . . . shall have the same right[s]. . . .’’ Ch. 31, 14 Stat. 27. 4The proposed amendment as it passed the House contained no such provision, and it was decided in the Senate to include language like that finally adopted. CONG. GLOBE, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 2560, 2768–69, 2869 (1866). The sponsor of the language said: ‘‘This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is . . . a citizen of the United States.’’ Id. at 2890. The legislative history is discussed at some length in Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253, 282–86 (1967) (Justice Harlan dissenting). 5 United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 688 (1898). 6Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 74 (1873). 7 United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898). 8 Id. at 682. 9 Id. at 680–82; Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, 99 (1884). 10 United States v. Gordon, 25 Fed. Cas. 1364 (C.C.S.D.N.Y. 1861) (No. 15,231); In re Look Tin Sing, 21 F. 905 (C.C.Cal. 1884); Lam Mow v. Nagle, 24 F.2d 316 (9th Cir. 1928). 11 387 U.S. 253 (1967). Though the Court upheld the involuntary expatriation of a woman citizen of the United States during her marriage to a foreign citizen in Mackenzie v. Hare, 239 U.S. 299 (1915), the subject first received extended judicial treatment in Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44 (1958), in which by a five-to-four decision the Court upheld a statute denaturalizing a native-born citizen for having voted in a foreign election. For the Court, Justice Frankfurter reasoned that Congress’ power to regulate foreign affairs carried with it the authority to sever the relationship of this country with one of its citizens to avoid national implication in of § 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, 4 set aside the Dred Scott holding in a sentence ‘‘declaratory of existing rights, and affirmative of existing law. . . .’’ 5 While clearly establishing a national rule on national citizenship and settling a controversy of long standing with regard to the derivation of national citizenship, the Fourteenth Amendment did not obliterate the distinction between national and state citizenship, but rather preserved it. 6 The Court has accorded the first sentence of § 1 a construction in accordance with the congressional intentions, holding that a child born in the United States of Chinese parents who themselves were ineligible to be naturalized is nevertheless a citizen of the United States entitled to all the rights and privileges of citizenship. 7 Congress’ intent in including the qualifying phrase ‘‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’’ was apparently to exclude from the reach of the language children born of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state and children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation, both recognized exceptions to the common-law rule of acquired citizenship by birth, 8 as well as children of members of Indian tribes subject to tribal laws. 9 The lower courts have generally held that the citizenship of the parents determines the citizenship of children born on vessels in United States territorial waters or on the high seas. 10 In Afroyim v. Rusk, 11 a divided Court extended the force of this first sentence beyond prior holdings, ruling that it withdrew AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 1567 acts of that citizen which might embarrass relations with a foreign nation. Id. at 60–62. Three of the dissenters denied that Congress had any power to denaturalize. See discussion supra pp. 272–76. In the years before Afroyim, a series of decisions had curbed congressional power. 12 Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253, 262–63 (1967). Four dissenters, Justices Harlan, Clark, Stewart, and White, controverted the Court’s reliance on the history and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and reasserted Justice Frankfurter’s previous reasoning in Perez. Id. at 268. 13 Rogers v. Bellei, 401 U.S. 815 (1971). This, too, was a five-to-four decision, Justices Blackmun, Harlan, Stewart, and White, and Chief Justice Burger in the majority, and Justices Black, Douglas, Brennan, and Marshall dissenting. 14 Insurance Co. v. New Orleans, 13 Fed. Cas. 67 (C.C.D.La. 1870). Not being citizens of the United States, corporations accordingly have been declared unable ‘‘to claim the protection of that clause of the Fourteenth Amendment which secures the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States against abridgment or impairment by the law of a State.’’ Orient Ins. Co. v. Daggs, 172 U.S. 557, 561 (1869). This conclusion was in harmony with the earlier holding in Paul v. Virginia, 75 U.S. (8 Wall.) 168 (1869), to the effect that corporations were not within the scope of the privileges and immunities clause of state citizenship set out in Article IV, § 2. See also Selover, Bates & Co. v. Walsh, 226 U.S. 112, 126 (1912); Berea College v. Kentucky, 211 U.S. 45 (1908); Liberty Warehouse Co. v. Tobacco Growers, 276 U.S. 71, 89 (1928); Grosjean v. American Press Co., 297 U.S. 233, 244 (1936). from the Government of the United States the power to expatriate United States citizens against their will for any reason. ‘‘[T]he Amendment can most reasonably be read as defining a citizenship which a citizen keeps unless he voluntarily relinquishes it. Once acquired, this Fourteenth Amendment citizenship was not to be shifted, canceled, or diluted at the will of the Federal Government, the States, or any other government unit. It is true that the chief interest of the people in giving permanence and security to citizenship in the Fourteenth Amendment was the desire to protect Negroes. . . . This undeniable purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment to make citizenship of Negroes permanent and secure would be frustrated by holding that the Government can rob a citizen of his citizenship without his consent by simply proceeding to act under an implied general power to regulate foreign affairs or some other power generally granted.’’ 12 In a subsequent decision, however, the Court held that persons who were statutorily naturalized by being born abroad of at least one American parent could not claim the protection of the first sentence of § 1 and that Congress could therefore impose a reasonable and non-arbitrary condition subsequent upon their continued retention of United States citizenship. 13 Between these two decisions there is a tension which should call forth further litigation efforts to explore the meaning of the citizenship sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment. Citizens of the United States within the meaning of this Amendment must be natural and not artificial persons; a corporate body is not a citizen of the United States. 14 1568 AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 15 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 71, 77–79 (1873). PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES Unique among constitutional provisions, the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enjoys the distinction of having been rendered a ‘‘practical nullity’’ by a single decision of the Supreme Court issued within five years after its ratification. In the Slaughter-House Cases, 15 a bare majority of the Court frustrated the aims of the most aggressive sponsors of this clause, to whom was attributed an intention to centralize ‘‘in the hands of the Federal Government large powers hitherto exercised by the States’’ with a view to enabling business to develop unimpeded by state interference. This expansive alteration of the federal system was to have been achieved by converting the rights of the citizens of each State as of the date of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment into privileges and immunities of United States citizenship and thereafter perpetuating this newly defined status quo through judicial condemnation of any state law challenged as ‘‘abridging’’ any one of the latter privileges. To have fostered such intentions, the Court declared, would have been ‘‘to transfer the security and protection of all the civil rights . . . to the Federal Government, . . . to bring within the power of Congress the entire domain of civil rights heretofore belonging exclusively to the States,’’ and to ‘‘constitute this court a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the States, on the civil rights of their own citizens, with authority to nullify such as it did not approve as consistent with those rights, as they existed at the time of the adoption of this amendment. . . . [The effect of] so great a departure from the structure and spirit of our institutions . . . is to fetter and degrade the State governments by subjecting them to the control of Congress, in the exercise of powers heretofore universally conceded to them of the most ordinary and fundamental character. . . . We are convinced that no such results were intended by the Congress . . . , nor by the legislatures . . . which ratified’’ this amendment, and that the sole ‘‘pervading purpose’’ of this and the other War Amendments was ‘‘the freedom of the slave race.’’ Conformably to these conclusions, the Court advised the New Orleans butchers that the Louisiana statute, conferring on a single corporation a monopoly of the business of slaughtering cattle, abrogated no rights possessed by them as United States citizens; insofar as that law interfered with their claimed privilege of pursuing the lawful calling of butchering animals, the privilege thus terminated was merely one of ‘‘those which belonged to the citizens of the States as such.’’ Privileges and immunities of state citizenship AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 1569 16 Id. at 78–79. 17 Id. at 79. 18 211 U.S. 78, 97 (1908). 19 Citing Crandall v. Nevada, 73 U.S. (65 Wall.) 35 (1868). It was observed in United States v. Wheeler, 254 U.S. 281, 299 (1920), that the statute at issue in Crandall was actually held to burden directly the performance by the United States of its governmental functions. Cf. Passenger Cases, 48 U.S. (7 How.) 282, 491–92 (1849) (Chief Justice Taney dissenting). Four concurring Justices in Edwards v. California, 314 U.S. 160, 177, 181 (1941), would have grounded a right of interstate travel on the privileges and immunities clause. More recently, the Court declined to ascribe a source but was content to assert the right to be protected. United States v. Guest, 383 U.S. 745, 758 (1966); Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618, 629–31 (1969). Three Justices ascribed the source to this clause in Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112, 285–87 (1970) (Justices Stewart and Blackmun and Chief Justice Burger, concurring in part and dissenting in part). 20 Citing United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876). 21 Citing Ex parte Yarbrough, 110 U.S. 651 (1884); Wiley v. Sinkler, 179 U.S. 58 (1900). Note Justice Douglas’ reliance on this clause in Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112, 149 (1970) (concurring in part and dissenting in part). had been ‘‘left to the state governments for security and protection’’ and had not been placed by this clause ‘‘under the special care of the Federal Government.’’ The only privileges which the Fourteenth Amendment protected against state encroachment were declared to be those ‘‘which owe their existence to the Federal Government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws.’’ 16 These privileges, however, had been available to United States citizens and protected from state interference by operation of federal supremacy even prior to the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Slaughter-House Cases, therefore, reduced the privileges and immunities clause to a superfluous reiteration of a prohibition already operative against the states. Although the Court has expressed a reluctance to attempt a definitive enumeration of those privileges and immunities of United States citizens which are protected against state encroachment, it nevertheless felt obliged in the Slaughter-House Cases ‘‘to suggest some which owe their existence to the Federal Government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws.’’ 17 Among those which it then identified were the right of access to the seat of Government and to the seaports, subtreasuries, land officers, and courts of justice in the several States, the right to demand protection of the Federal Government on the high seas or abroad, the right of assembly, the privilege of habeas corpus, the right to use the navigable waters of the United States, and rights secured by treaty. In Twining v. New Jersey, 18 the Court recognized ‘‘among the rights and privileges’’ of national citizenship the right to pass freely from State to State, 19 the right to petition Congress for a redress of grievances, 20 the right to vote for national officers, 21 the 1570 AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 22 Citing United States v. Waddell, 112 U.S. 76 (1884). 23 Citing Logan v. United States, 144 U.S. 263 (1892). 24 Citing In re Quarles and Butler, 158 U.S. 532 (1895). 25 Crutcher v. Kentucky, 141 U.S. 47, 57 (1891). 26 296 U.S. 404 (1935). 27Madden v. Kentucky, 309 U.S. 83, 93 (1940). 28 307 U.S. 496, 510–18 (1939) (Justices Roberts and Black; Chief Justice Hughes may or may not have concurred on this point. Id. at 532). Justices Stone and Reed preferred to base the decision on the due process clause. Id. at 518. 29 314 U.S. 160, 177–83 (1941). 30See also Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112, 149 (1970) (Justice Douglas); id. at 285–87 (Justices Stewart and Blackmun and Chief Justice Burger). 31 332 U.S. 633, 640 (1948). right to enter public lands, 22 the right to be protected against violence while in the lawful custody of a United States marshal, 23 and the right to inform the United States authorities of violation of its laws. 24 Earlier, in a decision not mentioned in Twining, the Court had also acknowledged that the carrying on of interstate commerce is ‘‘a right which every citizen of the United States is entitled to exercise.’’ 25 In modern times, the Court has continued the minor role accorded to the clause, only occasionally manifesting a disposition to enlarge the restraint which it imposes upon state action. Colgate v. Harvey, 26 which was overruled five years later, 27 represented the first attempt by the Court since adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to convert the privileges and immunities clause into a source of protection of other than those ‘‘interests growing out of the relationship between the citizen and the national government.’’ Here, the Court declared that the right of a citizen resident in one State to contract in another, to transact any lawful business, or to make a loan of money, in any State other than that in which the citizen resides was a privilege of national citizenship which was abridged by a state income tax law excluding from taxable income interest received on money loaned within the State. In Hague v. CIO, 28 two and perhaps three justices thought that freedom to use municipal streets and parks for the dissemination of information concerning provisions of a federal statute and to assemble peacefully therein for discussion of the advantages and opportunities offered by such act was a privilege and immunity of a United States citizen, and in Edwards v. California 29 four Justices were prepared to rely on the clause. 30 In Oyama v. California, 31 in a single sentence the Court agreed with the contention of a native-born youth that a state Alien Land Law, applied to work a forfeiture of property purchased in his name with funds advanced by his parent, a Japanese alien ineligible for citizenship and precluded from owning land, deprived him ‘‘of his privileges as an American citizen.’’ The right to acquire and retain property had previously not been set AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 1571 32 Civil Rights Act of 1866, ch. 31, 14 Stat. 27, now 42 U.S.C. § 1982, as amended. 