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The 5th Amendment and the 14th Amendment both have due process clauses. The texts are almost identical:

The Fifth Amendment:

[N]or shall any person . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . . .

The Fourteenth Amendment:

[N]or shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . . .

From all I've read - including a comment by cpast - the two clauses are interpreted identically. So why was the clause added to the 14th Amendment?

The one difference seems to be the use of "State" in the 14th Amendment - thus applying it not just on a federal level - but I would think that the Constitution would be automatically applicable in all state level cases.

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1 Answers1

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Your assumption is incorrect -- the Bill of Rights proper does not apply to the states, and pre-14th Amendment only bound the federal government. See Barron v. Baltimore, 32 US 243. States could do whatever they wanted, subject to federal legislation on the matters given to the federal government and subject to their own constitutions.

After the Civil War, the federal government was much less OK with so-called "black codes," restricting the rights of freedmen based on explicitly racial distinctions, with not even a fig leaf of justification that it applied to all citizens. The federal government could prevent federal discrimination, but no tools existed to prevent state discrimination. Hence, the 14th Amendment, which bound the states to adopt certain standards in their lawmaking and let Congress take action against those that didn't.

cpast
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