Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/59

Rh "“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of 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.” §1."

As enacted, the text of the Fourteenth Amendment provides a firm statement of equality before the law. It begins by guaranteeing citizenship status, invoking the “longstanding political and legal tradition that closely associated the status of citizenship with the entitlement to legal equality.” Vaello Madero, 596 U. S., at ___ (, concurring) (slip op., at 6) (internal quotation marks omitted). It then confirms that States may not “abridge the rights of national citizenship, including whatever civil equality is guaranteed to ‘citizens’ under the Citizenship Clause.” Id., at ___, n. 3 (slip op., at 13, n. 3). Finally, it pledges that even noncitizens must be treated equally “as individuals, and not as members of racial, ethnic, or religious groups.” Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U. S. 70, 120–121 (1995) (, concurring).

The drafters and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment focused on this broad equality idea, offering surprisingly little explanation of which term was intended to accomplish which part of the Amendment’s overall goal. “The available materials … show,” however, “that there were widespread expressions of a general understanding of the broad scope of the Amendment similar to that abundantly demonstrated in the Congressional debates, namely, that the first section of the Amendment would establish the full constitutional right of all persons to equality before the law and would prohibit legal distinctions based on race or color.”