Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2016
Abstract
With Justice Scalia gone, and Justices Ginsburg and Kennedy in their late seventies, there is the possibility of significant movement on the Supreme Court in the next several years. A two-justice shift could upend almost any area of constitutional law, but the possible movement in race-based equal protection jurisprudence provides a particularly revealing window into the larger trends at work. In the battle over equal protection, two strongly opposed visions of the Constitution contend against each other, and a change in the Court’s composition may determine the outcome of that struggle. In this essay, we set out the current state of the Court’s race-based equal protection jurisprudence, and then examine how a one- or two-justice shift, either to the right or to the left, would change this jurisprudence to embody one of the competing visions of the Constitution.
Keywords
Supreme Court of the United States, SCOTUS, constitutional law, jurisprudence, Fourteenth Amendment, judicial politics, racial classifications, affirmative action, remediation, disparate impact, strict and heightened scrutiny
Publication Title
University of Chicago Law Review Online
Repository Citation
Roosevelt, Kermit III and Stottlemyer, Patricia, "The Fight for Equal Protection: Reconstruction-Redemption Redux" (2016). All Faculty Scholarship. 1678.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1678
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, Education Law Commons, Fourteenth Amendment Commons, Judges Commons, Law and Politics Commons, Law and Race Commons, Law and Society Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, Supreme Court of the United States Commons
Publication Citation
83 U. Chi. L. Rev. Online 36 (2016).