The Fourteenth Amendment and symbolic legality: Let them eat due process.

This article examines several key tensions in thesymbolic legality or social representation of our society's core legal values. It argues that present Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence ignores the realities of contemporary social life and serves up ineffective due process protections as poor substitutes for genuine or meaningful equal protection remedies. By documenting the importance situation and context and verifying the limits of due process, social science data underscore the rift between social reality and equal protection rhetoric and thereby increase existing tensions in the symbolic legality.