The due process clause nobody reads

The 14th Amendment’s due process clause says no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. It’s a procedural guarantee — it governs how the government takes something from you, not which rights you hold. That sentence, read in full, leaves no room for the doctrine that courts spent the 20th century building from it.

That doctrine is called substantive due process. It holds that the due process clause protects certain liberties so fundamental that the government can’t infringe them regardless of how fair the procedure is. The word “substantive” appears nowhere in the Constitution. Courts constructed the entire framework.

The Lochner era — roughly 1897 to 1937 — used this theory to strike down economic regulations. FDR’s court-packing pressure ended that era, but the methodology survived. Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) relocated it from economic liberty to personal privacy, finding a right to contraception in