Appendix E: Landmark Supreme Court Cases
This appendix is a structured reference for the fifty Supreme Court decisions that shape the doctrines you encounter throughout this book. It is not a hit parade of "most important" cases — judgments about importance vary, and a list ranked by importance would generate more controversy than illumination. Instead, the cases are organized by doctrinal area, so that the reader can see how the Court has built (and sometimes torn down) the legal architecture in each domain.
Each entry follows the same format: holding, vote count and authors, factual background, doctrinal reasoning, significance, contestation status, and a cross-reference to the chapter where the case is discussed in depth. The "Contested or settled?" line is doing real work. Some of these decisions are universally accepted. Marbury v. Madison is settled. So is Brown. So is Loving. Other decisions remain genuinely contested — Citizens United, Heller, Dobbs, Trump v. United States — and the contestation is itself a fact about American constitutional law. Still other decisions are now considered errors. Dred Scott and Plessy are universally rejected. Korematsu was effectively repudiated by Chief Justice Roberts in dicta in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), and no current justice would defend it.
A note on citations. Every entry includes the official U.S. Reports citation (or the docket number, for very recent cases not yet paginated). The vote count is given as the headline split, with the principal opinion authors named. Concurrences and dissents that have outlived the majority — Justice Jackson's Youngstown concurrence, Justice Harlan's Plessy dissent, Justice Brandeis's Olmstead dissent — are noted where they matter to the doctrine.
A final orientation. The Supreme Court is a political institution. Its decisions reflect the legal text and the doctrinal tradition, but they also reflect the personnel of the Court at a given moment, the political coalitions that produced those personnel, and the arguments that lawyers and scholars made available to them. This is not a reductive claim. It is the same kind of claim political scientists make about Congress and the presidency. You will encounter it framed in various ways throughout the book — as the difference between law and politics in Chapter 12, as the strategic-actor model of the Court in Chapter 13, as the question of judicial supremacy in Chapter 14. The cases below are the data.
Section 1 — Foundations of Constitutional Law
The first section covers the cases that established the basic architecture of American constitutional law: who decides what the Constitution means, how federal and state power relate, and what tools the federal government has to act on the country it governs. Four of these five cases were authored by Chief Justice John Marshall, who served from 1801 to 1835 and who, more than any other single figure, shaped the institution we now have. The themes are constant: federal power is real, the Court is the final arbiter of what the federal Constitution means, and the structural compromises of the Founding (between states and the nation, between Congress and the executive, between the political branches and the judiciary) are interpreted by the federal judiciary in cases brought by ordinary litigants. Without this foundation, none of the doctrines in the later sections — civil rights, free speech, voting rights, executive power — would have the institutional vehicle they have. Read these cases first.
Marbury v. Madison (1803), 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137
Holding: The Supreme Court has the power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional and refuse to enforce them.
Vote: 4–0 (with Justices Cushing and Moore not participating). Opinion by Chief Justice John Marshall.
Background. William Marbury was appointed justice of the peace by outgoing President Adams but never received his commission. He sued Secretary of State James Madison directly in the Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus under section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789.
Reasoning. Marshall held that Marbury had a right to the commission and that mandamus was the proper remedy, but that section 13, by purporting to give the Supreme Court original jurisdiction over a writ of mandamus, expanded the Court's original jurisdiction beyond what Article III allowed. Where a statute conflicts with the Constitution, "the very essence of judicial duty" requires the Court to apply the Constitution as the superior law. The Court therefore had no jurisdiction over Marbury's case.
Significance. Marbury is the foundational case for judicial review in American law. The Court denied itself a small remedy in order to claim a far larger institutional power: the authority to invalidate acts of Congress. Marshall's logic — that the written Constitution is paramount and that the judges must say what the law is — has structured every subsequent constitutional dispute. Critics across two centuries have argued the case is a power grab by the unelected branch. Supporters argue it is a logical implication of a written Constitution.
Contested or settled? Settled in practice; the academic critique persists but has no current institutional traction.
See also: Chapter 12 (Federal Judiciary), Chapter 14 (Constitutional Interpretation).
McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316
Holding: Congress has implied powers under the Necessary and Proper Clause to charter a national bank, and a state may not tax federal instrumentalities.
Vote: 7–0. Opinion by Chief Justice John Marshall.
Background. Maryland imposed a tax on the Second Bank of the United States. James McCulloch, the Baltimore branch cashier, refused to pay. Maryland argued that Congress had no constitutional power to charter a bank in the first place and, even if it did, that states retained the power to tax federal entities operating within their borders.