33 E.g., Holden v. Hardy, 169 U.S. 366, 380 (1898) (statute limiting hours of labor in mines); Williams v. Fears, 179 U.S. 270, 274 (1900) (statute taxing the business of hiring persons to labor outside the State); Wilmington Mining Co. v. Fulton, 205 U.S. 60, 73 (1907) (statute requiring employment of only licensed mine managers and examiners and imposing liability on the mine owner for failure to furnish a reasonably safe place for workmen); Heim v. McCall, 239 U.S. 175 (1915); Crane v. New York, 239 U.S. 195 (1915) (statute restricting employment on state public works to citizens of the United States, with a preference to citizens of the State); Missouri Pacific Ry. v. Castle, 224 U.S. 541 (1912) (statute making railroads liable to employees for injuries caused by negligence of fellow servants and abolishing the defense of contributory negligence); Western Union Tel. Co. v. Milling Co., 218 U.S. 406 (1910) (statute prohibiting a stipulation against liability for negligence in delivery of interstate telegraph messages); Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 130, 139 (1873); In re Lockwood, 154 U.S. 116 (1894) (refusal of state court to license a woman to practice law); Kirtland v. Hotchkiss, 100 U.S. 491, 499 (1879) (law taxing a debt owed a resident citizen by a resident of another State and secured by mortgage of land in the debtor’s State); Bartemeyer v. Iowa, 85 U.S. (18 Wall.) 129 (1874); Mugler v. Kansas, 123 U.S. 623 (1887); Crowley v. Christensen, 137 U.S. 86, 91 (1890); Giozza v. Tiernan, 148 U.S. 657 (1893) (statutes regulating the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors); In re Kemmler, 136 U.S. 436 (1890) (statute regulating the method of capital punishment); Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. (21 Wall.) 162 (1875) (statute regulating the franchise to male citizens); Pope v. Williams, 193 U.S. 621 (1904) (statute requiring persons coming into a State to make a declaration of intention to become citizens and residents thereof before being permitted to register as voters); Ferry v. Spokane, P. & S. Ry., 258 U.S. 314 (1922) (statute restricting dower, in case wife at time of husband’s death is a nonresident, to lands of which he died seized); Walker v. Sauvinet, 92 U.S. 90 (1876) (statute restricting right to jury trial in civil suits at common law); Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 267 (1886) (statute restricting drilling or parading in any city by any body of men without license of the Governor); Maxwell v. Dow, 176 U.S. 581, 596, 597– 98 (1900) (provision for prosecution upon information, and for a jury (except in capital cases) of eight persons); New York ex rel. Bryant v. Zimmerman, 278 U.S. 63, 71 (1928) (statute penalizing the becoming or remaining a member of any oathbound association (other than benevolent orders, and the like) with knowledge that the association has failed to file its constitution and membership lists); Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319 (1937) (statute allowing a State to appeal in criminal cases for errors of law and to retry the accused); Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277 (1937) (statute making the payment of poll taxes a prerequisite to the right to vote); Madden v. Kentucky, 309 U.S. 83, 92–93 (1940), (overruling Colgate v. Harvey, 296 U.S. 404, 430 (1935)) (statute whereby deposits in banks outside the State are taxed at 50¢ per $100); Snowden v. Hughes, 321 U.S. 1 (1944) (the right to become a candidate for state office is a privilege of state citizenship, not national citizenship); MacDougall v. Green, 335 U.S. 281 (1948) (Illinois Election Code requirement that a petition to form and nominate candidates for a new political party be signed by at least 200 voters from each of at least 50 of the 102 counties in the State, notwithstanding that 52% of the voters reside in only one county and 87% in the 49 most populous counties); New York v. O’Neill, 359 U.S. 1 (1959) (Uniform Reciprocal forth in any of the enumerations as one of the privileges protected against state abridgment, although a federal statute enacted prior to the proposal and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment did confer on all citizens the same rights to purchase and hold real property as white citizens enjoyed. 32 In other respects, however, claims based on this clause have been rejected. 33 1572 AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED State Law to secure attendance of witnesses from within or without a State in criminal proceedings); James v. Valtierra, 402 U.S. 137 (1971) (a provision in a state constitution to the effect that low-rent housing projects could not be developed, constructed, or acquired by any state governmental body without the affirmative vote of a majority of those citizens participating in a community referendum). 34 Hibben v. Smith, 191 U.S. 310, 325 (1903). 35 Carroll v. Greenwich Ins. Co., 199 U.S. 401, 410 (1905). See also French v. Barber Asphalt Paving Co., 181 U.S. 324, 328 (1901). 36Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 450 (1857), is the exception. 37 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 80–81 (1873). 38 94 U.S. 113, 134 (1877). DUE PROCESS OF LAW The Development of Substantive Due Process Although many years after ratification the Court ventured the not very informative observation that the Fourteenth Amendment ‘‘operates to extend . . . the same protection against arbitrary state legislation, affecting life, liberty and property, as is offered by the Fifth Amendment,’’ 34 and that ‘‘ordinarily if an act of Congress is valid under the Fifth Amendment it would be hard to say that a state law in like terms was void under the Fourteenth,’’ 35 the significance of the due process clause as a restraint on state action appears to have been grossly underestimated by litigants no less than by the Court in the years immediately following its adoption. From the outset of our constitutional history due process of law as it occurs in the Fifth Amendment had been recognized as a restraint upon government, but, with the conspicuous exception of the Dred Scott decision, 36 only in the narrower sense that a legislature must provide ‘‘due process for the enforcement of law.’’ Thus, in the Slaughter-House Cases, 37 in which the clause was invoked by a group of butchers challenging the validity of a Louisiana statute which conferred upon one corporation the exclusive privilege of butchering cattle in New Orleans, the Court declared that the prohibition against a deprivation of property ‘‘has been in the Constitution since the adoption of the Fifth Amendment, as a restraint upon the Federal power. It is also to be found in some forms of expression in the constitution of nearly all the States, as a restraint upon the power of the States. . . . We are not without judicial interpretation, therefore, both State and National, of the meaning of this clause. And it is sufficient to say that under no construction of that provision that we have ever seen, or any that we deem admissible, can the restraint imposed by the State of Louisiana upon the exercise of their trade by the butchers of New Orleans be held to be a deprivation of property within the meaning of that provision.’’ Four years later, in Munn v. Illinois, 38 the Court again refused to interpret the due process clause as invalidating AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 1573 39 96 U.S. 97, 103–04 (1878). state legislation regulating the rates charged for the transportation and warehousing of grain. Rejecting contentions that such legislation effected an unconstitutional deprivation of property by preventing the owner from earning a reasonable compensation for its use and by transferring to the public an interest in a private enterprise, Chief Justice Waite emphasized that ‘‘the great office of statutes is to remedy defects in the common law as they are developed. . . . We know that this power [of rate regulation] may be abused; but that is no argument against its existence. For protection against abuses by legislatures the people must resort to the polls, not to the courts.’’ Deploring such attempts, nullified consistently in the preceding cases, to convert the due process clause into a substantive restraint on the powers of the States, Justice Miller in Davidson v. New Orleans, 39 obliquely counseled against a departure from the conventional application of the clause, albeit he acknowledged the difficulty of arriving at a precise, all-inclusive definition thereof. ‘‘It is not a little remarkable,’’ he observed, ‘‘that while this provision has been in the Constitution of the United States, as a restraint upon the authority of the Federal government, for nearly a century, and while, during all that time, the manner in which the powers of that government have been exercised has been watched with jealousy, and subjected to the most rigid criticism in all its branches, this special limitation upon its powers has rarely been invoked in the judicial forum or the more enlarged theatre of public discussion. But while it has been part of the Constitution, as a restraint upon the power of the States, only a very few years, the docket of this court is crowded with cases in which we are asked to hold that state courts and state legislatures have deprived their own citizens of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. There is here abundant evidence that there exists some strange misconception of the scope of this provision as found in the Fourteenth Amendment. In fact, it would seem, from the character of many of the cases before us, and the arguments made in them, that the clause under consideration is looked upon as a means of bringing to the test of the decision of this court the abstract opinions of every unsuccessful litigant in a State court of the justice of the decision against him, and of the merits of the legislation on which such a decision may be founded. If, therefore, it were possible to define what it is for a State to deprive a person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, in terms which would cover every exercise of power thus forbidden to the State, and exclude 1574 AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 40 110 U.S. 516, 528, 532, 536 (1884). those which are not, no more useful construction could be furnished by this or any other court to any part of the fundamental of law. ‘‘But, apart from the imminent risk of a failure to give any definition which would be at once perspicuous, comprehensive, and satisfactory, there is wisdom . . . in the ascertaining of the intent and application of such an important phrase in the Federal Constitution, by the gradual process of judicial inclusion and exclusion, as the cases presented for decision shall require. . . .’’ A bare half-dozen years later, in again reaching a result in harmony with past precedents, the Justices gave fair warning of the imminence of a modification of their views. After noting that the due process clause, by reason of its operation upon ‘‘all the powers of government, legislative as well as executive and judicial,’’ could not be appraised solely in terms of the ‘‘sanction of settled usage,’’ Justice Mathews, speaking for the Court in Hurtado v. California, 40 declared that ‘‘[a]rbitrary power, enforcing its edicts to the injury of the persons and property of its subjects, is not law, whether manifested as the decree of a personal monarch or of an impersonal multitude. And the limitations imposed by our constitutional law upon the action of the governments, both state and national, are essential to the preservation of public and private rights, notwithstanding the representative character of our political institutions. The enforcement of these limitations by judicial process is the device of self-governing communities to protect the rights of individuals and minorities, as well against the power of numbers, as against the violence of public agents transcending the limits of lawful authority, even when acting in the name and wielding the force of the government.’’ Thus were the States put on notice that every species of state legislation, whether dealing with procedural or substantive rights, was subject to the scrutiny of the Court when the question of its essential justice was raised. What induced the Court to dismiss its fears of upsetting the balance in the distribution of powers under the federal system and to enlarge its own supervisory powers over state legislation was the increasing number of cases seeking protection of property rights against the remedial social legislation States were enacting in the wake of industrial expansion. At the same time, the added emphasis on the due process clause afforded the Court an opportunity to compensate for its earlier virtual nullification of the privileges and immunities clause of the Amendment. So far as such modification of its position needed to be justified in legal terms, theories concerning the relation of government to private rights were available AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 1575 41 94 U.S. 113, 141–48 (1877). 42 123 U.S. 623, 661 (1887). 43 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 113–14, 116, 122 (1873). 44Loan Association v. Topeka, 87 U.S. (20 Wall.) 655, 662 (1875). ‘‘There are . . . rights in every free government beyond the control of the State. . . . There are limitations on [governmental power] which grow out of the essential nature of all free governments. Implied reservations of individual rights, without which the social compact could not exist. . . .’’ 45 ‘‘Rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are equivalent to the rights of life, liberty, and property. These are fundamental rights which can only be taken away by due process of law, and which can only be interfered with, or the enjoyment of which can only be modified, by lawful regulations necessary or proper for the mutual good of all. . . . This right to choose one’s calling is an essential part of that liberty which it is the object of government to protect; and a calling, when chosen, is a man’s property right. . . . A law which prohibits a large class of citizens from adopting a lawful employment, or from following a lawful employment previously adopted, does deprive them of liberty as well as property, without due process of law.’’ Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 116, 122 (1873) (Justice Bradley dissenting). to demonstrate the impropriety of leaving to the state legislatures the same ample range of police power they had enjoyed prior to the Civil War. Preliminary to this consummation, however, the Slaughter-House Cases and Munn v. Illinois had to be overruled at least in part, and the views of the dissenting Justices in those cases converted into majority doctrine. About twenty years were required to complete this process, in the course of which the restricted view of the police power advanced by Justice Field in his dissent in Munn v. Illinois, 41 namely, that it is solely a power to prevent injury, was in effect ratified by the Court itself. This occurred in Mugler v. Kansas, 42 where the power was defined as embracing no more than the power to promote public health, morals, and safety. During the same interval, ideas embodying the social compact and natural rights, which had been espoused by Justice Bradley in his dissent in the SlaughterHouse Cases, 43 had been transformed tentatively into constitutionally enforceable limitations upon government. 44 The consequence was that the States in exercising their police powers could foster only those purposes of health, morals, and safety which the Court had enumerated, and could employ only such means as would not unreasonably interfere with the fundamentally natural rights of liberty and property, which Justice Bradley had equated with freedom to pursue a lawful calling and to make contracts for that purpose. 45 So having narrowed the scope of the state’s police power in deference to the natural rights of liberty and property, the Court next proceeded to read into the concepts currently accepted theories of laissez faire economics, reinforced by the doctrine of Social Darwinism as elaborated by Herbert Spencer, to the end that ‘‘liberty,’’ in 1576 AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 46 143 U.S. 517, 551 (1892). 47See Fletcher v. Peck, 10. U.S. (6 Cr.) 87, 128 (1810). 48 94 U.S. 113, 123, 182 (1877). 49 123 U.S. 623 (1887). 50 Id. at 662. ‘‘We cannot shut out of view the fact, within the knowledge of all, that the public health, the public morals, and the public safety, may be endangered by the general use of intoxicating drinks; nor the fact . . . that . . . pauperism, and crime . . . are, in some degree, at least, traceable to this evil.’’

