Fifth Amendment
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 320 U.S. 81 - Hirabayashi v. United States · 1943Most cited · 2,136 citing opinions
discriminatory legislation
The Fifth Amendment contains no equal protection clause and it restrains only such discriminatory legislation by Congress as amounts to a denial of due process.
How the Supreme Court has restated “Fifth Amendment”
Each Supreme Court definition of “Fifth Amendment,” sized by how often later courts cited it. “Change” is measured by wording overlap with earlier definitions — a rough signal, not a semantic judgment.
How often courts cite the cases defining “Fifth Amendment”
Court decisions citing the 3 opinions that defined “Fifth Amendment” — 4,021 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 3 definitions, chronological · 1926–1943
- ORIGINAL
a limitation only upon the powers of the General Government, and is not directed against the action of individuals
The Fifth Amendment, unlike the Fourteenth, has no equal protection clause.