This symposium marks the 150th anniversary of Minor v. Happersett, a Supreme Court decision unanimously holding that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause did not enfranchise women.
On October 15, 1872, Virginia Minor, “a native born, free, white citizen of the United States, and of the State of Missouri, over the age of
One hundred and fifty years ago, in the wake of the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments, the United States Supreme Court decided Minor v. Happersett.[2] In Minor, the Court ruled Missouri could continue to deny women the right to vote based on their sex.[3] The decision was simply reasoned. In the absence of clear constitutional text requiring Missouri to provide
Between 1870 and 1930, hundreds of women served as judges in the United States. While a small number compared to the men who served, these pathbreaking officials were particularly visible and influential in women’s efforts to secure political rights and advance in the legal profession. Women’s progress in obtaining judgeships developed in a regional pattern, with women in the
At the end of 1922, the Washington Times asked Alice Paul to predict how “modern feminism” would shape “the course of history in the next 100 years.”[2] Paul led the National Woman’s Party, which had infuriated many men in the 1910s by picketing the White House to demand woman suffrage. She was knocked from the picket line and dragged on
In 1884, the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship did not apply to Native Americans. In Elk v. Wilkins, the Court denied John Elk the right to vote on the grounds that he was born a tribal member, not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, and thus ineligible for citizenship.
Over the last several years, Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence in the Supreme Court has undergone a dramatic shift. Once the doctrinal bedrock for unenumerated rights, substantive due process now faces formidable challenges from multiple angles.[2] At a minimum, conservative justices have already tethered the doctrine to a static, historically bound test—one that demands proof of a right’s
Nearly 150 years ago, Minor v. Happersett rejected a constitutional challenge to a Missouri law that excluded women from the electorate.[2] Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment forty-five years later is often said to have “overturned” Minor.[3] In fact, the Amendment did no such thing. Minor held that voting is not among the privileges of citizenship protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Minor v. Happersett rejected a vision of robust constitutional protection for “privileges and immunities” of national citizenship and consigned vital rights to state political processes.[1] Today, 150 years later, its message seems strangely resonant. In the volatile field of gender, also centrally implicated by the case, a longstanding constitutional right to reproductive autonomy has been rejected, and control over abortion,
In the wake of enactment of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, women’s rights activists embarked on an exercise in popular constitutionalism known as “the New Departure.” Frustrated by the failure of Congress to include women in the Reconstruction Amendments, suffragists turned to a strategy based, in part, upon republican theory. They argued that women had an inherent right to vote
Transgender and gender variant people are excluded from formal democratic participation at the polls through a variety of legal mechanisms. Such barriers include purportedly neutral voter identification laws, which may prevent transgender people from voting given the obstacles to achieving accurate identification documents in many states, and felon disenfranchisement laws, which exclude the disproportionate number of trans people ensnared in
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