POLS 1101 Ch. 16 Equality and Civil Rights Key Cases

Plessy v. Ferguson

In 1892, Homer Adolph Plessy, who, as the Court noted, was "seven eighths Caucasian," sat down in a whites-only car of a Louisiana train. Authorities arrested him when he refused to move to the Black-only car. Plessy argued that Louisiana's law mandating racial segregation on its trains violated the privileges and immunities guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and its equal protection clause.

The Supreme Court disagreed. The majority opinion upheld state-imposed racial segregation. The Court based its decision on what came to be known as the separate-but-equal doctrine, which held that separate facilities for people of different races satisfied the Fourteenth Amendment as long as they were equal. (The Court majority used the phrase "equal but separate" to describe the requirement. Justice John Marshall Harlan's dissenting opinion cast the phrase as "separate but equal," and that wording stuck.) Three years later, the Court extended the separate-but-equal doctrine to the schools.

Brown v. Board of Education

Living in Topeka, Kansas, Brown's father had tried to enroll Linda in a white public school because it was close to the Brown home and did not require her to cross a dangerous set of railroad tracks to get to her Black-only school. The racist policies of the school district resulted in the denial of Brown's request. A federal district court found that the Black public school was equal in quality to the white school in all relevant respects; therefore, according to the Plessy doctrine, Linda was required to attend the Black public school. Her family appealed the decision.

The justices delayed argument on the sensitive case until after the 1952 national election and then merged the case with four others into a "class action" suit.

Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953-69), who had only recently joined the Court, delivered the unanimous majority opinion. Warren declared that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," depriving the plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws. Segregated facilities generate in Black children "a feeling of inferiority . . . that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." In short, the nation's highest court found that state-imposed public school segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Brown v. Board of Education II

Ruled that school systems must desegregate "with all deliberate speed" and commanded the lower federal courts to supervise the effort.

Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1

The issue of race-based classifications in education arose again in 2007 when parents challenged voluntary school integration plans based on race.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the 5-4 majority on a bitterly divided bench, invalidated the plans, declaring that the programs were "directed only to racial balance, pure and simple," which the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids. "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," he said. Still, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who cast the fifth and deciding vote, wrote separately that achieving racial diversity and avoiding racial isolation were "compelling interests" that schools could constitutionally pursue as long as they "narrowly tailored" their programs to avoid racial labeling that sorted individual children. Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the minority and speaking from the bench, used pointed language, declaring, "This is a decision that the Court and the nation will come to regret."

United States v. Virginia

The Virginia Military Institute (VMI) boasted a long and proud tradition as Virginia's only exclusively male public undergraduate higher learning institution. The United States brought suit against Virginia and VMI alleging that the school's male-only admissions policy was unconstitutional insofar as it violated the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.

Declared that the men-only admissions policy of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), a state-supported military college, violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Writing for the 7-1 majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg applied a demanding test she labeled "skeptical scrutiny" to official acts that deny individuals rights or responsibilities based on their gender. "Parties who seek to defend gender-based government action," she wrote, "must demonstrate an 'exceedingly persuasive justification' for that action." The upshot is that these distinctions are almost as suspect as distinctions based on race. Three months after the Court's decision, VMI's board of directors finally voted 9-8 to admit women.

United States v. Windsor

The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), enacted in 1996, states that, for the purposes of federal law, the words "marriage" and "spouse" refer to legal unions between one man and one woman. Edith Windsor is the widow and sole executor of the estate of her late spouse, Thea Clara Spyer, who died in 2009. The two were married in Toronto, Canada, in 2007, and their marriage was recognized by New York state law. Thea Spyer left her estate to her spouse, and because their marriage was not recognized by federal law, the government imposed $363,000 in taxes. Had their marriage been recognized, the estate would have qualified for a marital exemption, and no taxes would have been imposed.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 5-4 decision, held the DOMA provision unconstitutional under the Fifth Amendment's due process clause.

Obergefell v. Hodges

The case represented a group effort of plaintiffs from Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee, who argued that their respective state constitutions, which banned same-sex marriage, violated their civil rights. Some petitioners argued that such bans offended the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection and due process clauses, and others argued that they violated the Civil Rights Act.

