If the original Constitution is the nation's first draft, this is the rewrite. More of modern American rights flow from this one amendment than from almost anything else in the document.
Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was one of the Reconstruction amendments passed after the Civil War to secure the freedom and citizenship of formerly enslaved people. It is long and dense, but its first section changed everything.
It begins by defining citizenship: all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens. That single sentence overturned the notorious Dred Scott decision, which had held that Black Americans could never be citizens.
It then bars states from three things: denying due process, denying equal protection, and abridging the privileges of citizens. For the first time, the Constitution's great limits applied not just to the federal government but to the states.
Through a doctrine called incorporation, courts have used the Fourteenth Amendment to apply most of the Bill of Rights against state and local governments too. Your free-speech and fair-trial protections hold against your city and your state largely because of this amendment.
