Fundamental Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment

In the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), the Supreme Court gave its first major interpretation of the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. The result was a narrow reading of the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause that left intact the basic antebellum understanding of the relationship between the Bill of Rights and the States that we saw in Barron v. Baltimore (1833). However, that understanding began to change in the 20th century when the Supreme Court started incorporating aspects of the Bill of Rights into how it read the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause.

Om Podcasten

The 1787 Project is the podcast version of the lectures for Professor Justin Dyer's socially-distanced class on the U.S. Constitution at the University of Missouri. Running from August 2020 - May 2021, the course is about how the U.S. Constitution of 1787 frames the way we organize our life together as a political community. Published twice a week, the episodes explore who gets to decide big questions of public policy and why, analyze the design of our national political institutions and the contested boundaries between them, and look at the structure of constitutional rights.