1346 “Careful adherence to the ‘state action’ requirement preserves an area of individual freedom by limiting the reach of federal law and federal judicial power. As it grew more sympathetic to federalism concerns in the late 1970s and 1980s, the Court began to reassert a strengthened state action doctrine, primarily but hardly exclusively in nonracial cases. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, however when almost all state action contentions were raised in a racial context, the Court generally found the presence of state action. Thus, following the Civil War, when the Court sought to reassert states’ rights, it imposed a rather rigid state action standard, limiting the circumstances under which discrimination suits could be pursued. The state action doctrine is not just a textual interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, but may also serve the purposes of federalism. For instance, is it state action when a minor state official’s act was not authorized or perhaps was even forbidden by state law? What if a private party engages in discrimination while in a special relationship with governmental authority? “The vital requirement is State responsibility,” Justice Frankfurter once wrote, “that somewhere, somehow, to some extent, there be an infusion of conduct by officials, panoplied with State power, into any scheme” to deny protected rights. 1343 In addition, acts by other branches of government “by whatever instruments or in whatever modes that action may be taken” can result in a finding of “state action.” 1344 But the difficulty for the Court has been when the conduct complained of is not so clearly the action of a state. 1342Ĭertainly, an act passed by a state legislature that directs a discriminatory result is state action and would violate the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment. That Amendment erects no shield against merely private conduct, however discriminatory or wrongful.” 1339 Although state action requirements also apply to other provisions of the Constitution 1340 and to federal governmental actions, 1341 the doctrine is most often associated with the application of the Equal Protection Clause to the states. 1338 As the Court has noted, “the action inhibited by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment is only such action as may fairly be said to be that of the States.

State Action.-The Fourteenth Amendment, by its terms, limits discrimination only by governmental entities, not by private parties.

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. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.

Equal protection clause