Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1948

Goesaert v. Cleary

335 U.S. 464 | 69 S. Ct. 198 | 93 L. Ed. 2d 163 | 1948 U.S. LEXIS 2715 | 93 L. Ed. 163

Full access

Unlock the video and quiz

The written brief is free to read below. Subscribe to watch the video explainer and take the quiz.

Create an account Log in

Takeaway

In short, the Court applied highly deferential rational-basis review and upheld a sex-based liquor-law classification that favored the wives and daughters of male bar owners; the dissent viewed that favoritism as arbitrary discrimination against women owners.

Background

Michigan required bartenders in cities with populations over 50,000 to obtain licenses. Under the 1945 statute, no woman could receive a bartender’s license unless she was the wife or daughter of the male owner of a licensed liquor establishment. Thus, the law excluded women generally from bartending while allowing the wives and daughters of male bar owners to work behind their fathers’ or husbands’ bars.

The appellants challenged the statute under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A three-judge federal district court denied an injunction against enforcement of the law, with one judge dissenting. The Supreme Court affirmed on direct appeal.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Michigan violated equal protection by barring women generally from bartending while permitting the wives and daughters of male liquor-establishment owners to be licensed as barmaids.

Holding

No. The classification had a conceivable rational basis and therefore did not deny equal protection.

Reasoning

The Court began from the premise that Michigan could constitutionally prohibit all women from bartending. Regulation of liquor traffic lay within a traditionally broad area of state legislative authority, and the Fourteenth Amendment did not forbid the State from drawing a sex-based line in that setting.

Having permissibly barred women generally, Michigan was not required to extend the prohibition to every woman without exception. Equal protection bars irrational discrimination, but it does not require the law to treat factually different situations as identical or to pursue a regulatory objective with complete symmetry.

Michigan could reasonably believe that the husband’s or father’s ownership and oversight of a bar reduced the moral and social hazards the legislature associated with women tending bar. The Court would not second-guess that legislative judgment so long as the line drawn was not wholly without reason.

The Court also declined to probe legislators’ actual motives. Because the ownership-and-family distinction was rationally entertainable, the Court would not invalidate the statute based on the suggestion that male bartenders sought to monopolize the occupation.

Issue #2

Whether Michigan’s decision to allow women to work as waitresses where liquor was served made its restriction on women bartenders unconstitutional.

Holding

No. The waitress exception did not render the bartending restriction invalid under equal protection.

Reasoning

A statute does not become unconstitutional merely because it does not go as far as it might in pursuing its perceived objective. Michigan could distinguish between bartending and waitressing and could conclude that service as a waitress in an establishment subject to male ownership and control created different concerns from work behind the bar.

The Court accepted the district court’s explanation that the legislature could have viewed waitressing as involving different conditions and risks than bartending. Equal protection did not require Michigan to regulate every form of women’s work in liquor establishments in the same manner.

Dissents

Justice Rutledge

Reasoning

Justice Rutledge, joined by Justices Douglas and Murphy, agreed that equal protection does not demand perfect symmetry or mathematical precision. But he concluded that the statute’s distinction was invidious rather than a permissible legislative classification.

The law discriminated not only among women workers, but also between male and female liquor-establishment owners. A male owner could employ his wife and daughter as barmaids even if he was regularly absent, while a female owner could neither tend bar herself nor employ her daughter, even if a man were always present to maintain order.

That result, the dissent argued, undermined the majority’s claimed justification of protecting women’s moral and physical welfare. Because the statute denied female owners and their daughters opportunities available to male owners’ wives and daughters without a plausible justification, Justice Rutledge would have held it unconstitutional.