Chp. 5 Court Cases

Brown v Board of Education Black children were denied admission to public schools attended by white children under laws requiring or permitting segregation according to the races. The white and black schools approached equality in terms of buildings, curricula, qualifications, and teacher salaries Does the segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprive the minority children of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment? Yes

-Despite the equalization of the schools by "objective" factors, intangible issues foster and maintain inequality - Racial segregation in public education has a detrimental effect on minority children because it is interpreted as a sign of inferiority

Guinn v United States Oklahoma legislatures required voters to satisfy a literacy test but it was only enforced on black Americans Are the grandfather clauses in Maryland and Oklahoma constitutions violate the fifteenth Amendment? Yes

-Supreme Court declared the grandfather clauses in the Maryland and Oklahoma constitutions to be repugnant to the Fifteenth Amendment and therefore null and void." -the grandfather clause was ruled unconstitutional

Smith v Allwright A resolution of the Democratic Party of Texas, a group that the Texas Supreme Court had deemed a "voluntary association," allowed only whites to participate in Democratic primary elections. S.S. Allwright was a county election official; he denied Lonnie E. Smith, a black man, the right to vote in the 1940 Texas Democratic primary. Did denying blacks the right to vote in primary elections violate the Fifteenth Amendment? Yes

-The Court overruled its decision in Grovey v. Townsend (1935) and found the restrictions against blacks unconstitutional -Even though the Democratic Party was a voluntary organization, the fact that Texas statutes governed the selection of county-level party leaders, the party conducted primary elections under state statutory authority, and state courts were given exclusive original jurisdiction over contested elections, guaranteed for blacks the right to vote in primaries

Jones v Mayer Jones, a black man, charged that a real estate company in Missouri's St. Louis County refused to sell him a home in a particular neighborhood on account of his race. Did the defendant violate 42 U.S.C. Section 1982 which guarantees equal rights to all citizens making real estate transactions?

-The Court sided with Jones and held that Section 1982 of the congressional act was intended to prohibit all discrimination against blacks in the sale and rental of property, including governmental and private discrimination -Furthermore, the Thirteenth Amendment's enforcement section empowered Congress to eliminate racial barriers to the acquisition of property since those barriers constituted "badges and incidents of slavery"

Korematsu v United States During World War II, Presidential Executive Order 9066 and congressional statutes gave the military authority to exclude citizens of Japanese ancestry from areas deemed critical to national defense and potentially vulnerable to espionage. Korematsu remained in San Leandro, California and violated Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 of the U.S. Army Did the President and Congress go beyond their war powers by implementing exclusion and restricting the rights of Americans of Japanese descent? No

-The Court sided with the government and held that the need to protect against espionage outweighed Korematsu's rights -Justice Black argued that compulsory exclusion, though constitutionally suspect, is justified during circumstances of "emergency and peril."

Alexander v Holmes County Board of Education The desegregation orders of Brown I and Brown II had not been followed for more than a decade, and schools in the South were desegregating slowly if at all Does the court have to implement the original desegregation of health, education, and welfare plan immediately instead of with all deliberate speed Yes

-The Court wrote, "The obligation of every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools." -The previously set pace of "all deliberate speed" was no longer permissible.

Bowers v Hardwick Michael Hardwick was observed by a Georgia police officer while engaging in the act of consensual homosexual sodomy with another adult in the bedroom of his home Does the Constitution confer a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in consensual sodomy, thereby invalidating the laws of many states which make such conduct illegal? No

-The divided Court found that there was no constitutional protection for acts of sodomy, and that states could outlaw those practices -Court has acted to protect rights not easily identifiable in the Constitution only when those rights are "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" -the right to commit sodomy did not meet either of these standards

