The Constitution grants many rights to the individual. Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, and Citizens United v. FEC all explore the definition of individual. In Brown v. BOE, Oliver Brown fought to integrate schools which let black people be treated as individuals under the Constitution as their white counterparts were. In Roe V. Wade, Norma McCovey’s case determined that individual rights do not apply to the unborn, which granted women the right to choose if they wanted an abortion. Finally, in Citizens United v. FEC, the court granted corporations some of the rights given to individuals, allowing unlimited campaign funding from corporations. Brown v. BOE, Roe v. Wade, and Citizens United v. FEC all concern the individual and their rights to free speech and equal protection, as well as what “individual” means in the Constitution.
In 1896, the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (163 US 537 (1896)) ruled that segregated spaces were legal, as long as black people and white people had equal facilities. This ruling made banning African Americans from spaces constitutional and became known as Jim Crow laws. The Jim Crow laws and the “separate but equal” doctrine stood for the next 60 years. In 1951, Oliver Brown, with the help of the NAACP, filed a class-action lawsuit against Topeka Kansas’s Board of Education. Brown’s daughter, Linda, had to walk six blocks and take the bus for one mile every day to the nearest black elementary school, even though there was an elementary school only seven blocks from her house. Her parents enrolled her in the closer school, but she was denied entrance because she wasn’t white. Brown claimed in his lawsuit that the black school had a worse environment than the white school, so it was violating “separate but equal.” At the US District Court in Kansas, Brown’s views were affirmed, and the court agreed that the segregation of public schools had a “detrimental effect upon the colored children” and that it contributed to “a sense of inferiority,” but they refused to overturn “separate but equal.” Brown wasn’t satisfied, so in 1952, he took his case to the Supreme Court. There were four other cases also dealing with school segregation, so all five were combined under Brown v. BOE. With attorney Thurgood Marshall defending Brown, on May 17, 1954, the relatively liberal court unanimously voted in favor of Brown. He got lucky because when the case first arrived at the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson wanted the Plessy verdict to stand, which would’ve allowed schools to stay segregated. However, right before the hearing in 1953, Vinsion died and Earl Warren became the Chief Justice. He was the one who ruled that the segregation of schools was unconstitutional. The court decided that segregated schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment which says that “nor shall any State [...] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" because “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” and segregated schools are “inherently unequal” (Brown v. BOE 347 US 483 (1954)).
Violation of the 14th Amendment is also central to Roe v. Wade. In 1970, Norma McCovey, a single, pregnant woman (under the fictional name Jane Roe) took federal action against her district attorney, Henry Wade, of Dallas County, Texas. At the time, Texas law made it illegal to get an abortion unless a doctor recommended it to save the mother’s life. In what turned out to be a similar situation to Brown v. BOE, Roe went to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas in 1970 and they found that preventing Roe from getting an abortion did violate her rights, but refused to issue an injunction to prevent all pregnant women from having to face this law. So Roe took her case to the federal court. On January 22, 1973, the liberal majority, including Chief Justice Warren Burger, voted 7-2, that (a) during the first trimester of pregnancy a woman could have an abortion on demand without interference from the state; (b) during the second trimester the state could regulate abortions for safety but not prohibit them entirely; and (c) during the third trimester, the state could regulate or forbid all abortions except to save the life of the mother” (Roe v. Wade 1973). Justice Blackmun, who delivered the majority opinion, included that the word person in the Constitution does not include the unborn. Denying abortion to women violated the 14th amendment which granted privacy, equal protection under the law, and prohibited states from making laws that infringed upon federal laws, which is exactly what Henry Wade was doing(Roe v. Wade 410 US 113 (1973)).
While Brown v. BOE and Roe v. Wade both explore the rights granted to different types of individuals, Citizens United v. FEC explores what groups individual rights are granted to. In 2002, Congress passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) which said that corporations and unions couldn’t use their general treasuries to fund “electioneering communications.” It also said that TV and satellite broadcast companies could not refer a candidate to office within 30 days of a primary election or within 60 days of a general election. In 2008, a conservative non-profit called Citizens United wanted to release a documentary criticizing Hillary Clinton, who was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President. They sought an injunction against the Federal Election Commission (FEC) because they wanted to prevent the application of BCRA for the making of their movie. The US District Court in Washington DC ruled against Citizens United on all counts on the precedent of McConnell v. FEC (2003) where Republican Senator Mitch McConnell also tried to challenge BRCA. Citizens United went to the Supreme Court. On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, including Chief Justice John Roberts, voted 5-4 that free speech applies to corporations too, and removed the limitations on corporate funding of independent political broadcasts. Citizens United v FEC is related to the first amendment which provides the five freedoms: speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition. It ruled that political spending was a form of free speech (even if the speaker was a corporation) and that limiting it violated the First amendment (Citizens United v. FEC 558 US 310 (2010)).
All three cases explore what an individual is when referred to in the Constitution. Today we see the effects of these cases in things like the education achievement gap between white/high-income students and students of color, we see them in the abortion bans being instituted in the south, and we see these effects when we look at how much influence corporations and super-PACs like the NRA have over politics.
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