Fourteenth Amendment

Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Dept of Health, 110 S. Ct. 2841 (1990) See also, Washington v. Harper, 494 U.S. 210, 221-22(1990) (recognizing a significant liberty interest in avoiding the unwanted administration of antipsychotic drugs under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment ) Vitek v. Jones, 445 U.S. 480,494 (1980) (forced admission to mental hospital and behavior modification treatment implicate liberty interests). 

What is undisputed is that the Supreme Court decided that the Second Amendment, whatever sort of right it declared, was a restraint only on Congress, not on the states, localities, or citizens. As noted earlier, many parts of the Bill of Rights would later be incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment and enforced against the states (notably, to protect the civil rights of African Americans and other minorities), but to date the Second Amendment has not been included in this process. 

The Fourteenth Amendment, the Freedman s Bureau Act, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 all include the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms among the rights that the states are prohibited from taking from any citizen. 

In Lewis v. U.S., the Supreme Court holds that the federal government denying felons the right to possess firearms does not infringe on the provisions of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms nor on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. 

Sanford Levinson, McCormick Professor at the University of Texas. Although he remains generally politically liberal, Levinson s studies of the Second Amendment led him to the conclusion that it did protect an individual right to keep and bear arms and that it should be taken seriously by constitutional scholars. His 1989 paper The Embarrassing Second Amendment helped touch off a renewed debate about the amendment s meaning and the suggestion that it should be, like the First and Fourth Amendments, incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment and applied to the states. 

S Petitioners raise a statutory claim, under the disparate-treatment prohibition of Title VII, and a constitutional claim, under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A decision for petitioners on their statutory claim would provide the relief sought, so we consider it first. See Atkins v. Parker, 472 U.S. 115, 123, 105 S.Ct. 2520, 86 L.Ed.2d 81 (1985) Escambia County v. McMillan, 466 U.S. 48, 51, 104 S.Ct. 1577, 80 L.Ed.2d 36 (1984) (per curiam) ( [N]ormally the Court will not decide a constitutional question if there is some other ground upon which to dispose of the case ). 

From a legal view, Mr. Rommey is right on. As a matter of interpretation of the word person in the Fourteenth Amendment, U.S. courts have extended certain constitutional protections to corporations. This is called the doctrine of corporate personhood. Groups organized specifically for business purposes, including corporations, may also benefit from its protections, just as any other group of persons. 

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