North American constitutional jurisprudence on equality and affirmative action

evolutionary and critical analysis

Abstract

The so-called “affirmative actions” comprise a group of institutions whose main objective is, broadly speaking, to compensate, through public or private policies, for centuries of discrimination against certain races or segments. This is a topic that has occupied a central position on the agenda of political actions of several governments, demanding ingenious legal and political solutions. The present study aims to collate the main North American judicial decisions that ended up influencing the creation and legal modeling of affirmative actions on November 24, 1965. To this end, however, a very brief historical overview of slavery will be provided, which, needless to say, marked the segregation and the harmful culture of marginalization of black people.