Congressional Authority to Interpret the Thirteenth Amendment

Alexander Tsesis

Most scholars of the Thirteenth Amendment have argued that Section 2 grants Congress broad powers to pass civil rights legislation.1 Several critics have challenged this view, most expositively Jennifer Mason McAward, who has argued for adopting a more constrained perspective of congressional enforcement power. There have been few recent Supreme Court decisions on the Thirteenth Amendment to draw upon and those that are available conceive of the Thirteenth Amendment expansively; therefore, the revisionist argument for a limited reading of the Thirteenth Amendment is informed by the Rehnquist Court’s Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence stemming from the holding in City of Boerne v. Flores and its progenies. This Essay will investigate the validity of claims about the historical lessons of the Thirteenth Amendment and the possibility that the Court will superimpose its Fourteenth Amendment conservatism unto the more liberal Thirteenth Amendment jurisprudence.