The Futility of the Fourteenth: When Classification and Imprecision Combine

Justice Holmes’ majority opinion in Buck v. Bell justified the sterilization of inmates at public mental health institutions as constitutional. It is unmistakable to any modern-day audience that such a verdict runs contrary to the tenets of liberty, equality, and protection from governmental abuse upon which our country’s democratic system was founded. And yet, due to the ambiguity of the language within the Fourteenth Amendment, Holmes was able to distort its meaning to first categorize citizens into two hierarchical groups that the Court found either more or less worthy of constitutional rights, and second, to actually bestow that different level of legal protection onto each of those groups. Although not cited as precedent in the decision itself, the unexplained assumptions made in Bell that different groups of citizens can have different rights and that the definition of a legal protection can be malleable is an extrapolation of the logic established in an earlier decision in Minor v. Happersett, which designated women as citizens but denied them the right to vote. These cases display that the 14th Amendment is not a sufficient remedy to protect unenumerated rights…