Timothy Sandefur (Goldwater Institute), The Declaration of Independence in California, California Legal History, vol. 20, pp. 155-83 (2025) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
California’s experience with the principles of the Declaration of Independence has been strained. While early Californians prized its idea of self-government, they failed to acknowledge the underlying principle of equality, and in fact engaged in shocking degrees of official bigotry well into the twentieth century. The “spreading and deepening” of the Declaration’s influence in the Golden State has been slow, indeed. Not until the 1990s would Californians proclaim in their fundamental law that government discrimination based on race was intolerable—and even after that, the state has persisted in its discriminatory conduct. This article gives an overview of the Golden State’s long-delayed reckoning with the principle that “all men are created equal.”
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