grandfather clause
English
editEtymology
editFrom late 19th-century legislation and constitutional amendments passed by a number of U.S. Southern states, which created new literacy and property restrictions on voting, but exempted those whose grandfathers had the right to vote before the American Civil War. The intent and effect of such rules was to prevent poor and illiterate African American former slaves and their descendants from voting, but without denying poor and illiterate whites the right to vote.
Noun
editgrandfather clause (plural grandfather clauses)
- A clause or section, especially in a law, granting exceptions for people or organisations who were affected by previous conditions.
- Many building codes include a grandfather clause exempting older buildings until some amount of remodeling occurs.
- 1911, Frederic Jesup Stimson, chapter XVI, in Popular Law-making[2]:
- Under the Fifteenth Amendment there is little political legislation, except the effort in Southern States by educational or property qualifications, and most questionably by the so-called "grandfather clause," to exclude most negroes from the right of suffrage.
- 2013 October 22, Alan Greenblatt, “The Racial History Of The 'Grandfather Clause'”, in NPR.org[5]:
- In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Guinn v. United States that grandfather clauses were unconstitutional. The court in those days upheld any number of segregationist laws — and even in Guinn specified that literacy tests untethered from grandfather clauses were OK.
Derived terms
edit- grandfather (verb)
- grandfather in (verb)
Translations
editexeption for those joined under the previous law
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Further reading
edit- grandfather clause on Wikipedia.Wikipedia