What does the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause say?
About this video
The video explains the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause: no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. This means the government can take away liberty, but only with due process. At a minimum, due process has two parts: there must be established law known in advance, and a person's violation of it must be determined through judicial processes such as a trial.
You'll be able to
- state what the Due Process Clause says.
- explain the two minimum components of due process of law.
- recognise when a government action would violate due process.
Key words
- Due Process Clause
- The part of the 14th Amendment saying no state may take life, liberty or property without due process of law.
- Established law
- A law that exists and is known before someone's actions are judged.
- Adjudicate
- To decide a case through a formal judicial process, such as a trial.
- Arbitrarily
- Based on a whim or personal choice rather than rules or reasons.
- Equal Protection Clause
- The 14th Amendment's guarantee that laws apply equally to all; the speaker calls it the other side of the coin from due process.
Transcript
The due process clause and the equal protection clause actually work hand in hand. They are two sides of the same coin. The due process clause says, no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. This seems to suggest that the government can, in fact, take away your liberty. It can take away your life.
It can throw you in jail, but only with due process of law. What is due process of law? As always, scholars disagree over the full extent of the meaning of this provision, but at a minimum, due process to law means two things. First, it means that there must be established law before the government can take your rights away.
In other words, the government can't just say, Jaywalking is not illegal. We saw you jaywalking yesterday. We didn't like that. Go to the Tower of London. You can't do that. The government, the king, Congress, Parliament, the President, they can't just make up law on the fly and send you to prison for violating that law that they make up on the fly.
There must be established law. In other words, there must be a law setting out a particular crime or a particular prohibition, and only if you violate that law, again, that is established and known in advance, can the government send you to jail, can send you to prison? Of course, the second component of due process of law then is that your violation of that law must be adjudicated must be determined through judicial processes.
Someone can't just say, I saw you Jaywalking the other day, therefore, go to jail. You get a trial. Sometimes you get a jury. You get a court, you get a judge. You get judicial process. Due process of law, fundamentally as two components, there must be established law. One's violation of that established law must be adjudicated according to established processes in order to determine whether you've in fact violated the law. That's due process of law. The government cannot arbitrarily send you to jail. It can't on a whim, capriciously send someone to the tower of London. There must be law established in advance, and there must be a process to determine one's violation of that law.
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