Reasonableness in the jurisprudence of the US Supreme Court

The US Constitution is certainly not pluralist, but it is a loose text, whose flexible clauses allow the Court to operate with a wide margin of discretion. The clause which guaranteed a reasonable balance of interests, however, was not so much the Equal Protection Clause, as the due process clause, and more particularly that of the Fourteenth Amendment. The role played by equality has certainly grown since the Second World War. It has, however, never really freed itself from the formalities, but above all it has never risen to the external principle of homogenization of the legal system. It is a form of guarantee of fundamental rights, connected to constitutional values. Outside strict scrutiny, the Supreme Court of the United States applies the reasonableness test only when assessing distinctions in areas which do not abide by fundamental values and materialise as internal disharmonies to the law itself.