Narrow tailoring (also known as narrow framing) is the legal principle that a law be written to specifically fulfill only its intended goals. It is usually connoted to the judicial test of

strict scrutiny In U.S. constitutional law, when a law infringes upon a fundamental constitutional right, the court may apply the strict scrutiny standard. Strict scrutiny holds the challenged law as presumptively invalid unless the government can demonstrat ...

. This phrase is most commonly invoked in constitutional law cases in the United States, such as First Amendment cases, or

Equal Protection The Equal Protection Clause is part of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides "nor shall any State... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal pr ...

cases involving

racial discrimination Racial discrimination is any discrimination against any individual on the basis of their Race (human categorization), race, ancestry, ethnicity, ethnic or national origin, and/or Human skin color, skin color and Hair, hair texture. Individuals ...

by creating racial distinctions. In the case '' Grutter v. Bollinger'' (2003), the

United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on question ...

held that:

Even in the limited circumstance when drawing racial distinctions is permissible to further a compelling state interest, government is still constrained under equal protection clause in how it may pursue that end: the means chosen to accomplish the government's asserted purpose must be specifically and narrowly framed to accomplish that purpose.'' Grutter v. Bollinger'',

Prior to Students for '' Fair Admissions v. Harvard'', affirmative action programs in higher education were only considered legal because they further the compelling state interest of creating diversity on university campuses. Federal courts would consider certain programs to be illegal if they exceeded the scope that would be required to fulfill the academic institution's goals.

Brief history

The Supreme Court case '' Korematsu v. U.S.'' in 1944 is widely known to have brought the first concerns revolving strict scrutiny and racial discrimination. However, it wasn't until '' Chicago v. Mosley'' in 1972 to have first coined the term "narrowly tailoring" when the restriction of rights outlined in the U.S. Constitution serves a

compelling state interest Government or state interest is a concept in law that allows the state to regulate a given matter. The concept may apply differently in different countries, and the limitations of what should and should not be of government interest vary, and hav ...

References

Statutory law United States constitutional law {{law-term-stub

Brief history

See also

References