Due Process: Procedural and Substantive: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
25 flashcard terms for Constitutional Law Topic 6, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 15-question quiz — free, no account needed.
Provisions of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments forbidding deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. They generate procedural, substantive, and incorporation doctrines.
Procedural due process
The requirement that government follow fair procedures before depriving a person of a protected life, liberty, or property interest. Analysis proceeds in two steps: identify the interest, then determine what process is due.
Property interest under due process
A legitimate claim of entitlement created by an independent source such as a statute, contract, or rule, rather than a mere unilateral expectation or abstract need for a benefit.
Board of Regents v. Roth
Held that a nontenured professor whose one-year contract simply expired had no property entitlement and no liberty interest absent a charge damaging his reputation or foreclosing other employment.
Goldberg v. Kelly
Required an evidentiary hearing before termination of welfare benefits, emphasizing the recipient's dependence on subsistence payments and the risk of erroneous cutoff.
Mathews v. Eldridge
Set the three-factor balancing test for how much process is due: the private interest at stake, the risk of error and value of added safeguards, and the government's administrative and fiscal burden.
Liberty interest in reputation
Damage to reputation alone does not trigger due process; the plaintiff must show stigma plus alteration of a legal status or loss of a tangible interest such as employment.
Notice and opportunity to be heard
The irreducible core of procedural fairness, requiring notice reasonably calculated to reach the affected person and a meaningful chance to respond at a meaningful time.
Substantive due process
The doctrine holding that some liberties are protected against government interference regardless of the procedures used, dividing into review of economic regulation and of fundamental personal rights.
Lochner v. New York
Struck a maximum-hours law for bakers as an interference with freedom of contract. It symbolizes an era of aggressive judicial protection of economic liberty that ended in the late 1930s.
West Coast Hotel v. Parrish
Upheld a state minimum wage law for women and repudiated the freedom of contract jurisprudence, ushering in deferential review of economic legislation.
Williamson v. Lee Optical
Illustrates modern rational basis review of economic rules, upholding an optician licensing restriction on any conceivable legitimate rationale even if the legislature acted piecemeal.
Incorporation
The process by which most Bill of Rights guarantees have been applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, selectively and generally with identical content in state and federal cases.
McDonald v. City of Chicago
Incorporated the individual right to keep and bear arms against the states through the Due Process Clause, with a concurrence urging the Privileges or Immunities Clause instead.
Slaughter-House Cases
Narrowly construed the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect only rights of national citizenship, largely removing it as a vehicle for incorporating rights.
Fundamental rights strand
The branch of substantive due process protecting choices deemed central to personal dignity and autonomy, where infringement triggers heightened scrutiny rather than rational basis review.
Glucksberg approach
An analytic method requiring a careful description of the asserted liberty and asking whether it is deeply rooted in the nation's history and tradition and implicit in ordered liberty.
Griswold v. Connecticut
Invalidated a ban on contraceptive use by married couples, locating a right of marital privacy in the penumbras of several guarantees, later restated as a due process liberty.
Eisenstadt v. Baird
Extended contraceptive access to unmarried persons, framing the right as belonging to the individual rather than to the marital unit.
Lawrence v. Texas
Struck a same-sex sodomy prohibition as an unjustified intrusion on private consensual conduct and personal autonomy, overruling a 1986 decision to the contrary.
Obergefell v. Hodges
Held that the right to marry extends to same-sex couples, relying on due process liberty and equal protection principles working in tandem.
Troxel v. Granville
Reaffirmed the fundamental interest of fit parents in directing the care and upbringing of their children, invalidating a broad grandparent visitation order that gave no weight to the parent's judgment.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization
Overruled the constitutional abortion right in 2022, applying the history and tradition method and returning regulation of abortion to the political process under rational basis review.
Right to refuse medical treatment
A competent adult has a protected liberty interest in declining unwanted treatment, and states may require clear and convincing evidence of an incompetent patient's prior wishes before withdrawal.
Punitive damages due process limit
Grossly excessive awards violate due process; courts weigh reprehensibility, the ratio to compensatory damages, and comparable civil penalties, with single-digit ratios usually the outer bound.