The Court held 5-4 for the petitioners. In the majority opinion, Justice Kennedy argued that the right to marry is fundamental, protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, and essential to liberty regardless of the couple's sexual orientation. The dissenters, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, argued that the Court had gone too far, usurping the power of state legislatures, which, the dissenters argued, possessed the right to define marriage.

Lau v. Nichols

Unanimous Supreme Court held that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required students in public schools who were still learning English to receive linguistic accommodations. The case also arose in San Francisco, where the Court heard arguments showing that approximately 2,800 students of Chinese ancestry who did not speak English attended the public schools, yet 1,800 received no supplemental courses in English. The Court found that unacceptable. The Lau decision has had important implications for the education of children of all backgrounds, especially Hispanic students, who today comprise 76 percent of English learners in the nation's public schools.

McGirt v. Oklahoma

The Court seemed to affirm Creek sovereignty by preventing Oklahoma from prosecuting a Creek member for a crime committed on the nation's land. Justice Gorsuch authored the majority opinion, which the four liberal members of the Court joined.

Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta

The majority held that state governments can prosecute crimes on Native American lands if they were committed by non-Native Americans. In this case, Justice Gorsuch penned a fiery dissent, criticizing his fellow conservatives: "Tribes are not private organizations within state boundaries. . . . Their reservations are not glorified private campgrounds. Tribes are sovereigns."

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

Allan Bakke, a 35-year-old white man, had twice applied for admission to the University of California Medical School at Davis and the university rejected him both times. As part of the university's affirmative action program, the school had an explicit quota that reserved 16 places for qualified racial minority applicants in each entering class of 100 students. Bakke's academic qualifications exceeded those of all the minority students admitted in the two years the university rejected him, which he said violated his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act.

The Court's decision in Bakke contained six opinions and spanned 154 pages, but no opinion commanded a majority. Despite the confusing multiple opinions, the Court struck down the school's rigid use of racial quotas, thus admitting Bakke, while approving affirmative action programs in education that use race as a plus factor (one of many such factors) but not as the sole factor. Therefore, the Court managed to minimize opposition to the goal of promoting more equal outcomes (by finding for Bakke) while extending possible gains for racial minorities through affirmative action.

Gratz v. Bollinger

The Court considered the university's undergraduate admissions policy, which conferred 20 points automatically to members of favored groups (100 total points guaranteed admission). In a 6-3 opinion, Chief Justice Rehnquist argued that such a policy violated the equal protection clause because it lacked the narrow tailoring required for permissible racial preferences and it failed to provide for individualized consideration of each candidate, given that they received those 20 points if they were in the policy's favored groups.

Grutter v. Bollinger

The Court considered the University of Michigan's law school admissions policy, which gave preference to minority applicants even if they had lower undergraduate GPAs and standardized test scores. This time, in a 5-4 decision that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor authored, the Court held that the school's narrowly tailored use of racial preferences furthered a compelling interest that flowed from a racially diverse student body, and therefore was constitutional. Since applicants were judged on their individual merits, race was only one among many factors that determined the admissions decision.

Fisher v. University of Texas

The Court further refined its position in 2013 in the case of Abigail Fisher, who challenged the admissions policies of the University of Texas at Austin, which used a formula including the applicant's race among several other factors. In a 7-1 decision, the justices decided and explained that universities could consider race in admissions, consistent with its prior decisions, but only if they met the Court's standard of strict scrutiny.

In Fisher's case, however, the lower court had not properly applied strict scrutiny, and so the Supreme Court ordered the lower court to review it again. The case returned to the Supreme Court and, in 2016, the justices agreed with the lower court, this time on a 4-3 vote, that the university's procedures were acceptable.

Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina

In a 6-3 ruling, the justices struck down the Harvard and North Carolina policies. Chief Justice Roberts authored the majority opinion. It declared that any use of race in admissions procedures must be connected to a prospective student's "experiences as an individual," such as overcoming personal racial discrimination that the student might have endured, rather than using race, in and of itself, to advantage groups of students over others in the admissions process. While not explicitly declaring that its previous rulings in Gratz and Grutter were overturned, the very narrow path that the majority described for incorporating racial considerations in admissions, as a practical matter, substantially veered from the principles and potentially acceptable practices that those cases had articulated. In other words, declared observers of the Court, affirmative action in college admissions as it had been practiced for years since Bakke was now effectively dead.