Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

• 1. Introduction

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  The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on the 9th of July, 1868, and it has since become the most litigated part of the document that governs American life. Three states ratified it on the same day it took effect: Louisiana, South Carolina, and a nation still raw from civil war. At its core, it was written to answer a question that the original Constitution had refused to answer honestly: who counts as a citizen, and what does that citizenship actually protect?

  The amendment emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War and the hard politics of Reconstruction. Freed slaves had no legal standing under the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that Americans descended from African slaves could never become citizens. That ruling had to be buried in constitutional stone, not just overturned by ordinary legislation that a future Congress could repeal. What resulted was an amendment of five sections, each one aimed at a different gap in the nation's founding promises.

  Decades later, its first section alone would touch cases about school segregation, interracial marriage, abortion, the 2000 presidential election, same-sex marriage, and the barring of affirmative action. The questions this document plants are still being argued: who is born American, what can government take from you without your day in court, and when does equal protection actually mean equal? None of those answers came easily, or all at once.

• 2. Writing the Amendment

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  Representative John A. Bingham of Ohio drafted the core of what became Section 1, and his fingerprints are visible in nearly every clause. More than seventy proposals for the amendment were drafted before the final version took shape. The process grew out of a congressional impasse over the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which President Andrew Johnson vetoed on the 27th of March, 1866, framing citizenship for African Americans as itself a form of discrimination against the eleven southern states still without congressional representation.

  Johnson's veto was overridden three weeks later, but Republicans in Congress were uneasy. They feared that if Southern Democrats regained control of Congress, ordinary legislation could simply be repealed. A constitutional amendment would be far harder to undo. Social reformer Robert Dale Owen led the push to combine several competing proposals into a single document, reasoning that bundling popular provisions together would carry the harder ones through ratification.

  On the 29th of May, 1866, the House passed House Resolution 127. The Senate amended it and passed the modified version on the 8th of June by a 33-11 vote, with five senators not voting. The House agreed to the Senate's changes on the 13th of June by a 138-36 vote. Even its supporters were not satisfied: Thaddeus Stevens lamented that the Congress was "obliged to be content with patching up the worst portions of the ancient edifice." Abolitionist Wendell Phillips went further, calling the result a "fatal and total surrender." Their dissatisfaction would eventually produce the Fifteenth Amendment, targeting voting rights directly.

• 3. Who Belongs to the Nation

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  Birthright citizenship, the idea that being born on American soil makes you American, was written into the Citizenship Clause as a direct repudiation of the Dred Scott ruling. The clause also repudiated the American Colonization Society's practice of repatriating freeborn people of color and emancipated slaves to Africa. Congress's debate over the clause included explicit rejection of Senator Edgar Cowan's anti-Romani arguments, making clear that birthright citizenship could not be stripped from children of disfavored ethnic minorities.

  The Supreme Court worked out the clause's edges case by case. In Elk v. Wilkins in 1884, the Court held that Native Americans born on reservation land did not receive birthright citizenship, reasoning that such land was not under the federal government's jurisdiction. Congress later created alternative paths: the 1887 Dawes Act tied citizenship to cultural assimilation and the acceptance of private property, while the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act extended it to all Native Americans born within the nation's territorial limits.

  In United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898, the Court confirmed that children of non-citizen immigrants born in the United States are citizens. Questions about renunciation took longer to settle. The Supreme Court upheld laws stripping citizenship from American women who married foreign nationals in Mackenzie v. Hare in 1915, and it allowed Congress to treat foreign-election voting as an implied renunciation in Perez v. Brownell in 1958. The Court reversed course in Afroyim v. Rusk in 1967 and Vance v. Terrazas in 1980, holding that renunciation must be formally and voluntarily expressed. In January 2025, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14160 to deny birthright citizenship to children of parents with illegal or temporary immigration status; multiple federal judges blocked its enforcement as unconstitutional.

• 4. Due Process and Its Expansion

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  The Due Process Clause built directly on the Fifth Amendment's similar language and applied it explicitly to state governments. Its authors were responding to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which had allowed slave owners to recapture people "without process" and barred the testimony of those accused of being fugitive slaves. Extending due process to all people at all levels of government was the clause's foundational promise.

  Courts carved that promise into two distinct doctrines: procedural due process, which covers the mechanics of hearings and neutral decision-makers, and substantive due process, which asks whether the government's reason for restricting life, liberty, or property is sufficient in the first place. The early 20th century became known as the Lochner era, named for Lochner v. New York decided in 1905, when the Supreme Court read a broad freedom of contract into the clause and used it to strike down labor regulations. That reading ended with West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish in 1937.

  Substantive due process did not die with the Lochner era; it migrated to new subjects. In 1890, future Justice Louis Brandeis and his law partner Samuel D. Warren II published "The Right to Privacy" in the Harvard Law Review, advocating only for tort remedies. Decades later, the Court used substantive due process to protect contraceptive access in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, consensual sex between adults in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, and same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. The abortion right recognized in Roe v. Wade in 1973 followed the same doctrinal path, and the Supreme Court overturned that decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022, writing that a right to abortion is "not deeply rooted in the Nation's history and traditions."