Dothard v Rawlinson Dianne wanted to work as a correctional counselor at Alabama prison but she could not meet the 120 lb. minimum weight requirement. She states that the 5'2, 120lbs requirement discriminates against the women and has a disparate impact on her gender. She also challenges Regulation 204 which states that women will not be assigned to contact positions in maximum security prisons. 1-Do the requirements have a disparate impact on the female? 2-Does 204 violates title VII? 1-yes 2-no

-Title VII requires: "the removal of artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers to employment when the barriers operate invidiously to discriminate on the basis of racial or other impermissible classification --statistics show that the requirements really hurt the women way more than the men and it also discourages women from applying

US v Virginia Virginia Military Institute (VMI) was the only single-sexed school in Virginia. VMI used a highly adversarial method to train (male) leaders of the future. There was no equal educational opportunity to that of VMI in the State for women Did VMI represent a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause? Yes

-Virginia has shown no "exceedingly persuasive justification" for excluding all women -"Benign" justifications offered in defense of absolute exclusions will not be accepted automatically

Strauder v West Virginia Strauder was a black man who was convicted by murder by an all-white jury Is Virginias exclusionary policy violating the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment Yes

-categorical exclusion of blacks from juries for no other reason than their race did indeed violate the Equal Protection Clause, since the very purpose of the Clause was "to assure to the colored race the enjoyment of all the civil rights that under the law are enjoyed by white persons, and to give to that race the protection of the general government, in that enjoyment, whenever it should be denied by the States."

Harris v Forklift Systems -Teresa Harris was sexually harassed by her employer -She filed suit in federal district court, claiming that the harassment created an "abusive work environment" in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Must sexual harassment "seriously affect [an employee's] psychological well being" in order to create an "abusive work environment" that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? No

-the Court found that the district court had been wrong to focus on whether or not the harassment had caused "concrete psychological harm." -Justice O'Connor wrote that the court should have focused on whether the conduct was hostile or abusive

Hunt v Cromartie Following the Supreme Court's decision in Shaw v. Hunt (517 US 899), declaring North Carolina's 12th district to have been unconstitutionally drawn, the state made a new districting plan in 1997 Is the presence of "uncontroverted material facts," concerning the practice of racial gerrymandering, sufficient to sustain a summary judgment even prior to conducting an evidentiary hearing or discovery? No

-the Court held that despite strong evidence of racial gerrymandering, the North Carolina General Assembly's motivations were in dispute - since accusations of racial gerrymandering rise to the level of being constitutionally significant, they must be evaluated with strict scrutiny

Harper v Virginia State Board of Elections Annie E. Harper, a resident of Virginia, filed suit alleging that the state's poll tax was unconstitutional. After a three-judge district court dismissed the complaint, the case went to the Supreme Court. This case was decided together with Butts v. Harrison. Did the Virginia poll tax violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? Yes

-the Court held that making voter affluence an electoral standard violated the Equal Protection Clause - Court found that wealth or fee-paying had no relation to voting qualifications -noted that the Equal Protection Clause was not "shackled to the political theory of a particular era" and that notions of what constituted equal treatment under the Clause were subject to change

Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, system in which approximately 14,000 black students attended schools that were either totally black or more than 99 percent black. Lower courts had experimented with a number of possible solutions when the case reached the Supreme Court Were federal courts constitutionally authorized to oversee and produce remedies for state-imposed segregation?

-the Court held that once violations of previous mandates directed at desegregating schools had occurred, the scope of district courts' equitable powers to remedy past wrongs were broad and flexible 1) remedial plans were to be judged by their effectiveness, and the use of mathematical ratios or quotas were legitimate "starting points" for solutions 2) predominantly or exclusively black schools required close scrutiny by courts; 3) non-contiguous attendance zones, as interim corrective measures, were within the courts' remedial powers 4) no rigid guidelines could be established concerning busing of students to particular schools

Reed v Reed The Idaho Probate Code specified that "males must be preferred to females" in appointing administrators of estates. After the death of their adopted son, both Sally and Cecil Reed sought to be named the administrator of their son's estate (the Reeds were separated). According to the Probate Code, Cecil was appointed administrator and Sally challenged the law in court Did the Idaho Probate Code violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? Yes

