Informed Citizens. Accountable Power.

,

By

Lakshmi

·

Session 2: What is Equality?

Materials for Session 2

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What is Equality?

Agenda:

Assigned Materials:

View:

The Civil War

The Fourteenth Amendment

Equal Protection and Tiers of Scrutiny:

Read:

Questions to Consider: 

  1. What did equality mean before the civil war? For states? For men? For people?
  2. How did the Abolitionist Movement and the diverse Native American traditions shape the evolution of the concept of equality?
  3. How did the civil war change the debate on equality, if it did at all?
  4. To whom did the Fourteenth Amendment apply initially?
  5. Is there truly such a thing as separate but equal?
  6. How did the end World War II force the development of internal laws and policies in the United States?
  7. What role did the new influx of Jewish refugees (including Albert Einstein) play in further development of the idea of equality?
  8. How did the case Brown v. Board of Education alter the American understanding of equality?
  9. What role did/does popular culture play in the legal understanding of equal protection?
  10. What does equal protection under the law mean?
  11. Does the clause mean everyone should be bound by the same laws, regardless of their individual circumstance, or that the law should provide equal protection based on individual circumstance, or that the impact of the law should always be the same for all people? How do we realize any or all of these objectives? Can we realize any or all of these objectives?
  12. Which approach is more desirable?
  13. What are the different aspects of equal treatment that one can legitimately take into account?
  14. Why does the court need to apply different levels of investigative force to different kinds of equality issues?
  15. Why does it take the U.S. Constitutional system so long to extend equal protection to women (of all races)?
  16. What are some of the ways in which ideas about equal protection can be improved?
  17. How and why is the concept of equal protection in constant evolution?
  18. What does equality mean today?
  19. Do we live in an equal society? Here in Germany? Across the world?
  20. Is America an equal society, after over two hundred years of efforts at attempting to build a nation on the principle of equality?

OPTIONAL Materials: 

Reading:

Legal Materials:

History:

Scholarship:

Literature:

Listening:

Speeches:

Viewing:

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