The Equal Protection Clause is a part of the Fourteenth Amendment to
the United States Constitution, providing that "no state shall ...
deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the
laws." In the broadest view, the Equal Protection Clause is part of
the United States's continuing attempt to determine what its professed
commitment to the proposition that "all men are created equal" should
mean in practice. Before its enactment, the Constitution protected
individual rights only from invasion by the federal government. After
its enactment, the Constitution also protected rights from abridgement
by state governments. For a long while after the Clause became a part
of the Constitution, it was interpreted narrowly. During and after
World War II, however, the U.S. Supreme Court began to construe the
Clause more expansively. During the 1960s, the other two branches of
the federal government—the executive and the legislative—joined in, as
Congress and the President passed and enforced legislation intended to
ensure equality in education, employment, housing, lodging, and
government benefits.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1755:
A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson was first
published.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language)
1912:
The passenger liner RMS Titanic sank two hours and forty minutes after
colliding with an iceberg.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Titanic)
1947:
African American Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers broke the
color line in professional baseball.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Robinson)
1986:
U.S. armed forces launched Operation El Dorado Canyon against Libya.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_El_Dorado_Canyon)
1989:
The Hillsborough disaster, one of the biggest tragedies of European
football, occurred.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster)
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Wikiquote of the day:
"Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and
thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us,
nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may
suffice for explaining many phenomena." -- Leonhard Euler
(
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler)