Brennan Stresses Lawyers’ Need to Guard 14th-Amendment Rights

Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. told lawyers Friday that it is their job to help rid society of its “ugly inequities,” calling the 14th Amendment the nation’s most potent tool for eliminating discrimination.

Brennan, in a speech prepared for an American Bar Assn. convention audience at the New York University Law School, defended the way the Supreme Court has interpreted the 14th Amendment to protect the rights of women and minority groups.

The 14th Amendment, ratified to protect freed slaves after the Civil War, has been debated by conservative and liberal scholars, who disagree over the meaning and reach of its guarantees of “due process” and “equal protection of the laws.”

Some conservatives have argued that the 1868 amendment has been misinterpreted by the Supreme Court, which has used the 14th Amendment to make the Bill of Rights binding upon the states.

Brennan said the 14th Amendment is “the prime tool by which we as citizens can shape a society which truly champions the dignity and worth of the individual as its supreme value.”

“Congress and the federal judiciary have done much in recent years to close the gap between promise and fulfillment,” Brennan said. “But who will deny that despite this great progress the goal of universal equality, freedom and prosperity is far from won and that ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation?”

Brennan urged lawyers to help him in “resisting cutbacks, particularly by the Supreme Court of the United States, of 14th-Amendment protections.”