Equal Protection: Throughline: NPR

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

The Fourteenth Amendment. Of all the amendments to the United States Constitution, the Fourteenth is one of the most important. It has shaped all of our lives, whether we realize it or not: Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Education, Bush v. Gore, plus other Supreme Court cases that legalized same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, access to birth control, were all built on the Fourteenth. The amendment was ratified after the Civil War and is full of high-sounding phrases like due process, equal protection, and liberty. But what do these words really guarantee us? Today on Throughline We the people: How the 14th Amendment Remade America, and How America Remade the 14th (originally called the Fourteenth Amendment).

Guests:

Kenneth Mack, Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Associate Professor of History at Harvard University.

Vernon Burton, Judge Matthew J. Perry, professor emeritus of history at Clemson University.

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