Abstract

The purposes of the following thesis is to research United States Supreme Court sex-discrimination jurisprudence and ascertain if Fourteenth Amendment legislative history was used, referred to, cited to, or quoted from, by the Supreme Court Justices in their opinions regarding sex-discrimination cases since the Amendment was ratified in 1868. Legislative history is a window into the drafting, debating, and intricate crafting of laws and amendments. When words and phrases that are used in the statutes, codes, and amendments are ambiguous or unclear, judges and justices should use the legislative history to ascertain the intent of the framers of the legislation. The methodology that was employed for this thesis was through the researching of all relevant United States Supreme Court cases as to what was written by the Justices in their opinions. Research was conducted into the relevant law review articles on the subject of legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment, Supreme Court sex-discrimination jurisprudence, and the historical impact of Court decisions on the law relative to sex-discrimination. After extensive research, it was discovered that the United States Supreme Court has established over 144 years' worth of sex-discrimination jurisprudence. The law review article research revealed that the lack of legislative history research by the Court has not gone unnoticed by the legal community or the women's rights community since the Fourteenth Amendment was originally drafted. The research and analysis of the sources of sex-discrimination from cases, law review articles, and books on the subject, led to the conclusion that no Fourteenth Amendment legislative history was ever used by the Supreme Court of the United States as part of its development of sex-discrimination jurisprudence.

Notes

If this is your Honors thesis, and want to learn how to access it or for more information about readership statistics, contact us at STARS@ucf.edu

Thesis Completion

2013

Semester

Spring

Advisor

Slaughter, David B.

Degree

Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

College

College of Health and Public Affairs

Degree Program

Legal Studies

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Health and Public Affairs;Health and Public Affairs -- Dissertations, Academic

Format

PDF

Identifier

CFH0004327

Language

English

Access Status

Open Access

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Document Type

Honors in the Major Thesis

Download

Included in

Legal Studies Commons

Share

COinS