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Casebook Read Credits
Constitutional Law
Section 4 . 2
15 hours

Equal Protection

Lawrence Lessig

These cases about race are meant to illustrate a pattern that is different from the pattern with the federalism cases. In those cases, I said that translation was suppressed in the period beginning in 1937. Then, beginning with Rehnquist's opinion in National League of Cities in 1976, there has been a restoration of the effort to translate federalism properly. 

With equal protection as applied to race, the suppression comes first. After the initial period of hope, and then a short period of ambiguity, the cases evince (as I argue more fully in the book) the yielding to social and political reality. The revival of the original meaning of equality happens fully only in 1954. And then that principle of equality gets translated to sex and sexual orientation later. -LL

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