Critics of illegal immigrant mothers who supposedly enter the country to have "anchor babies" sometimes propose repealing the Reconstruction-era amendment.
"It is extraordinary because Congress embarked on a mission long delayed and of extraordinary importance: to realize the purpose and promise of the Fifteenth Amendment," the Reconstruction-era amendment that barred racial discrimination in voting and authorized Congress to enforce it.
Most of the consequential fights about civil rights, beginning with the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution, have been over the federal government's role in enforcement.
In Mr. Obama's due process and voting right classes, he showed students the broad failures of Reconstruction-era amendments that tried to establish equality for blacks.
Further, the Congress that enacted the Voting Rights Act in 1965 invoked its authority under two Reconstruction-era amendments that protect fundamental rights of citizenship: equal protection (the 14th) and the right to vote (the 15th).
For one thing, Mr. Obama's courses chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change: the Reconstruction-era amendments that were rendered meaningless by a century of resistance, the way the triumph of Brown gave way to fights over busing, the voting rights laws that crowded blacks into as few districts as possible.
Easterbrook's approach emphasized the imperative need for lower court deference to the Supreme Court's explicit Reconstruction Era holdings that the Second Amendment does not bind the states, even after the Supreme Court's game-changing decision in District of Columbia V. Heller and thus gave only scant attention to the various historical authorities that O'Scannlain referred to in Nordyke.
"Supporters of the exclusionary rule cannot point to a single major statement from the Founding — or even the antebellum or Reconstruction eras — supporting Fourth Amendment exclusion of evidence in a criminal trial," Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, wrote in The Harvard Law Review in 1994.
Under the leadership of Attorney General Francis Biddle, the Civil Rights Section invoked the constitutional amendments and legislation of the Reconstruction Era as the basis for its actions.
His story sharpens a paradox of the Reconstruction era.
THIS city survived the first Reconstruction era, but just barely.
