Why is the Fourteenth Amendment important today?

0:03I think in many ways, the 14th Amendment is more important both to our modern conception of the Constitution and to our modern lived experience under the Constitution than anything in the original Constitution. The 14th Amendment is added to the Constitution in 1868 after the Civil War. It contains a number of provisions, but the most important ones for present day purposes, are the ones that grant citizenship to all individuals born or naturalized in the United States. That's in the first sentence of the 14th Amendment. Then critically, it guarantees to every person the equal protection of the laws, and it prohibits any state from depriving any individual of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Equality, which actually doesn't appear in the original Constitution, enters the Constitution as a concept in the 14th Amendment.

0:56I think it's right that the way the historian Eric Foner frames the change wrought by the 14th Amendment and all the reconstruction Amendment, which includes the 13th, which abolish slavery and the 15th, which guaranteed the right to vote. Those three amendments together, but in some ways, most of all the 14th Amendment are really best understood as a second founding. The Constitution is fundamentally changed when those amendments are added and the 14th, in many ways, is the font, both of our most important rights today and really of an inclusive multiracial democracy.