Whose Right Is It? The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equality

Ages 12 to 18

A crucial and timely investigation of the Fourteenth Amendment and the impact it's had—and continues to have—on our rights as citizens, for readers of Rise Up! and This Is Our Constitution.

In 1954, the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that separate schools for Black and white students are inherently unequal. In 1973, the Supreme Court guaranteed that abortion was a fundamental right in Roe v. Wade. And in 2015, the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide in Obergefell v. Hodges. What do these three famous cases, separated by decades, have in common? Each one was decided under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Born in the years after the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments served as a sort of second Constitution, redefining what America would look like in the years after slavery ended. The Fourteenth was the most expansive, and the most complicated, of the three.

About the Author

Hana Bajramovic has a degree in English from Harvard and a JD from Yale Law School. She has worked for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and at the New York law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP. She now works to defend reproductive rights and access to reproductive healthcare. She is the author of Whose Right Is It?: The Second Amendment and the Fight Over Guns. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. hanabajramovic.com