新GRE高频阅读机经原文：法案

1、新 GRE 高频阅读机经原文：法案Fourteenth AmendmentThe Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1868, prohibits state governments from denying citizens the“equal protection of the laws. ”Although precisely what the framers of the amendment meant by this equal protection clause remains u

2、nclear, all interpreters agree that the framers' immediate objective wasto provide a constitutional warrant for the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guaranteed the citizenship of all persons born in the United States and subject to United States jurisdiction. This declaration, which was echoed in

3、 the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, was designed primarily to counter the Supreme Court 's ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Black people in the United States could be denied citizenship. The act was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson, who argued that the Thirteenth Amendment, which aboli

4、shed slavery, did not provide Congress with the authority to extend citizenship and equal protection to the freed slaves. Although Congress promptly overrode Johnson's veto,supporters of the act sought to ensure its constitutional foundations with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.第一段： 14修

5、正案禁止政府否认法律对公民的平等保护“ equal protection of the laws ”虽然不太明白提案者这么说的具体意义，但所有解释都认同提案 者的直接目的是为 Civil Right Acts 提供支持，这个 Act 的内容是保 证所有出生于美国的并遵从美国法律的公民的市民权 citizenship 。14 修正案重提 Act 的内容主要是为了反对法院 Super Court 的“黑人应 该没有 citizenship ”这个判决。 Act 被总统否定了，他认为 13修正 案中废除了奴隶制，但没有向国会提供将 citizenship 和 equal protection 扩展到

6、黑人的权力 authority 。即使国会又否决了总统的 否定， Act 的支持者们仍然去寻找 Act 的宪法基础 constitutional foundations ，这样就有了 14修正案。The broad language of the amendment strongly suggests that its framers were proposing to write into the Constitution not a laundry list of specific civil rights but a principle of equal citizenship that

7、 forbids organized society from treating any individual as a member of an inferior class. Yet for the first eight decades of the amendmen't s existence, the Supreme Court 's interpretation of the amendment betrayed this ideal of equality. In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, for example, the C

8、ourt invented the “state action ” limitation, which asserts that“privatedecisions by owners of public accommodations and other commercial businesses to segregate their facilities are insulated from the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment'sguarantee of equal protection under the law.第二段： 14修正案所用的 b

9、road language 强烈地表明了提案者的 目的并不是要提出谁的权力应该受保护的名单，而是要在宪法中建立 建立这样一个原则：任何一个个人都不应该被当做低等阶层对待。但 是 14修正案提出后的 80年间，法院对它的解释违背了它的这个平等 的想法。举例： 1883年的 Civil Rights Cases 中法院发明了“ state action ”这样的一个限制，将 public accommodations and other commercial businesses 所有者的四人决定孤立于 14修正案的法律平 等保护之外。After the Second World War, a j

10、udicial climate more hospitable to equal protection claims culminated in theSupreme Court 's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racially segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Two doctrines embraced by the Supreme Court during this period ext

11、ended the amendmen't s reach. First, the Court required especially strict scrutiny of legislation that employed a“suspectclassification, ” meaning discrimination against a group on grounds that could be construed as racial. This doctrine has broadened the application of the Fourteenth Amendment

12、to other, nonracial forms of discrimination, for while some justices have refused to find any legislative classification other than race to be constitutionally disfavored, most have been receptive to arguments that at least some nonracial discriminations, sexual discrimination in particular, are “suspect ” and deserve this