High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Substantive due process (SDP) is one of the theories of law through which courts enforce limits on legislative and executive powers and authority. Under American jurisprudence, the avenues for use of this theory by courts are the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which prohibit the federal and state governments, respectively, from depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." That is, substantive due process demarcates the line between, on the one hand, acts by persons of a public or private nature that courts hold are subject to public regulations or legislation, and on the other hand, acts that courts place beyond the reach of governmental interference. Whether the Fifth and/or Fourteenth Amendments were intended to serve this function continues to be a matter of scholarly as well as judicial discussion and dissent.