14th_Amendment_Analysis

Through the use of the Incorporation Doctrine, the United States Supreme Court has held that most, but not all, guarantees of the federal Bill of Rights limit state and local governments as well as the federal government through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. States have been required to respect freedom of speech, press, and religion, and most of the other guarantees. Whether the guarantees that are “incorporated” apply to the states just as they apply to the federal government has been the subject of judicial controversy. Until 1866, the rule, established by the Supreme Court in 1833 in Barron v. Baltimore, was that guarantees of the federal bill of rights limited only the federal government, not state governments. The Fourteenth Amendment made all persons born in the United States citizens and provided that no state should abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens or deny due process or equal protection to any person. Although between 1835 and 1866, at the federal level the rights in the Bill of Rights were considered to belong to all American citizens under the Constitution, early cases provided contradictory and inconsistent decisions by the Court as to how the rights in the Bill of Rights would be applied to the states. In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), the Court considered whether Louisiana could grant a monopoly on slaughtering animals. In ruling for the State, a majority ruled that the Privileges or Immunities Clause did not protect such fundamental rights as the right to labor. Thus, Slaughterhouse and following cases seemed to deprive the Privileges or Immunities Clause of any significant meaning. Cases following Slaughterhouse held one after another that the guarantees of the Bill of Rights did not limit the states. Eventually, though, the Court began to incorporate particular Bill of Rights guarantees selectively as limits on the states. The Court held that the guarantee that private property would not be taken for public use without just compensation (Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad Co. v. Chicago, 1897) and later free speech and press (Gitlow v. New York, 1925) were construed as limits on the states. Although the First Amendment was adopted in 1791, it was not until Gitlow that the Court decided that state governments, as well as the federal government, are prohibited from restricting free expression under the Constitution. In Gitlow, the Court declared that First Amendment rights such as the Speech and Press Clauses were protected from infringement by state governments through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Gitlow marked the beginning of the “incorporation” of the First Amendment as a limitation on the states. Ironically, however, the Court rejected Gitlow's free speech claim. The Supreme Court used the case as an occasion to examine the concept that the speech and press protections of the First Amendment should be extended to the states. Although the Court agreed that freedom of speech and of the press are among the fundamental personal rights protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from impairment by the States, it nonetheless sustained upheld Gitlow's state law conviction on the grounds that a state may punish utterances endangering the foundations of organized government and threatening its overthrow by unlawful means. It was not until 1931 that the Court ruled a state law unconstitutional on First Amendment free speech grounds. In 1937, in Palko v. Connecticut, the Court held that some privileges and immunities in the Bill of Rights were so fundamental that the states were required to respect them under the Due Process Clause; other Bill of Rights privileges and immunities were less important, so states were free to disregard them. Then in 1947, in Adamson v. California, Justice Hugo Black first argued that the Fourteenth Amendment required the states to respect all rights specified in the Bill of Rights. Though his view did not prevail in that case, the Court would later overrule, through a series of cases, a number of prior cases (including Palko) and apply almost all guarantees of the Bill of Rights to the states.