Background
The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution each contain a Due Process Clause. The Supreme Court of the United States interprets these two clauses as providing four protections: procedural due process in civil and criminal proceedings, substantive due process, a prohibition against vague laws, and as the vehicle for the incorporation of the Bill of Rights .
Bill of Rights
This item is the enrolled original joint resolution of Congress, engrossed on parchment, proposing 12 amendments to the United States Constitution. The Federal Government's official copy of the resolution is signed by Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and John Adams, Vice President of the United States and President of the Senate.
This protection extends to all government proceedings that can result in an individual's deprivation, whether civil or criminal in nature, from parole violation hearings to administrative hearings regarding government benefits and entitlements to full-blown criminal trials.
Procedural Due Process
At a basic level, procedural due process is essentially based on the concept of fundamental fairness. For example, in 1934, the United States Supreme Court held that due process is violated "if a practice or rule offends some principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental. " As construed by the courts, it includes an individual's right to be adequately notified of charges or proceedings, the opportunity to be heard at these proceedings, and that the person or panel making the final decision over the proceedings be impartial in regards to the matter before them. To put it more simply, where an individual is facing a deprivation of life, liberty, or property, procedural due process mandates that he or she be entitled to adequate notice, a hearing, and a neutral judge.
Procedural due process has also been an important factor in the development of the law of personal jurisdiction, in the sense that it is inherently unfair for the judicial machinery of a state to take away the property of a person who has no connection to it whatsoever.
The requirement of a neutral judge has introduced a constitutional dimension into the question of whether a judge should recuse himself or herself from a case. Specifically, the Supreme Court has ruled that in certain circumstances, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires a judge to recuse himself on account of a potential or actual conflict of interest. For example, on June 8, 2009, in Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal Co. (2009), the Court ruled that a justice of the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia could not participate in a case involving a major donor to his election to that court.
In criminal cases, many of these due process protections overlap with procedural protections provided by the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees reliable procedures that protect innocent people from being executed, which would be an obvious example of cruel and unusual punishment.
Substantive Due Process
The term substantive due process (SDP) is commonly used in two ways: first to identify a particular line of case law, and second to signify a particular attitude toward judicial review under the Due Process Clause. The term substantive due process began to take form in 1930s legal casebooks as a categorical distinction of selected due process cases, and by 1950 had been mentioned twice in Supreme Court opinions.
Today, the Court focuses on three types of rights under substantive due process in the Fourteenth Amendment, which originated in United States v. Carolene, 1938. Those three types of rights are: the first eight amendments in the Bill of Rights (e.g. the Eighth Amendment); restrictions on the political process (e.g. the rights of voting, association, and free speech); and the rights of "discrete and insular minorities."