RIGHTS GUARANTEED PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES OF CITIZENSHIP, DUE PROCESS AND EQUAL PROTECTION FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT SECTION 

1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES In the Dred Scott Case, 1 Chief Justice Taney for the Court ruled that United States citizenship was enjoyed by two classes of individuals:

 (1) white persons born in the United States as descendents of ‘‘persons, who were at the time of the adoption of the Constitution recognized as citizens in the several States and [who] became also citizens of this new political body,’’ the United States of America, and

 (2) those who, having been ‘‘born outside the dominions of the United States,’’ had migrated thereto and been naturalized therein. The States were competent, he continued, to confer state citizenship upon anyone in their midst, but they could not make the recipient of such status a citizen of the United States. 

The ‘‘Negro,’’ or ‘‘African race,’’ according to the Chief Justice, was ineligible to attain United States citizenship, either from a State or by virtue of birth in the United States, even as a free man descended from a Negro residing as a free man in one of the States at the date of ratification of the Constitution. 

2 Congress, first in § 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 3 and then in the first sentence 1566

 AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED condition of slavery or involuntary servitude . . . shall have the same right[s]. . . .’’ Ch. 31, 14 Stat. 27. 4The proposed amendment as it passed the House contained no such provision, and it was decided in the Senate to include language like that finally adopted. CONG. GLOBE, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 2560, 2768–69, 2869 (1866). The sponsor of the language said: ‘‘This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is . . . a citizen of the United States.’’ Id. at 2890. The legislative history is discussed at some length in Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253, 282–86 (1967) (Justice Harlan dissenting). 

5 United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 688 (1898). 

6 Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 74 (1873). 

7 United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898). 

8 Id. at 682. 

9 Id. at 680–82; Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, 99 (1884). 

10 United States v. Gordon, 25 Fed. Cas. 1364 (C.C.S.D.N.Y. 1861) (No. 15,231); In re Look Tin Sing, 21 F. 905 (C.C.Cal. 1884); 

Lam Mow v. Nagle, 24 F.2d 316 (9th Cir. 1928). 11 387 U.S. 253 (1967). Though the Court upheld the involuntary expatriation of a woman citizen of the United States during her marriage to a foreign citizen in Mackenzie v. Hare, 239 U.S. 299 (1915), the subject first received extended judicial treatment in Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44 (1958), in which by a five-to-four decision the Court upheld a statute denaturalizing a native-born citizen for having voted in a foreign election. 

For the Court, Justice Frankfurter reasoned that Congress’ power to regulate foreign affairs carried with it the authority to sever the relationship of this country with one of its citizens to avoid national implication in of § 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, 4 set aside the Dred Scott holding in a sentence ‘‘declaratory of existing rights, and affirmative of existing law. . . .’’ 

5 While clearly establishing a national rule on national citizenship and settling a controversy of long standing with regard to the derivation of national citizenship, the Fourteenth Amendment did not obliterate the distinction between national and state citizenship, but rather preserved it.

 6 The Court has accorded the first sentence of § 1 a construction in accordance with the congressional intentions, holding that a child born in the United States of Chinese parents who themselves were ineligible to be naturalized is nevertheless a citizen of the United States entitled to all the rights and privileges of citizenship. 

7 Congress’ intent in including the qualifying phrase ‘‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’’ was apparently to exclude from the reach of the language children born of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state and children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation, both recognized exceptions to the common-law rule of acquired citizenship by birth,

8 as well as children of members of Indian tribes subject to tribal laws. 

9 The lower courts have generally held that the citizenship of the parents determines the citizenship of children born on vessels in United States territorial waters or on the high seas. 

10 In Afroyim v. Rusk, 

11 a divided Court extended the force of this first sentence beyond prior holdings, ruling that it withdrew AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 1567 acts of that citizen which might embarrass relations with a foreign nation. Id. at 60–62. Three of the dissenters denied that Congress had any power to denaturalize. See discussion supra pp. 272–76. In the years before Afroyim, a series of decisions had curbed congressional power. 

12 Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253, 262–63 (1967). Four dissenters, Justices Harlan, Clark, Stewart, and White, controverted the Court’s reliance on the history and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and reasserted Justice Frankfurter’s previous reasoning in Perez. Id. at 268. 

13 Rogers v. Bellei, 401 U.S. 815 (1971). This, too, was a five-to-four decision, Justices Blackmun, Harlan, Stewart, and White, and Chief Justice Burger in the majority, and Justices Black, Douglas, Brennan, and Marshall dissenting. 

14 Insurance Co. v. New Orleans, 13 Fed. Cas. 67 (C.C.D.La. 1870). Not being citizens of the United States, corporations accordingly have been declared unable ‘‘to claim the protection of that clause of the Fourteenth Amendment which secures the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States against abridgment or impairment by the law of a State.’’ 

Orient Ins. Co. v. Daggs, 172 U.S. 557, 561 (1869). This conclusion was in harmony with the earlier holding in Paul v. Virginia, 75 U.S. (8 Wall.) 168 (1869), to the effect that corporations were not within the scope of the privileges and immunities clause of state citizenship set out in Article IV, § 2. See also Selover, Bates & Co. v. Walsh, 226 U.S. 112, 126 (1912); 

Berea College v. Kentucky, 211 U.S. 45 (1908); Liberty Warehouse Co. v. Tobacco Growers, 276 U.S. 71, 89 (1928); Grosjean v. American Press Co., 297 U.S. 233, 244 (1936). from the Government of the United States the power to expatriate United States citizens against their will for any reason. ‘‘[T]he Amendment can most reasonably be read as defining a citizenship which a citizen keeps unless he voluntarily relinquishes it. Once acquired, this Fourteenth Amendment citizenship was not to be shifted, canceled, or diluted at the will of the Federal Government, the States, or any other government unit. It is true that the chief interest of the people in giving permanence and security to citizenship in the Fourteenth Amendment was the desire to protect Negroes. . . . This undeniable purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment to make citizenship of Negroes permanent and secure would be frustrated by holding that the Government can rob a citizen of his citizenship without his consent by simply proceeding to act under an implied general power to regulate foreign affairs or some other power generally granted.’’ 

12 In a subsequent decision, however, the Court held that persons who were statutorily naturalized by being born abroad of at least one American parent could not claim the protection of the first sentence of § 1 and that Congress could therefore impose a reasonable and non-arbitrary condition subsequent upon their continued retention of United States citizenship. 

13 Between these two decisions there is a tension which should call forth further litigation efforts to explore the meaning of the citizenship sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment. Citizens of the United States within the meaning of this Amendment must be natural and not artificial persons; a corporate body is not a citizen of the United States. 14 1568 AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 15 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 71, 77–79 (1873). PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES Unique among constitutional provisions, the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enjoys the distinction of having been rendered a ‘‘practical nullity’’ by a single decision of the Supreme Court issued within five years after its ratification. In the Slaughter-House Cases, 15 a bare majority of the Court frustrated the aims of the most aggressive sponsors of this clause, to whom was attributed an intention to centralize ‘‘in the hands of the Federal Government large powers hitherto exercised by the States’’ with a view to enabling business to develop unimpeded by state interference. 