-the Court held that the law's dissimilar treatment of men and women was unconstitutional -"to give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other, merely to accomplish the elimination of hearings on the merits, is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment

Craig v Boren An Oklahoma law prohibited the sale of "non-intoxicating" 3.2 percent beer to males under the age of 21 and to females under the age of 18. Curtis Craig, a male then between the ages of 18 and 21, and a licensed vendor challenged the law as discriminatory Did an Oklahoma statute violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause by establishing different drinking ages for men and women? Yes

-the Court held that the statute made unconstitutional gender classifications -Court held that the statistics relied on by the state of Oklahoma were insufficient to show a substantial relationship between the law and the maintenance of traffic safety

Grutter v Bollinger In 1997, Barbara Grutter, a white resident of Michigan, applied for admission to the University of Michigan Law School. Grutter applied with a 3.8 undergraduate GPA and an LSAT score of 161. She was denied admission. Does the University of Michigan Law School's use of racial preferences in student admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? No

-the Equal Protection Clause does not prohibit the Law School's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body

McLaurin v OK State Regents -George McLaurin, who already had a master's degree in education, was first denied admission to the University of Oklahoma to pursue a Doctorate in Education degree -successfully sued -Oklahoma law prohibited schools from instructing blacks and whites together Is the state law requiring African Americans to be provided graduate or professional education on a segregated basis a violation of the 14th amendment Yes

-the United States Supreme Court ruled that a public institution of higher learning could not provide different treatment to a student solely because of his/her race as doing so deprived the student of his/her Fourteenth Amendment rights of Equal Protection

Plessy v Ferguson The state of Louisiana enacted a law that required separate railway cars for blacks and whites. In 1892, Homer Adolph Plessy--who was seven-eighths Caucasian--took a seat in a "whites only" car of a Louisiana train. He refused to move to the car reserved for blacks and was arrested Is Louisiana's law mandating racial segregation on its trains an unconstitutional infringement on both the privileges and immunities and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment? No

-the state law is within constitutional boundaries -The majority, in an opinion authored by Justice Henry Billings Brown, upheld state-imposed racial segregation

Meacham v Knolls Automatic Power Laboratory When the New York-based federal research laboratory Knolls Atomic Power Lab instituted a downsizing program, it asked supervisors to rank employees based on three factors: performance, flexibility, and the criticality of their skills, and then to add points for years of service in order to determine who would be dismissed Under the Supreme Court's decision in Smith v. City of Jackson, must the employer or the employee prove the reasonableness of adverse employment decisions occurring as part of a claim for age discrimination under the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act? Yes

-the text and structure of the ADEA indicated that it is the employer, not the employee, who must bear both the burden of production and the burden of persuasion for the use of "reasonable factors other than age" in the decision to terminate employment

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke a thirty-five-year-old white man, had twice applied for admission to the University of California Medical School at Davis. He was rejected both times. The school reserved sixteen places in each entering class of one hundred for "qualified" minorities, as part of the university's affirmative action program, in an effort to redress longstanding, unfair minority exclusions from the medical profession Did the University of California violate the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by practicing an affirmative action policy that resulted in the repeated rejection of Bakke's application for admission to its medical school? No and Yes

Four of the justices contended that any racial quota system supported by government violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., agreed, casting the deciding vote ordering the medical school to admit Bakke. However, in his opinion, Powell argued that the rigid use of racial quotas as employed at the school violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment

Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña a contractor specializing in highway guardrail work, submitted the lowest bid as a subcontractor for part of a project funded by the United States Department of Transportation. Under the terms of the federal contract, the prime contractor would receive additional compensation if it hired small businesses controlled by "socially and economically disadvantaged individuals." Is the presumption of disadvantage based on race alone, and consequent allocation of favored treatment, a discriminatory practice that violates the equal protection principle embodied in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment? Yes

