This book presents the history behind a revolution in American liberty: the 1868 addition of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This exhaustively researched book follows the evolution in public understanding of the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, from the early years of the Constitution to the critical national election of 1866. For the first 92 years of our nation's history, nothing in the American Constitution prevented states from abridging freedom of speech, prohibiting the free exercise of religion, or denying the right of peaceful assembly. The suppression of freedom in the southern states convinced the Reconstruction Congress and the supporters of the Union to add an amendment forcing the states to respect the rights announced in the first eight amendments. But rather than eradicate state autonomy altogether, the people embraced the Fourteenth Amendment that expanded the protections of the Bill of Rights and preserved the Constitution's original commitment to federalism and the principle of limited national power."

This book presents the history behind the 1868 addition of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

A Federalist Notable Book “An important contribution to our understanding of the 14th Amendment.” —Wall Street Journal “By any standard an important contribution...A must-read.” —National Review “The most detailed legal history to date of the constitutional amendment that changed American law more than any before or since...The corpus of legal scholarship is richer for it.” —Washington Examiner Adopted in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment profoundly changed the Constitution, giving the federal judiciary and Congress new powers to protect the fundamental rights of individuals from being violated by the states. Yet, the Supreme Court has long misunderstood or ignored the original meaning of its key Section I clauses. Barnett and Bernick contend that the Fourteenth Amendment must be understood as the culmination of decades of debate about the meaning of the antebellum Constitution. In the course of this debate, antislavery advocates advanced arguments informed by natural rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the common law, as well as what is today called public-meaning originalism. The authors show how these arguments and the principles of the Declaration in particular eventually came to modify the Constitution. They also propose workable doctrines for implementing the amendment’s key provisions covering the privileges and immunities of citizenship, due process, and equal protection under the law.

The privileges and immunities clauses in the U.S. Constitution forbids one state from discriminating against citizens of another state with respect to privileges and immunities that state affords its own citizens. Of course, the history, interpretation, and rulings on Article IV and the Fourteenth Amendment are much more nuanced and controversial. Bogen details the origins and development of the concept of privileges and immunities, and provides an in-depth analysis of the symbiotic relationship between Article IV and the Fourteenth Amendment, detailing the current understanding of the clauses as reflected in the decisions of the Supreme Court. The author concludes by arguing that the tension between the Framers' intent to protect fundamental human rights and the Court's current confused and inappropriate use of rights language may be resolved by applying customary international human rights to the states. An extensive bibliographic essay and a table of cases are provided to guide further reading on the topic.

Do the unemployment and undereducation of millions of Americans raise issues of constitutional significance? In this provocative reassessment of constitutional intent, John Denvir investigates the "privileges or immunities" of U.S. citizenship and considers how they should be understood in the twenty-first century. He asserts that the Fourteenth Amendment implicitly protects certain social rights essential to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These privileges of national citizenship, in his view, include the opportunity to earn a decent living, the right to a first-rate education, the right to a voice that is heard, and the right to a vote that counts. Denvir discusses how key U.S. Supreme Court decisions bear on the realization of democracy in America and how a new interpretation of the privileges or immunities clause could give the Constitution a more democratic cast, one more consistent with the basic moral premise of the Declaration of Independence. Advocating reforms in funding for education and campaign financing, as well as large-scale government work programs, he indicates how full implementation of the political rights of free speech and the vote could facilitate the implementation of the social rights to work and education. By uncovering the social rights implicit in the Fourteenth Amendment and the U.S. constitutional tradition, Democracy's Constitution reaffirms the principles that distinguish the United States as a political and legal culture. Its recommendations aim to make the participation of ordinary citizens in their democracy more effective and their pursuit of happiness more feasible.

Rather than a dry, hard-to-understand reference book on our Constitutional rights, this collection of essays presents a lively discussion of what "citizenship for all" really means. Essay resources include Akhil Reed Amar, James F. Wilson, Priscilla Huang, Horace Gray, Melville Fuller, and Dmitri Vasillaros. Essay topics include slavery, federal despotism, naturalized citizens, undocumented immigrants, and dual citizenship.