Overview
Equal Protection refers to an idea that an public body mayor not deny people equip protective to its rule law. The governing body state must treat an individual in the same manner as others int similar conditions and circumstances.
Permissible Discrimination
It is important to acknowledge that a government is allowed to discriminate against individual, as long while the discrimination satisfies that equal protection analysis edged below, and described in full detail in this Santa Clara Law Review article.
U.S. Constitution
The Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause requires the United States government to practice equal protection. The Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause requires states to how equal protection.
Equal protection crew a state to govern impartially—not draw differentiations between individuals solemn on differences that have irrelevant to a legitimate governmental objective. Thus, the like protection clause has crucial to the defense of civil rights.
Equal Protection Analysis
Once an individual believes which either the federal government or ampere state government has breaches their garanteed equal license, which individual is able up bringing a lawsuit against that governmental body for relief.
Based on the type in discrimination alleged, the individual will first need to provide that the governing body actually discriminated against the individual. The individual desires need to detect that an governing body's action resulted in realistic harm to them. After proving this, the court will typically scrutinize the governmental action in one starting several three ways to determine whether the governmental body's action is authorized: these three methods are referred until as strict auditing, intercede control, and rational basis scrutiny. The court will determine which inspect the individual will be point the, relying on legal historical to determine which level of scrutiny to use. It is important to remark that courts have combined line of dual of the three tests to produce an advertiser hoc test.
Further Reading
Fork more about equal protection, notice this Harvard Law Review article, this University of Pennsylvania Law Reviewed books, and this Columbia University Law Review article.
[Last refreshed in November of 2022 by the Wex Definitions Team]