Overruling Metro Broadcasting (497 US 547), the Court held that all racial classifications, whether imposed by federal, state, or local authorities, must pass strict scrutiny review. In other words, they "must serve a compelling government interest, and must be narrowly tailored to further that interest." The Court added that compensation programs which are truly based on disadvantage, rather than race, would be evaluated under lower equal protection standards

Scott v Sanford A slave sought his freedom under the Missouri Compromise after his master moved him from a slave state to a free state Can a slave be considered a citizen and as such become entitled to all the rights, privileges and immunities granted to citizens under the United States Constitution? No

Slaves were not intended to be included under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution. At the time the Constitution was written, slaves were considered an inferior and subordinate class. No state can introduce a new member into the political community created by the Constitution

Thornberg v Gingles The North Carolina General Assembly passed a redistricting plan for the state's Senate and House of Representatives. Black citizens of North Carolina alleged that the plan created seven new districts where blacks would not be able to elect representatives of their choosing. Did the District Court err by holding that a North Carolina redistricting plan unlawfully discriminated against blacks in six voting districts? No

The Court found that five of the six contested districts discriminated against blacks by diluting the power of their collective vote

Obergefell v Hodges Groups of same-sex couples sued their relevant state agencies in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee to challenge the constitutionality of those states' bans on same-sex marriage or refusal to recognize legal same-sex marriages that occurred in jurisdictions that provided for such marriages (1) Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex? (2) Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex that was legally licensed and performed in another state? 1-Yes 2-Yes

The Court held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees the right to marry as one of the fundamental liberties it protects, and that analysis applies to same-sex couples in the same manner as it does to opposite-sex couples

Plyler v Doe A revision to the Texas education laws in 1975 allowed the state to withhold from local school districts state funds for educating children of illegal aliens. This case was decided together with Texas v. Certain Named and Unnamed Alien Child Did the law violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? Yes

The Court reasoned that illegal aliens and their children, though not citizens of the United States or Texas, are people "in any ordinary sense of the term" and, therefore, are afforded Fourteenth Amendment protections

Hernandez v Texas Pete Hernandez, an agricultural worker, was indicted for the murder of Joe Espinoza by an all-Anglo (white) grand jury in Jackson County, Texas. Claiming that Mexican-Americans were barred from the jury commission that selected juries, and from petit juries, Hernandez' attorneys tried to quash the indictment Is it a denial of the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause to try a defendant of a particular race or ethnicity before a jury where all persons of his race or ancestry have, because of that race or ethnicity, been excluded by the state? Yes

the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment protects those beyond the two classes of white or Negro, and extends to other racial groups in communities depending upon whether it can be factually established that such a group exists within a community

Lawrence v Texas Responding to a reported weapons disturbance in a private residence, Houston police entered John Lawrence's apartment and saw him and another adult man, Tyron Garner, engaging in a private, consensual sexual act. Lawrence and Garner were arrested and convicted of deviate sexual intercourse in violation of a Texas statute forbidding two persons of the same sex to engage in certain intimate sexual conduct 1-Do the criminal convictions of John Lawrence and Tyron Garner under the Texas "Homosexual Conduct" law, which criminalizes sexual intimacy by same-sex couples, but not identical behavior by different-sex couples, violate the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of laws? 2-Do their criminal convictions for adult consensual sexual intimacy in the home violate their vital interests in liberty and privacy protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? 3-Should Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), be overruled? 1-No 2-Yes 3-Yes

the Court held that the Texas statute making it a crime for two persons of the same sex to engage in certain intimate sexual conduct violates the Due Process Clause. After explaining what it deemed the doubtful and overstated premises of Bowers, the Court reasoned that the case turned on whether Lawrence and Garner were free as adults to engage in the private conduct in the exercise of their liberty under the Due Process Clause