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10  STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT 

AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 
Opinion of the Court 

III 
A 

In the wake of the Civil War, Congress proposed and the 
States ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, providing that 
no State shall “deny to any person . . . the equal protection 
of the laws.”  Amdt. 14, §1.  To its proponents, the Equal 
Protection  Clause  represented  a  “foundation[al]  princi-
ple”—“the  absolute  equality  of  all  citizens  of  the  United 
States politically and civilly before their own laws.”  Cong.
Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 431 (1866) (statement of Rep.
Bingham) (Cong. Globe).  The Constitution, they were de-
termined, “should not permit any distinctions of law based
on race or color,” Supp. Brief for United States on Reargu-
ment in Brown v. Board of Education, O. T. 1953, No. 1 etc., 
p. 41 (detailing the history of the adoption of the Equal Pro-
tection Clause), because any “law which operates upon one 
man [should] operate equally upon all,” Cong. Globe 2459 
(statement of Rep. Stevens).  As soon-to-be President James 
Garfield observed, the Fourteenth Amendment would hold 
“over every American citizen, without regard to color, the 
protecting shield of law.”  Id., at 2462.  And in doing so, said
Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, the Amendment would 
give “to the humblest, the poorest, the most despised of the 
race the same rights and the same protection before the law 
as it gives to the most powerful, the most wealthy, or the
most haughty.”  Id., at 2766.  For “[w]ithout this principle
of equal justice,” Howard continued, “there is no republican
government  and  none  that  is  really  worth  maintaining.” 
Ibid. 

At  first,  this  Court  embraced  the  transcendent  aims  of 
the Equal Protection Clause.  “What is this,” we said of the 
Clause  in  1880,  “but  declaring  that  the  law  in  the  States
shall  be  the  same  for  the  black  as  for  the  white;  that  all 
persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before
the laws of the States?”  Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U. S. 
303,  307–309.    “[T]he  broad  and  benign  provisions  of  the