Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1967

Loving v. Virginia

388 U.S. 1 | 87 S. Ct. 1817 | 18 L. Ed. 2d 1010 | 1967 U.S. LEXIS 1082

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Takeaway

In short, this case invalidated bans on interracial marriage: the Constitution protects both racial equality and each individual's fundamental freedom to choose whom to marry.

Background

Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter Loving, a Black woman, married legally in the District of Columbia in 1958 and then returned to their home in Caroline County, Virginia. A Virginia grand jury indicted them for violating the State's antimiscegenation laws, which criminalized marriage between a white person and a “colored person,” including an out-of-state marriage undertaken to evade Virginia law.

The Lovings pleaded guilty and received one-year jail sentences. The trial court suspended the sentences for 25 years on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together during that period. The judge justified the result with explicitly racial and religious assertions that God had separated the races.

After moving to the District of Columbia, the Lovings sought to vacate their convictions on Fourteenth Amendment grounds. When the state trial court denied relief, the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia upheld the antimiscegenation statutes and the convictions, although it modified the sentence. The Lovings appealed to the United States Supreme Court.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Virginia's prohibition and criminal punishment of interracial marriage violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even though it imposed the same penalty on both spouses.

Holding

Yes. Virginia's racial classifications and its prohibition of interracial marriage violated the Equal Protection Clause.

Reasoning

Virginia argued that its law treated white and Black participants in an interracial marriage equally because each received the same criminal punishment. The Court rejected that “equal application” theory. A law does not escape equal-protection review merely because it punishes persons of different races equally when the law itself makes race the basis for criminality.

The Court distinguished ordinary economic or social classifications, which may receive deferential rational-basis review, from racial classifications. Because Virginia's statutes expressly classified people by race, they were subject to the most rigid scrutiny and could survive only if necessary to achieve a permissible state objective independent of the racial discrimination the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to eliminate.

Virginia relied on historical claims about the Fourteenth Amendment's framers and on Pace v. Alabama, an 1883 decision that had accepted equal punishment as a sufficient answer to an equal-protection challenge. The Court explained that later decisions, especially McLaughlin v. Florida, had repudiated Pace's narrow conception of equal protection. The Amendment's central purpose is to eliminate official state sources of invidious racial discrimination.

The statutes prohibited conduct that would otherwise be lawful solely because the prospective spouses were assigned to different races. Virginia identified no legitimate overriding purpose separate from racial discrimination, and its scheme in fact protected only the supposed racial integrity of white persons. The Court concluded that the laws were measures designed to maintain White Supremacy and therefore could not stand.

Issue #2

Whether Virginia's prohibition of interracial marriage deprived the Lovings of liberty without due process of law under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Holding

Yes. The statutes unconstitutionally deprived the Lovings of the fundamental freedom to marry.

Reasoning

Marriage is a vital personal right and one of the basic civil rights essential to individual existence, survival, and the orderly pursuit of happiness. Although states generally possess authority to regulate marriage, that authority remains subject to the Fourteenth Amendment's protections of liberty and equality.

Virginia denied the Lovings the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications that were incompatible with equal protection. The Court held that the choice whether to marry a person of another race belongs to the individual, not the State, and that the State may not infringe that choice through invidious racial discrimination.

Because Virginia's laws both rested on unconstitutional racial discrimination and directly burdened the fundamental freedom to marry, they deprived the Lovings of liberty without due process. The Court therefore reversed their convictions.

Concurrences

Justice Stewart

Reasoning

Justice Stewart concurred in the judgment based on the principle he had stated in McLaughlin v. Florida: a state law cannot be constitutionally valid when it makes an act criminal because of the race of the actor. His concurrence offered a more categorical formulation than the majority's Equal Protection and Due Process analysis, emphasizing that race cannot determine whether conduct is a crime.