Two provisions of the 14th Amendment are relevant here: Section 5 grants Congress the power "to enforce" the substantive guarantees of Section 1, "among them, equal protection of the laws," by enacting "appropriate legislation".
While its subject was the Family and Medical Leave Act, the decision's analytical core was an interpretation of Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, under which Congress "shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation" the amendment's substantive guarantees of equal protection and due process.
Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and the House agree on the core of the Senate bill: substantive guarantees intended to make sure that sick people with insurance receive the care ordered by their doctors, without interference by insurance company clerks.
The Mubarak regime has yet to show serious commitment to meeting these demands or to moving toward substantive, guaranteed change.
Equality of treatment and the due process right to demand respect for conduct protected by the substantive guarantee of liberty are linked in important respects, and a decision on the latter point advances both interests.
To be sure, the Clause's ultimate goal is to ensure reliability of evidence, but it is a procedural rather than a substantive guarantee.
Likewise, in Lawrence, the court focused principally on liberty precedents as opposed to the equal protection arguments raised by the plaintiffs, writing that "[e]quality of treatment and the due process right to demand respect for conduct protected by the substantive guarantee of liberty are linked in important respects".
"From this point on, virtually every substantive decision is guaranteed to displease someone," said William Rodgers, Newtown's second selectman and a nonvoting director of the Newtown-Sandy Hook Community Foundation, which was set up to disburse the $10.2 million.
In her 86-page opinion, she called the law, passed by Congress in 1993, an unconstitutional violation of First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and Fifth Amendment guarantees of substantive due process.
As Geddickes puts it, "by 1790... the notion of the 'due process of law,' associated with the 'law of the land' guaranteed by Chapter 29 of Magna Carta, was understood to include a residual guarantee of substantive liberty against arbitrary actions of government, including (especially) those of the state legislatures".
Due process is the guarantee, made in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, that a person can't be deprived "of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"; "substantive" means that this guarantee is more than formalistic (or "procedural").
