14th Amendment Word for Word: Full Text and Clause Breakdown

The full text of the 14th Amendment consists of five sections, ratified on July 9, 1868, that established birthright citizenship, required states to follow due process, guaranteed equal protection of the laws, reshaped congressional apportionment, disqualified insurrectionists from office, secured the public debt, and gave Congress the power to enforce all of it.¹ Congress passed the amendment on June 13, 1866, during Reconstruction, primarily to secure the legal status and civil rights of formerly enslaved people. Each section is reproduced below in full, followed by a plain-language explanation.

Section 1

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”¹

Section 1 is the most frequently litigated part of the entire Constitution. It contains four distinct clauses.

The Citizenship Clause

The opening sentence settles who counts as an American citizen: anyone born on U.S. soil or naturalized through the legal process. The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes a narrow group, mainly children of foreign diplomats who enjoy immunity from U.S. law. This clause directly overturned the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had held that people of African descent could never be U.S. citizens.²

In 1898, the Supreme Court confirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that birthright citizenship applies to children born in the United States even when their parents are foreign nationals, so long as the parents are subject to U.S. jurisdiction. The Court ruled that a child born in San Francisco to Chinese-citizen parents was a U.S. citizen by virtue of the Citizenship Clause.³

The Privileges or Immunities Clause

This clause was meant to prevent states from stripping away rights tied to national citizenship. In practice it has done little work. The Supreme Court gutted it almost immediately in the Slaughter-House Cases of 1873, holding that the clause only protects a narrow set of federal rights and does not reach the broader rights granted by individual states. That reading forced later generations of lawyers to route civil-rights arguments through the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses instead.

The Due Process Clause

On its face, the clause requires the government to follow fair procedures before depriving anyone of life, freedom, or property. Courts have also read it to protect certain fundamental rights that the government cannot take away regardless of what procedures it follows. This concept, known as substantive due process, has been the basis for rulings protecting the right to privacy, the right to marry, and the right to raise children without undue government interference. In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Supreme Court relied on both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause to hold that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.⁴

The Due Process Clause is also the vehicle for incorporation, the doctrine by which most of the Bill of Rights now applies against state governments. Before the Fourteenth Amendment, those protections restrained only the federal government. The Supreme Court has since held that states must respect nearly all of the same rights, from free speech to the right to counsel to the right to bear arms.⁵

The Equal Protection Clause

This clause requires states to treat people in similar situations the same way under the law. Its most famous application came in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), where the Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in public schools, declaring that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”⁶ Equal-protection challenges continue in cases involving voting rights, employment discrimination, and access to public services. Both equal-protection and due-process guarantees extend to all persons within a state’s borders, not only citizens.

Section 2

“Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.”¹

Section 2 replaced the original Constitution’s three-fifths compromise, which had counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation. After the amendment, every person in a state counts fully toward its share of House seats.

The section also created a penalty: if a state blocks eligible citizens from voting, its representation in Congress should shrink proportionally. Congress never enforced this penalty, even during the decades of Jim Crow disenfranchisement across the South.

The language refers specifically to “male inhabitants” who are “twenty-one years of age.” Later amendments have superseded both limitations. The Nineteenth Amendment (1920) extended the vote to women, and the Twenty-sixth Amendment (1971) lowered the voting age to eighteen.⁷ The phrase “except for participation in rebellion, or other crime” remains the constitutional basis for state felony-disenfranchisement laws. Policies vary widely by state, from automatic restoration after release to permanent bans for certain offenses.

Section 3

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”¹

Section 3 bars anyone from holding federal or state office if they previously swore an oath to support the Constitution and then participated in insurrection or rebellion. The disqualification is not permanent; a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate can lift it. The original targets were Confederate officials and military officers who had broken their oaths of allegiance during the Civil War. Congress granted a broad amnesty to most former Confederates in 1872 and removed the remaining disqualifications in 1898.

The clause returned to national attention after January 6, 2021. In Trump v. Anderson (2024), the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that states have no power to enforce Section 3 against federal officeholders or candidates. Only Congress can do that.⁸ States retain the ability to disqualify candidates for state-level offices under Section 3, but removing someone from a presidential or congressional ballot requires congressional action.

Section 4

“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.”⁹

The first sentence guarantees that federal debts authorized by law cannot be legally challenged. During Reconstruction, this protected Union war debts and military pensions from any future Congress that might try to repudiate them. The second sentence did the opposite for the Confederacy: all debts taken on to fund the rebellion were declared void, and no government could compensate former slaveholders for the loss of enslaved people.

Section 5

“The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”¹

This short sentence shifted real power to the federal government. Before the Fourteenth Amendment, protecting individual rights from state interference was largely left to the states themselves. Section 5 gave Congress the authority to pass laws that enforce citizenship rights, due process, and equal protection directly. Major civil-rights legislation rests on this foundation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.⁷

Congress’s Section 5 power is broad but not unlimited. In City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), the Supreme Court struck down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as it applied to states, holding that Section 5 legislation must show a “congruence and proportionality” between the harm being addressed and the remedy Congress chose. Congress can prevent or fix constitutional violations, but it cannot use Section 5 to redefine the substance of constitutional rights.¹⁰

One limitation applies to the amendment as a whole: it restricts government action, not private conduct. The Supreme Court established this principle in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, holding that Section 5 does not authorize Congress to regulate purely private discrimination. Congress has used other constitutional powers, particularly the Commerce Clause, to reach private actors in later civil-rights legislation.

1
National Archives. 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil Rights (1868)
2
National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
3
Justia. United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898)
4
Justia. Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015)
5
Constitution Annotated. Overview of Incorporation of the Bill of Rights
6
Cornell Law Institute. Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
7
U.S. Senate. Landmark Legislation: The Fourteenth Amendment
8
Supreme Court of the United States. Trump v. Anderson, No. 23-719 (2024)
9
Congress.gov. Fourteenth Amendment – Section 4 – Public Debt
10
Justia. City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997)