degree of political power in their own right. At the turn of the century
environmentalism even developed its own political extreme, closely allied by
anarchist movements, who took, often violent, direct action against world
economic leaders at several G-8 summits. (See alsonew social movements.)
Equal Protection
Equal protection is a term which describes the idea that the legal system should
protect all citizens from arbitrary discrimination and guarantee them equal
rights. Initially it seemed that this idea was very similar to the guarantees of
procedural fairness anddue processoffered in many societies. In the 20th
century, however, a distinction was increasingly made between, on the one
hand, equal protection and simple procedural fairness, which offer a formal
equality that may mean little where wealth, education and similar factors are
unequal, and, on the other hand, substantive equal protection. In the USA in
particular, the idea of equal protection became extended from a procedural
guarantee to a fuller conception of equality, albeit in a limited and restricted
field.
This guarantee is contained in the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment—an amendment which was passed in 1868 to protect all citizens
(and especially former slaves) against the abridgement of their rights by state
governments. Since the innovative era of Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953–69),
the US Supreme Court has used this constitutional provision to eliminate
various forms of racial discrimination and to promote its own view of
constitutionally mandated standards in such areas as criminal law and deseg-
regation (seejudicial review). It was, for example, the equal protection clause
that led to the desegregation of schools in the famous case ofBrown v Board of
Education of Topeka(1954), and which has been behind most court-led anti-
discrimination actions—the equal protection clause has even led to the
redrawing of constituency boundaries for congressional elections. Positive
attempts to redress the effects of discriminations through, for example,
affirmative action, have been most common in the USA. While other
countries do have vestiges of such ideas, even major civil rights statements
such as the European Convention on Human Rights (seeHuman Rights
Act) tend to stress the procedural due process style of argument rather than the
more substantively demanding equal protection approach. Despite this caveat,
the programme ofThird Waygovernments such as that in the United
Kingdom from 1997, has concentrated strongly on anti-discrimination legisla-
tion which in some cases exceeds in its reach even the strongest US court
decisions.
Equal Protection