Reasoning. Marshall held that although the power to charter a bank is not enumerated in Article I, the Necessary and Proper Clause authorizes Congress to use any means "plainly adapted" to a legitimate constitutional end. "Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional." On the tax question, the Court held that "the power to tax involves the power to destroy" and that allowing states to tax federal entities would let states unmake federal laws.
Significance. McCulloch is the source of the doctrine of implied powers, which underwrites the modern federal administrative state, and the doctrine of intergovernmental immunity. Combined with Marbury, it established the basic Marshallian view: a strong national government, a Supreme Court empowered to interpret the Constitution, and significant constraints on the states.
Contested or settled? Settled. The "necessary and proper" framework remains the ordinary mode of analysis for the scope of enumerated powers.
See also: Chapter 4 (Federalism), Chapter 11 (The Bureaucracy).
Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.) 1
Holding: The Commerce Clause grants Congress broad power to regulate interstate commerce, including navigation, and overrides conflicting state monopolies.
Vote: 6–0. Opinion by Chief Justice John Marshall.
Background. New York granted Aaron Ogden a monopoly on steamboat navigation in state waters. Thomas Gibbons operated competing steamboats under a federal coasting license. Ogden sued to enjoin Gibbons; Gibbons argued the federal license preempted the state monopoly.
Reasoning. Marshall held that "commerce" is not just buying and selling but "intercourse," including navigation. The Commerce Clause therefore reaches navigation between states. Where Congress has acted within its Commerce Clause power, conflicting state law is preempted. New York's monopoly grant could not stand against the federal coasting license.
Significance. Gibbons gave the Commerce Clause its expansive interpretive trajectory. The case opened the path for an active national role in regulating the integrated national economy that emerged over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — railroads, manufacturing labor standards, civil-rights public-accommodations laws, environmental regulation, the modern administrative state. Gibbons is the doctrinal ancestor of Wickard, Heart of Atlanta, and the New Deal cases.
Contested or settled? The broad Commerce Clause framework remains settled, but its outer limits have been recontested since Lopez in 1995.
See also: Chapter 4 (Federalism), Chapter 11 (Bureaucracy).
Martin v. Hunter's Lessee (1816), 14 U.S. (1 Wheat.) 304
Holding: The Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction over state court decisions on questions of federal law.
Vote: 6–0 (Marshall recused). Opinion by Justice Joseph Story.
Background. A Virginia land dispute between Lord Fairfax's heirs (loyalists) and Virginia's wartime confiscation grantees turned on the meaning of federal treaties. The Virginia Court of Appeals refused to obey the Supreme Court's first remand, holding that section 25 of the Judiciary Act — which gave the Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction over state-court decisions on federal questions — was unconstitutional.
Reasoning. Story held that Article III's "arising under" jurisdiction extends to all cases involving federal law, however they arise procedurally. If federal courts could not review state-court decisions on federal questions, federal law would mean different things in different states. The Supremacy Clause and the structure of federal power required a single uniform interpreter of federal law. Section 25 was therefore constitutional.
Significance. Martin is the case that makes the Supreme Court the true apex court of the United States, not merely the apex of a parallel federal system. Without Martin, state supreme courts could give state-specific interpretations to the federal Constitution and federal statutes. With Martin, federal law speaks with one voice.
Contested or settled? Settled.
See also: Chapter 12 (Federal Judiciary), Chapter 14 (Constitutional Interpretation).
Cohens v. Virginia (1821), 19 U.S. (6 Wheat.) 264
Holding: The Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction over state criminal cases when they raise federal constitutional questions.
Vote: 7–0. Opinion by Chief Justice John Marshall.
Background. The Cohen brothers were prosecuted under Virginia law for selling congressionally authorized D.C. lottery tickets in Norfolk. They argued that the federal lottery statute preempted Virginia's prohibition. Virginia argued that as a sovereign state, it could not be hauled into federal court on appeal in a state criminal case.
Reasoning. Marshall extended Martin's logic to state criminal cases. The Eleventh Amendment bars certain suits against states by private parties, but does not strip the Supreme Court of appellate jurisdiction when a state criminal defendant raises a federal constitutional defense. Otherwise, states could insulate their laws from federal-constitutional review by always proceeding by criminal prosecution.
Significance. Cohens completed the Marshallian project of federal judicial supremacy on questions of federal law. State criminal defendants — including, much later, civil-rights defendants in the Jim Crow South — could appeal federal-law questions to the Supreme Court. This jurisdictional rule made the incorporation of the Bill of Rights in the twentieth century practically possible.
Contested or settled? Settled.
See also: Chapter 12 (Federal Judiciary).
