Ten Broek, Jacobus (1911–1968)
TEN BROEK, JACOBUS (1911–1968)
The major contribution of Jacobus ten Broek to American constitutional scholarship was The Antislavery Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment (1951; rev. ed., Equal under Law, 1965), in which he described the influence of the abolitionist movement on the drafting and ratification of the fourteenth amendment. Ten Broek argued that the abolitionists identified the natural rights of human beings as constitutional rights requiring a national constitutional power of enforcement. He maintained that the privileges and immunities clause of the amendment protected these natural rights and the auxiliary rights necessary to their enjoyment; that the equal protection clause required the states to supply full legal protection to natural rights and authorized Congress to protect these rights if the states failed to do so; and that the amendment applied to the states those provisions of the federal Bill of Rights guaranteeing natural rights, as well as those natural rights not mentioned in the Bill of Rights. Ten Broek, a lawyer, was a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Richard B. Bernstein
(1986)