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

_______________________________ 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)

_____________________ 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)