This expansive alteration of the federal system was to have been achieved by converting the rights of the citizens of each State as of the date of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment into privileges and immunities of United States citizenship and thereafter perpetuating this newly defined status quo through judicial condemnation of any state law challenged as ‘‘abridging’’ any one of the latter privileges. To have fostered such intentions, the Court declared, would have been ‘‘to transfer the security and protection of all the civil rights . . . to the Federal Government, . . . to bring within the power of Congress the entire domain of civil rights heretofore belonging exclusively to the States,’’ and to ‘‘constitute this court a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the States, on the civil rights of their own citizens, with authority to nullify such as it did not approve as consistent with those rights, as they existed at the time of the adoption of this amendment. . . . [The effect of] so great a departure from the structure and spirit of our institutions . . . is to fetter and degrade the State governments by subjecting them to the control of Congress, in the exercise of powers heretofore universally conceded to them of the most ordinary and fundamental character. . . . We are convinced that no such results were intended by the Congress . . . , nor by the legislatures . . . which ratified’’ this amendment, and that the sole ‘‘pervading purpose’’ of this and the other War Amendments was ‘‘the freedom of the slave race.’’ Conformably to these conclusions, the Court advised the New Orleans butchers that the Louisiana statute, conferring on a single corporation a monopoly of the business of slaughtering cattle, abrogated no rights possessed by them as United States citizens; insofar as that law interfered with their claimed privilege of pursuing the lawful calling of butchering animals, the privilege thus terminated was merely one of ‘‘those which belonged to the citizens of the States as such.’’ Privileges and immunities of state citizenship AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 1569 16 Id. at 78–79. 17 Id. at 79. 18 211 U.S. 78, 97 (1908). 

19 Citing Crandall v. Nevada, 73 U.S. (65 Wall.) 35 (1868). It was observed in United States v. Wheeler, 254 U.S. 281, 299 (1920), that the statute at issue in Crandall was actually held to burden directly the performance by the United States of its governmental functions. Cf.

Passenger Cases, 48 U.S. (7 How.) 282, 491–92 (1849) (Chief Justice Taney dissenting). Four concurring Justices in Edwards v. California, 314 U.S. 160, 177, 181 (1941), would have grounded a right of interstate travel on the privileges and immunities clause. 

More recently, the Court declined to ascribe a source but was content to assert the right to be protected. 

United States v. Guest, 383 U.S. 745, 758 (1966); 

Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618, 629–31 (1969). Three Justices ascribed the source to this clause in Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112, 285–87 (1970) (Justices Stewart and Blackmun and Chief Justice Burger, concurring in part and dissenting in part). 20 Citing United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876). 21 Citing Ex parte Yarbrough, 110 U.S. 651 (1884); Wiley v. Sinkler, 179 U.S. 58 (1900). Note Justice Douglas’ reliance on this clause in Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112, 149 (1970) (concurring in part and dissenting in part). had been ‘‘left to the state governments for security and protection’’ and had not been placed by this clause ‘‘under the special care of the Federal Government.’’ The only privileges which the Fourteenth Amendment protected against state encroachment were declared to be those ‘‘which owe their existence to the Federal Government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws.’’ 16 These privileges, however, had been available to United States citizens and protected from state interference by operation of federal supremacy even prior to the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Slaughter-House Cases, therefore, reduced the privileges and immunities clause to a superfluous reiteration of a prohibition already operative against the states. Although the Court has expressed a reluctance to attempt a definitive enumeration of those privileges and immunities of United States citizens which are protected against state encroachment, it nevertheless felt obliged in the Slaughter-House Cases ‘‘to suggest some which owe their existence to the Federal Government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws.’’ 17 Among those which it then identified were the right of access to the seat of Government and to the seaports, subtreasuries, land officers, and courts of justice in the several States, the right to demand protection of the Federal Government on the high seas or abroad, the right of assembly, the privilege of habeas corpus, the right to use the navigable waters of the United States, and rights secured by treaty. In Twining v. New Jersey, 18 the Court recognized ‘‘among the rights and privileges’’ of national citizenship the right to pass freely from State to State, 19 the right to petition Congress for a redress of grievances, 20 the right to vote for national officers, 21 the 1570 AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 22 Citing United States v. Waddell, 112 U.S. 76 (1884). 23 Citing Logan v. United States, 144 U.S. 263 (1892). 24 Citing In re Quarles and Butler, 158 U.S. 532 (1895). 25 Crutcher v. Kentucky, 141 U.S. 47, 57 (1891). 26 296 U.S. 404 (1935). 27Madden v. Kentucky, 309 U.S. 83, 93 (1940). 28 307 U.S. 496, 510–18 (1939) (Justices Roberts and Black; Chief Justice Hughes may or may not have concurred on this point. Id. at 532). Justices Stone and Reed preferred to base the decision on the due process clause. Id. at 518. 29 314 U.S. 160, 177–83 (1941). 30See also Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112, 149 (1970) (Justice Douglas); id. at 285–87 (Justices Stewart and Blackmun and Chief Justice Burger). 31 332 U.S. 633, 640 (1948). right to enter public lands, 22 the right to be protected against violence while in the lawful custody of a United States marshal, 23 and the right to inform the United States authorities of violation of its laws. 24 Earlier, in a decision not mentioned in Twining, the Court had also acknowledged that the carrying on of interstate commerce is ‘‘a right which every citizen of the United States is entitled to exercise.’’ 25 In modern times, the Court has continued the minor role accorded to the clause, only occasionally manifesting a disposition to enlarge the restraint which it imposes upon state action. Colgate v. Harvey, 26 which was overruled five years later, 27 represented the first attempt by the Court since adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to convert the privileges and immunities clause into a source of protection of other than those ‘‘interests growing out of the relationship between the citizen and the national government.’’ Here, the Court declared that the right of a citizen resident in one State to contract in another, to transact any lawful business, or to make a loan of money, in any State other than that in which the citizen resides was a privilege of national citizenship which was abridged by a state income tax law excluding from taxable income interest received on money loaned within the State. In Hague v. CIO, 28 two and perhaps three justices thought that freedom to use municipal streets and parks for the dissemination of information concerning provisions of a federal statute and to assemble peacefully therein for discussion of the advantages and opportunities offered by such act was a privilege and immunity of a United States citizen, and in Edwards v. California 29 four Justices were prepared to rely on the clause. 

30 In Oyama v. California, 31 in a single sentence the Court agreed with the contention of a native-born youth that a state Alien Land Law, applied to work a forfeiture of property purchased in his name with funds advanced by his parent, a Japanese alien ineligible for citizenship and precluded from owning land, deprived him ‘‘of his privileges as an American citizen.’’ The right to acquire and retain property had previously not been set AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 1571 32 Civil Rights Act of 1866, ch. 31, 14 Stat. 27, now 42 U.S.C. § 1982, as amended. 33 E.g., Holden v. Hardy, 169 U.S. 366, 380 (1898) (statute limiting hours of labor in mines); Williams v. Fears, 179 U.S. 270, 274 (1900) (statute taxing the business of hiring persons to labor outside the State); Wilmington Mining Co. v. Fulton, 205 U.S. 60, 73 (1907) (statute requiring employment of only licensed mine managers and examiners and imposing liability on the mine owner for failure to furnish a reasonably safe place for workmen); Heim v. McCall, 239 U.S. 175 (1915); Crane v. New York, 239 U.S. 195 (1915) (statute restricting employment on state public works to citizens of the United States, with a preference to citizens of the State); Missouri Pacific Ry. v. Castle, 224 U.S. 541 (1912) (statute making railroads liable to employees for injuries caused by negligence of fellow servants and abolishing the defense of contributory negligence); Western Union Tel. Co. v. Milling Co., 218 U.S. 406 (1910) (statute prohibiting a stipulation against liability for negligence in delivery of interstate telegraph messages); 

Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 130, 139 (1873); In re Lockwood, 154 U.S. 116 (1894) (refusal of state court to license a woman to practice law); Kirtland v. Hotchkiss, 100 U.S. 491, 499 (1879) (law taxing a debt owed a resident citizen by a resident of another State and secured by mortgage of land in the debtor’s State);

Bartemeyer v. Iowa, 85 U.S. (18 Wall.) 129 (1874); Mugler v. Kansas, 123 U.S. 623 (1887); Crowley v. Christensen, 137 U.S. 86, 91 (1890); Giozza v. Tiernan, 148 U.S. 657 (1893) (statutes regulating the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors); In re Kemmler, 136 U.S. 436 (1890) (statute regulating the method of capital punishment); Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. (21 Wall.) 162 (1875) (statute regulating the franchise to male citizens); Pope v. Williams, 193 U.S. 621 (1904) (statute requiring persons coming into a State to make a declaration of intention to become citizens and residents thereof before being permitted to register as voters); Ferry v. Spokane, P. & S. Ry., 258 U.S. 314 (1922) (statute restricting dower, in case wife at time of husband’s death is a nonresident, to lands of which he died seized); Walker v. Sauvinet, 92 U.S. 90 (1876) (statute restricting right to jury trial in civil suits at common law);

Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 267 (1886) (statute restricting drilling or parading in any city by any body of men without license of the Governor); Maxwell v. Dow, 176 U.S. 581, 596, 597– 98 (1900) (provision for prosecution upon information, and for a jury (except in capital cases) of eight persons); New York ex rel. Bryant v. Zimmerman, 278 U.S. 63, 71 (1928) (statute penalizing the becoming or remaining a member of any oathbound association (other than benevolent orders, and the like) with knowledge that the association has failed to file its constitution and membership lists);

 Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319 (1937) (statute allowing a State to appeal in criminal cases for errors of law and to retry the accused); 

Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277 (1937) (statute making the payment of poll taxes a prerequisite to the right to vote); Madden v. Kentucky, 309 U.S. 83, 92–93 (1940), (overruling Colgate v. Harvey, 296 U.S. 404, 430 (1935)) (statute whereby deposits in banks outside the State are taxed at 50¢ per $100); 

Snowden v. Hughes, 321 U.S. 1 (1944) (the right to become a candidate for state office is a privilege of state citizenship, not national citizenship); 

MacDougall v. Green, 335 U.S. 281 (1948) (Illinois Election Code requirement that a petition to form and nominate candidates for a new political party be signed by at least 200 voters from each of at least 50 of the 102 counties in the State, notwithstanding that 52% of the voters reside in only one county and 87% in the 49 most populous counties); New York v. O’Neill, 359 U.S. 1 (1959) (Uniform Reciprocal forth in any of the enumerations as one of the privileges protected against state abridgment, although a federal statute enacted prior to the proposal and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment did confer on all citizens the same rights to purchase and hold real property as white citizens enjoyed. 32 In other respects, however, claims based on this clause have been rejected. 

33 1572 AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED State Law to secure attendance of witnesses from within or without a State in criminal proceedings); James v. Valtierra, 402 U.S. 137 (1971) (a provision in a state constitution to the effect that low-rent housing projects could not be developed, constructed, or acquired by any state governmental body without the affirmative vote of a majority of those citizens participating in a community referendum). 

34 Hibben v. Smith, 191 U.S. 310, 325 (1903). 35 Carroll v. Greenwich Ins. Co., 199 U.S. 401, 410 (1905). See also French v. Barber Asphalt Paving Co., 181 U.S. 324, 328 (1901). 36Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 450 (1857), is the exception. 37 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 80–81 (1873). 38 94 U.S. 113, 134 (1877). 

DUE PROCESS OF LAW The Development of Substantive Due Process Although many years after ratification the Court ventured the not very informative observation that the Fourteenth Amendment ‘‘operates to extend . . . the same protection against arbitrary state legislation, affecting life, liberty and property, as is offered by the Fifth Amendment,’’ 34 and that ‘‘ordinarily if an act of Congress is valid under the Fifth Amendment it would be hard to say that a state law in like terms was void under the Fourteenth,’’ 35 the significance of the due process clause as a restraint on state action appears to have been grossly underestimated by litigants no less than by the Court in the years immediately following its adoption. 

From the outset of our constitutional history due process of law as it occurs in the Fifth Amendment had been recognized as a restraint upon government, but, with the conspicuous exception of the Dred Scott decision, 36 only in the narrower sense that a legislature must provide ‘‘due process for the enforcement of law.’’ Thus, in the Slaughter-House Cases, 37 in which the clause was invoked by a group of butchers challenging the validity of a Louisiana statute which conferred upon one corporation the exclusive privilege of butchering cattle in New Orleans, the Court declared that the prohibition against a deprivation of property ‘‘has been in the Constitution since the adoption of the Fifth Amendment, as a restraint upon the Federal power.

It is also to be found in some forms of expression in the constitution of nearly all the States, as a restraint upon the power of the States. . . . We are not without judicial interpretation, therefore, both State and National, of the meaning of this clause. And it is sufficient to say that under no construction of that provision that we have ever seen, or any that we deem admissible, can the restraint imposed by the State of Louisiana upon the exercise of their trade by the butchers of New Orleans be held to be a deprivation of property within the meaning of that provision.’’

 Four years later, in Munn v. Illinois, 38 the Court again refused to interpret the due process clause as invalidating AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 1573 39 96 U.S. 97, 103–04 (1878). state legislation regulating the rates charged for the transportation and warehousing of grain. Rejecting contentions that such legislation effected an unconstitutional deprivation of property by preventing the owner from earning a reasonable compensation for its use and by transferring to the public an interest in a private enterprise, Chief Justice Waite emphasized that ‘‘the great office of statutes is to remedy defects in the common law as they are developed. . . . We know that this power [of rate regulation] may be abused; but that is no argument against its existence. 

For protection against abuses by legislatures the people must resort to the polls, not to the courts.’’ Deploring such attempts, nullified consistently in the preceding cases, to convert the due process clause into a substantive restraint on the powers of the States, Justice Miller in Davidson v. New Orleans, 39 obliquely counseled against a departure from the conventional application of the clause, albeit he acknowledged the difficulty of arriving at a precise, all-inclusive definition thereof.

 ‘‘It is not a little remarkable,’’ he observed, ‘‘that while this provision has been in the Constitution of the United States, as a restraint upon the authority of the Federal government, for nearly a century, and while, during all that time, the manner in which the powers of that government have been exercised has been watched with jealousy, and subjected to the most rigid criticism in all its branches, this special limitation upon its powers has rarely been invoked in the judicial forum or the more enlarged theatre of public discussion. 

But while it has been part of the Constitution, as a restraint upon the power of the States, only a very few years, the docket of this court is crowded with cases in which we are asked to hold that state courts and state legislatures have deprived their own citizens of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. 

There is here abundant evidence that there exists some strange misconception of the scope of this provision as found in the Fourteenth Amendment. In fact, it would seem, from the character of many of the cases before us, and the arguments made in them, that the clause under consideration is looked upon as a means of bringing to the test of the decision of this court the abstract opinions of every unsuccessful litigant in a State court of the justice of the decision against him, and of the merits of the legislation on which such a decision may be founded.

If, therefore, it were possible to define what it is for a State to deprive a person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, in terms which would cover every exercise of power thus forbidden to the State, and exclude 1574 AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 40 110 U.S. 516, 528, 532, 536 (1884). those which are not, no more useful construction could be furnished by this or any other court to any part of the fundamental of law. ‘‘But, apart from the imminent risk of a failure to give any definition which would be at once perspicuous, comprehensive, and satisfactory, there is wisdom . . . in the ascertaining of the intent and application of such an important phrase in the Federal Constitution, by the gradual process of judicial inclusion and exclusion, as the cases presented for decision shall require. . . .’’ A bare half-dozen years later, in again reaching a result in harmony with past precedents, the Justices gave fair warning of the imminence of a modification of their views. 

After noting that the due process clause, by reason of its operation upon ‘‘all the powers of government, legislative as well as executive and judicial,’’ could not be appraised solely in terms of the ‘‘sanction of settled usage,’’ Justice Mathews, speaking for the Court in Hurtado v. California, 40 declared that ‘‘[a]rbitrary power, enforcing its edicts to the injury of the persons and property of its subjects, is not law, whether manifested as the decree of a personal monarch or of an impersonal multitude. And the limitations imposed by our constitutional law upon the action of the governments, both state and national, are essential to the preservation of public and private rights, notwithstanding the representative character of our political institutions.

The enforcement of these limitations by judicial process is the device of self-governing communities to protect the rights of individuals and minorities, as well against the power of numbers, as against the violence of public agents transcending the limits of lawful authority, even when acting in the name and wielding the force of the government.’’ Thus were the States put on notice that every species of state legislation, whether dealing with procedural or substantive rights, was subject to the scrutiny of the Court when the question of its essential justice was raised. 

What induced the Court to dismiss its fears of upsetting the balance in the distribution of powers under the federal system and to enlarge its own supervisory powers over state legislation was the increasing number of cases seeking protection of property rights against the remedial social legislation States were enacting in the wake of industrial expansion. 

At the same time, the added emphasis on the due process clause afforded the Court an opportunity to compensate for its earlier virtual nullification of the privileges and immunities clause of the Amendment. So far as such modification of its position needed to be justified in legal terms, theories concerning the relation of government to private rights were available 

AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 1575 41 94 U.S. 113, 141–48 (1877). 42 123 U.S. 623, 661 (1887). 43 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 113–14, 116, 122 (1873). 44Loan Association v. Topeka, 87 U.S. (20 Wall.) 655, 662 (1875). ‘‘There are . . . rights in every free government beyond the control of the State. . . . There are limitations on [governmental power] which grow out of the essential nature of all free governments. Implied reservations of individual rights, without which the social compact could not exist. . . .’’ 45 

‘‘Rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are equivalent to the rights of life, liberty, and property. These are fundamental rights which can only be taken away by due process of law, and which can only be interfered with, or the enjoyment of which can only be modified, by lawful regulations necessary or proper for the mutual good of all. . . . This right to choose one’s calling is an essential part of that liberty which it is the object of government to protect; and a calling, when chosen, is a man’s property right. . . . A law which prohibits a large class of citizens from adopting a lawful employment, or from following a lawful employment previously adopted, does deprive them of liberty as well as property, without due process of law.’’

 Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 116, 122 (1873) (Justice Bradley dissenting). to demonstrate the impropriety of leaving to the state legislatures the same ample range of police power they had enjoyed prior to the Civil War. Preliminary to this consummation, however, the Slaughter-House Cases and Munn v. Illinois had to be overruled at least in part, and the views of the dissenting Justices in those cases converted into majority doctrine. About twenty years were required to complete this process, in the course of which the restricted view of the police power advanced by Justice Field in his dissent in Munn v. Illinois, 

41 namely, that it is solely a power to prevent injury, was in effect ratified by the Court itself. This occurred in Mugler v. Kansas, 

42 where the power was defined as embracing no more than the power to promote public health, morals, and safety. During the same interval, ideas embodying the social compact and natural rights, which had been espoused by Justice Bradley in his dissent in the SlaughterHouse Cases, 

43 had been transformed tentatively into constitutionally enforceable limitations upon government. 

44 The consequence was that the States in exercising their police powers could foster only those purposes of health, morals, and safety which the Court had enumerated, and could employ only such means as would not unreasonably interfere with the fundamentally natural rights of liberty and property, which Justice Bradley had equated with freedom to pursue a lawful calling and to make contracts for that purpose. 

45 So having narrowed the scope of the state’s police power in deference to the natural rights of liberty and property, the Court next proceeded to read into the concepts currently accepted theories of laissez faire economics, reinforced by the doctrine of Social Darwinism as elaborated by Herbert Spencer, to the end that ‘‘liberty,’’ in 1576 

AMENDMENT 14—RIGHTS GUARANTEED 46 143 U.S. 517, 551 (1892). 47

See Fletcher v. Peck, 10. U.S. (6 Cr.) 87, 128 (1810). 48 94 U.S. 113, 123, 182 (1877). 49 123 U.S. 623 (1887). 50 Id. at 662. ‘‘We cannot shut out of view the fact, within the knowledge of all, that the public health, the public morals, and the public safety, may be endangered by the general use of intoxicating drinks; nor the fact . . . that . . . pauperism, and crime . . . are, in some degree, at least, traceable to this evil.’’