Opinion ID: 2011334
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Constitutionally Protected Classes: United States v. Carolene Products Co.

Text: An historical approach will be useful to the classification analysis. The idea that the legislative treatment of particular classes of persons requires greater scrutiny under the equal protection clause than other persons receive is traceable to dictum in a footnote to the Supreme Court's opinion in United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 144, 152 n. 4, 58 S.Ct. 778, 783-84 n. 4, 82 L.Ed. 1234 (1938) (upholding federal statute prohibiting interstates shipment of filled milk under rational basis test). In that footnote, Justice Stone indicated that prejudice against discrete and insular minorities may be a special condition ... curtail[ing] the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities, and [so] may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry. Id. (emphasis added). Racial discrimination presents the paradigm case under Carolene Products. A particular racial minority, such as Africa-Americans, is discrete in the sense intended; they are visible in a way that makes them relatively easy for other s to identify. Bruce A. Ackerman, Beyond Carolene Products, 98 HARV.L.REV. 713, 729 (1985). African-Americans also are insular, meaning they tend to interact with each other with great frequency in a variety of social contexts, such as neighborhoods, churches, clubs. See id. at 726. African-Americans, moreover, are nationally, if not always locally, in the minority. Finally, the history of civil rights litigation and legislation reflects prejudice which has resulted in invidious discrimination against African-Americans, requiring various court-ordered remedies. The premise underlying Carolene Products' call for more searching judicial inquiry into allegedly prejudicial treatment of discrete and insular minorities is that such minorities lack sufficient political power to fend for themselves in a democratic process that should, but fails, to generate[] outcomes systematically more favorable to minority interests. Ackerman, supra, 98 HARV.L.REV. at 716. There are problems with the Carolene Products formulation, however. It is underinclusive, as later Supreme Court decisions have made clear. Women, for example, are subject to prejudicial discrimination while comprising a diffuse, not insular group. And, of course, women are not a minority. Furthermore, discrete and insular minorities are not necessarily less able to effectuate their interests through the legislative process than other groups or even disorganized majorities. Racial minorities, in any event, appear to have greater political muscle in most instances than other disadvantaged groups, such as illegitimate children or homosexuals or the poor, all of which tend on the whole to be less identifiable and more diffuse than African-Americans, for example. See id. at 728-31. Finally, the kind of prejudice reflected in the Carolene Products footnote is also under-inclusive. There are at least two kinds of prejudice the Supreme Court has recognized: (1) lack of effective participation in the political process, as emphasized in Carolene Products, and (2) stigma, i.e., a mark of shame that invites demeaning treatment regardless of one's strength at the polls. See, e.g., Plyler, 457 U.S. at 223, 102 S.Ct. at 2398 (stigma of illiteracy affecting undocumented school-age children); Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677, 685, 93 S.Ct. 1764, 1769, 36 L.Ed.2d 583 (1973) (plurality opinion) (gross, stereotypical distinctions between the sexes). As explained below, equal protection analysis has evolved beyond Carolene Products to the point where courts intervene to remedy both kinds of prejudice. This discussion of Carolene Products is intended as background for discussion of how the Supreme Court has developed and applied the idea of intensified scrutiny to a variety of groups not limited to discrete and insular minorities, and how the Court has expanded protectable prejudice from lack of effective participation in the political process to prejudice from stigmatizing and stereotypingfrom devaluingparticular groups of human beings.