294
Opinion of Souter, J.
shall attack the equality of rights of American citizens . . . ." Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 1st Sess., 478 (1871).
The effect of the equal protection requirement in thus limiting the deprivation clause has received the Court's careful attention, first in Collins v. Hardyman, 341 U. S. 651 (1951), then in a series of more recent cases, Griffin v. Breckenridge, 403 U. S. 88 (1971), Great American Fed. Sav. & Loan Assn. v. Novotny, 442 U. S. 366 (1979), and Carpenters v. Scott, 463 U. S. 825 (1983). For present purposes, Griffin and Carpenters stand out.
B
The Griffin Court sought to honor the restrictive intent of the 42d Congress by reading the "language requiring intent to deprive of equal protection, or equal privileges and immunities," Griffin, 403 U. S., at 102 (emphasis omitted), as demanding proof of "some racial, or perhaps otherwise class-based, invidiously discriminatory animus behind the conspirators' action." Ibid. And while this treatment did, of course, effectively narrow the scope of the clause, it did so probably to the point of overkill, unsupported by any indication of an understanding on the part of Congress that the animus to deny equality of rights lying at the heart of an equal protection violation as the legislation's sponsors understood it would necessarily be an animus based on race or some like character. See id., at 100; Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 1st Sess., App. 188 (remarks of Rep. Willard); Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 1st Sess., at 478 (remarks of Rep. Shellabarger).
While the Congress did not explain its understanding of statutory equal protection to any fine degree, I am not aware of (and the Griffin Court did not address) any evidence that in using the phrase "equal protection" in a statute passed only three years after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment Congress intended that phrase to mean anything different from what the identical language meant in the Amendment itself. That is not to say, of course, that all Members of Congress in 1871, or all jurists, would have
Page: Index Previous 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007