The 1787 Project

In our final episode for the course, we conclude our section on Equal Protection by considering ongoing legal and political debates about the meaning "sex" in federal anti-discrimination statutes including the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This episode explores how the Supreme Court has addressed sex-based discrimination claims in Equal Protection analysis.

This episode gives a brief overview of the 2003 cases of Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, the first major Supreme Court cases about the use of race in university admissions since the 1968 Bakke case.

This episode takes a close look at the case of University of California v. Bakke (1978), which sets the general analytic framework for the Supreme Court's subsequent series of cases on the use of race as a factor in university admissions decisions.

In the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Congress sought to prevent discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of race, but the Supreme Court declared that to be beyond the scope of Congress' power under Section V of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Turning now to the Equal Protection Clause, we consider in this episode the background that lead to the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and the way the Supreme Court addressed that precedent in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

In this episode, we go back to the case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby in 2014 to consider the structure of some of the arguments about the application of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in specific cases.

This episode gives an overview of the back-and-forth between the Supreme Court and Congress over the issue of religious free exercise that led to the passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 1993 and the Supreme Court's limiting of the application of RFRA only to federal law in the case of City of Boerne v. Flores (1997).

In this conversation with Notre Dame Professor Phillip Munoz, we talk about the Free Exercise Clause and the contested place of religious exemptions in U.S. constitutional law and politics.

This episode explores several early cases about the Free Exercise Clause and the question of whether the First Amendment requires religious exemptions to otherwise valid laws. After considering the issue of polygamy in the federal territories in the nineteenth century, we then look at the important case of Sherbert v. Verner (1963) and preview our discussion, in the next episode, about the Supreme Court's move away from the reasoning in Sherbert in the 1990s.