Government and Foreign Policy
The promise of equal protection under the law is one of the most powerful ideas in the American constitutional tradition. It holds that the government must treat all people equally and cannot discriminate against individuals or groups without sufficient legal justification.
Beyond Race: Expanding Equal Protection
Since the civil rights era, the Equal Protection Clause has been applied to protect many groups beyond racial minorities. The Supreme Court has used it to strike down laws that discriminated on the basis of gender, disability, and sexual orientation.
In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, finding that denying them this right violated both equal protection and due process guarantees.