Abstract
The Fourteenth Amendment’s equality and liberty clauses have been subjected to more judicial review, and opining, than most others. In this still-ongoing interpretative process, successive generations of (mostly) white male federal judges have exploited the unenumerated review power based chiefly on their personal ideological predilections to dismantle reconstructive laws for more than a century. In this historical and continuing process, white power masquerades as constitutional interpretation while willfully sabotaging equality and liberty. This persistent judicial misbehavior has managed to sideline two national Reconstructions that repudiated the colonial identity castes created and exploited by white power. But during this time, judicial appointees also have created a framework for principled constitutional interpretation. Judicial appointees frequently ignore or manipulate this framework in order to prop up identity caste systems and kill the formal foundational promises of equal justice and individual liberty. Nonetheless, and crucially, this framework awaits principled uses to vindicate the express constitutional goal of creating a more perfect Union under the rule of law.
About the Author
Francisco Valdes, Professor of Law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar, University of Miami, earned his J.S.M. in 1991 and his J.S.D. in 1994 from Stanford Law School. In 1995, Dr. Valdes co-founded LatCrit theory as a jurisprudential movement, along with others at a Colloquium in Puerto Rico on Latina/o/x/e communities and Critical Race Theory. In and since 1995, Dr. Valdes also began teaching constitutional law and other courses at the University of Miami (UM) School of Law. In 2010, he became a founding recipient of the Dean’s Distinguished Scholar designation and was appointed founding Director of the UM Junior Faculty Development program to ensure the well-rounded progress of newer faculty. During these years, Dr. Valdes also has worked actively with many organizations and received multiple awards, including notably the Clyde Ferguson Award from the American Association of Law Schools (Minority Groups Section, 2002) and the Great Teacher Award from the Society of American Law Teachers (2010). Substantively, Dr. Valdes’s scholarly work focuses broadly on justice studies and praxis, including LatCrit scholarship, U.S. constitutional law, and Queer legal theory. In 2025, Dr. Valdes retired from UM and became professor emeritus. That same year, he joined the law faculty of Seattle University as Distinguished University Professor.
