14th Amendment The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution provides equal protection for all citizens in all manners of the law, at least in theory. In practice, equal protection is not executed perfectly, but it does remain an ideal to which each section of the criminal justice system can and usually does aspire. In the criminal justice system, all defendants are entitled to an attorney, which is why a public defender is

Amendments The Tea Party and the 14th and 17th Amendments At its core, the Tea Party identifies itself as a political faction intended to reduce what it perceives as the tyrannical power of the federal government over the rights of corporations, states and citizens. This is the perspective that underlies the Tea Parties aggressive posturing in recent political affairs and especially its vitriolic hostility toward President Obama. As a part of the

14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments of the United States Constitution took quite a long time to be fully realized for a number of reasons. The principle one, of course, is that the U.S. was designed to operate as a patriarchal, Anglo-Saxon-based society to benefit its principle citizens, white males. A cursory review of the recent court decision in which a Hispanic white male shot and killed an unarmed African-American

The Progressive Movement in the early twentieth century had a somewhat similar though less socialist-leaning agenda; regulation of business and the environment were major policies of Progressives. Theodore Roosevelt was the leading figure of the movement, along with Democrat William Jennings Bryant. In 1896, Bryant ran for President against McKinley in one of the most intense elections in United States history. Multiple parties and factions backed each candidate, and McKinley's

Powell was followed by the Court's decision in Brown v. Mississippi which threw out the coerced confession of a defendant in a state criminal case and was a harbinger of what would occur in the early 1960's by the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren (Brown v. Mississippi, 1936). The Warren Court began to exercise its influence on the area of Constitutional Law in the late 50's as

Reconstruction & the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments The Civil War remains one the most momentous events in American history. The survival of the United States as one nation was at risk and on the outcome of the war depended the nation's ability to bring to reality the ideals of liberty, equality, justice, and human dignity. The war put constitutional government to its severest test as a long festering debate over the power