Hate Crimes Legislation and the Thirteenth Amendment
5 Pages Posted: 23 Aug 2010
Date Written: August 15, 2009
Abstract
This year the House of Representatives and Senate passed two closely related but differently formulated hate crimes bills. The critical distinction between the two is that the Senate version relies on both the Thirteenth Amendment and Commerce Clause as the sources of Congress’s authority to pass hate crimes legislation (S. 909), while the House version only relies on the Commerce Clause (H. R. 1913).The difficulty with relying on the Thirteenth Amendment is that it would require extending its reach to groups that the Court has never recognized as falling under it: namely women, gays and lesbians, transsexuals, and transvestites, and the disabled. I think the stakes of crimes committed against these groups that don’t fall under the commerce provisions of S.A. 1511 make it imperative to try to extend the amendment’s applicability. Of course, the risk of this proposal is that the Court could find the law unconstitutional. So, I make two proposals: the first more risky than the second more pragmatic.
Keywords: Hate crimes, Thirteenth Amendment, constitutional law
JEL Classification: J7, J78
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation