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REVERSE INCORPORATION

The concept of reverse incorporation is that the Bill of Rights (the first ten Amendments) which was ratified in 1791 also incorporated parts of the Fourteenth Amendment – which was ratified 77 years later in 1868. The Incorporation Doctrine is the concept that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution (the later document) “incorporated” the Bill of Rights (the earlier document.)

The concept of reverse incorporation appears in the Supreme court case, Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954), which is a companion case to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). In these landmark cases, the Supreme court struck down state laws which established separate public schools for black and white students as being unconstitutional. The Supreme Court applied the law to the federal District of Columbia, which is not a state. While the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution lacked an Equal Protection Clause (such as in the Fourteenth Amendment), the court nevertheless held that concepts of Equal Protection and Due Process are not mutually exclusive.

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