  The Bill of Rights began reaching state governments through this same clause. Before the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court had held in Barron v. Baltimore in 1833 that those rights constrained only the federal government. Starting with the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause applied to states in Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad Co. v. City of Chicago in 1897, the Court began absorbing the Bill of Rights into the Due Process Clause protection by protection, a process still not complete.

• 5. Equal Protection's Long Arc

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  The Equal Protection Clause was designed to constitutionalize the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and knock out the Black Codes, the post-war state laws that had restricted movement, employment, self-defense, and legal rights for African Americans. In Strauder v. West Virginia in 1880, the Court struck down the exclusion of Black Americans from juries as a violation of the clause. In Yick Wo v. Hopkins in 1886, it ruled that race-neutral laws enforced in racially discriminatory ways were equally unconstitutional.

  The clause's promise collapsed in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, when the Court accepted racial segregation as consistent with equal protection under the "separate but equal" doctrine. That doctrine survived until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, where the Court held segregated facilities to be inherently unequal. The ruling met "massive resistance" in southern states, but civil rights groups, particularly the NAACP, had spent decades in litigation weakening Plessy's foundations before that ruling came.

  The clause covers more than race. In Reed v. Reed in 1971, the Court unanimously struck down an Idaho law favoring men in probate administration, its first use of the clause for sex discrimination. In Craig v. Boren in 1976, the Court applied intermediate scrutiny to sex classifications. The clause also protects people regardless of immigration status: in Plyler v. Doe in 1982, the Court prohibited states from denying public education to children based on their immigration status, with Justice William J. Brennan Jr. citing the earlier holding in Wong Wing v. United States from 1896 that illegal immigrants remain within American jurisdiction for due process purposes.

  Affirmative action in university admissions traced a longer arc. The Court upheld race-conscious admissions while banning racial quotas in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978, refined that standard in the 2003 companion cases Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, and ultimately struck down affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in 2023, prohibiting it at private universities receiving federal funds and at all public universities except military academies.

• 6. Insurrection, Debt, and Readmission

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  Section 3 of the amendment disqualifies anyone who previously swore an oath to the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection or rebellion. Before the amendment's adoption, Congress had no tool for this beyond impeachment; it removed Tennessee District Court Judge West Hughes Humphreys that way in 1862. When Alexander H. Stephens, former Vice President of the Confederate States of America, won election to the Senate from Georgia, the Republican-dominated Congress simply blocked him from taking his seat.

  The Amnesty Act of 1872 waived most Section 3 disqualifications by a two-thirds majority in each chamber, exempting all Confederates except former Senators, Representatives, federal judges, military officers, cabinet officials, and ambassadors. A broader amnesty in 1898 covered everyone then living who remained disqualified. Congress later lifted the disqualification of Confederate General-in-Chief Robert E. Lee and President Jefferson Davis posthumously during the 1970s, both having died before the 1898 act.

  Between Reconstruction and 2021, the clause was invoked against a person only once. Congress refused to seat Victor L. Berger for the 66th Congress after his conviction under the Espionage Act of 1917. That conviction was overturned in Berger v. United States in 1921 on the grounds of judicial bias, and Berger then served three terms representing Wisconsin's 5th congressional district. After President Donald Trump instigated the January 6 Capitol attack, Colorado voters challenged his eligibility for the state's 2024 presidential ballot under Section 3. In Trump v. Anderson in 2024, the Supreme Court held that enforcement of the clause for federal offices belongs to Congress, not to individual states acting unilaterally. No objections based on constitutional disqualification were raised at the 2025 Electoral College vote count.

  Section 4 addresses money rather than people. It affirms public debt authorized by Congress while refusing to compensate slaveholders for emancipation or to recognize Confederate war debts. In the Gold Clause Cases, the Court upheld the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 under Congress's monetary authority despite its practical effect of canceling gold clauses in contracts. In 2011, former President Bill Clinton publicly argued that Section 4 requires the Executive Branch to ignore the debt ceiling rather than default on congressionally authorized spending.

• 7. The Ratification Fight

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  On the 16th of June, 1866, Secretary of State William H. Seward sent the Fourteenth Amendment to state governors for ratification. Connecticut ratified first on the 30th of June, 1866. Every formerly Confederate state except Tennessee refused to ratify it initially, prompting Congress to pass the Reconstruction Acts conditioning readmission on ratification. Tennessee ratified on the 19th of July, 1866, and rejoined Congress relatively quickly.

  The ratification count grew turbulent. New Jersey ratified in September 1866, then rescinded that ratification in February and March 1868. Ohio ratified in January 1867, then rescinded in January 1868. On the 20th of July, 1868, Seward certified that if those rescissions were invalid, the amendment had become law with South Carolina's ratification as the 28th state. Congress acted the following day, declaring the Fourteenth Amendment part of the Constitution and directing Seward to promulgate it accordingly, settling that states cannot withdraw a ratification once given. Seward officially proclaimed its adoption on July 27 after Georgia's ratification arrived, listing all thirty ratifying states in the proclamation to head off any future court challenge.

  Oregon rescinded its own ratification on the 16th of October, 1868, three months after the amendment had already taken effect, which changed nothing. New Jersey and Ohio both re-ratified in 2003, which meant that as of that year, every state in existence during Reconstruction had formally ratified the amendment. The ratification fight itself had produced a legal precedent that neither Congress nor the courts have revisited since: once a state says yes, it cannot say no.