Section 2 — Slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction
The cases in this section trace the constitutional drama of race in America from before the Civil War to the consolidation of Jim Crow. Three of them (Dred Scott, Plessy, Korematsu) are universally regarded today as wrong on the merits. Two of them (Slaughter-House, Civil Rights Cases) hollowed out the Reconstruction Amendments at the moment they were most needed and produced doctrinal limits that persist in modified form today. Reading these cases together is uncomfortable — and is meant to be. The Supreme Court is not always on the right side of history, and pretending otherwise distorts the institutional record. The political-science point is that the Court's decisions reflect the politics that produce its personnel; the historical point is that legal doctrine and racial subordination have been deeply intertwined; the doctrinal point is that some of the doctrines worked out in this period (state action, narrow Privileges or Immunities, suspect classifications scrutinized only weakly) were laid as foundations for later cases that the modern reader knows by heart.
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393
Holding: People of African descent, whether enslaved or free, were not and could never be citizens of the United States, and Congress lacked power to prohibit slavery in the territories.
Vote: 7–2. Opinion by Chief Justice Roger Taney; dissents by Justices McLean and Curtis.
Background. Dred Scott was an enslaved man taken by his enslaver from Missouri (a slave state) into Illinois (free) and the Wisconsin Territory (free under the Missouri Compromise). After returning to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom on the theory that residence in free territory had emancipated him.
Reasoning. Taney held that the framers of the Constitution viewed Black people as "beings of an inferior order" and that no Black person, free or enslaved, could be a citizen of the United States or invoke federal diversity jurisdiction. He further held that the Missouri Compromise's ban on slavery in northern territories violated the Fifth Amendment by depriving slaveholders of property without due process — making this the first time the Court used substantive due process to strike down an act of Congress.
Significance. Dred Scott helped precipitate the Civil War by closing the political path of compromise on slavery's expansion. It was effectively overturned by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which abolished slavery and constitutionalized birthright citizenship. Today Dred Scott is regarded as the worst decision in the Court's history and is invoked across the political spectrum as the canonical example of a wrongly decided case.
Contested or settled? Universally rejected. No serious legal authority defends the holding.
See also: Chapter 6 (Civil Rights), Chapter 14 (Constitutional Interpretation).
The Slaughter-House Cases (1873), 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36
Holding: The Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects only a narrow category of national-citizenship rights and does not incorporate most rights against the states.
Vote: 5–4. Opinion by Justice Samuel Miller; dissents by Justices Field, Bradley, Swayne, and Chief Justice Chase.
Background. Louisiana granted a single corporation a monopoly on butchering in the New Orleans area. Independent butchers sued, arguing the monopoly violated the new Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause by depriving them of the right to pursue their trade.
Reasoning. Miller distinguished between privileges of state citizenship and privileges of national citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment, he said, protected only the latter — and the privileges of national citizenship were a short list (access to federal officials, interstate travel, federal habeas, etc.) that did not include occupational liberty. Reading the clause more broadly would, the Court warned, "fetter and degrade" state governments and "transfer the security and protection of all the civil rights" to the federal courts.
Significance. Slaughter-House read the Privileges or Immunities Clause out of the Constitution at the very beginning of its life. The clause that the Reconstruction-era framers had likely intended as the central engine of incorporating fundamental rights against the states was rendered nearly inert. Most of the work of incorporation has since been done through the Due Process Clause instead — a doctrinally more contested route. Modern scholars across the spectrum (originalist and progressive) have argued Slaughter-House was wrong; modern doctrine has largely worked around it.
Contested or settled? Holding remains good law but is widely criticized; periodic calls to revive Privileges or Immunities have not yet produced a majority.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties), Chapter 6 (Civil Rights).
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 163 U.S. 537
Holding: State-imposed racial segregation does not violate the Equal Protection Clause as long as facilities are "separate but equal."
Vote: 7–1 (Justice Brewer not participating). Opinion by Justice Henry Billings Brown; dissent by Justice John Marshall Harlan.
Background. Louisiana law required separate railway cars for "white" and "colored" passengers. Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth Black, deliberately violated the law in a planned test case to challenge the statute.
Reasoning. Brown held that distinctions based on race were not inherently invidious; "separate but equal" facilities did not stamp the colored race with a badge of inferiority unless the colored race chose to read it that way. The Fourteenth Amendment, the Court said, was about legal equality, not social equality. Justice Harlan's solitary dissent declared that "our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens" and predicted that the decision would prove as pernicious as Dred Scott.
Significance. Plessy gave constitutional sanction to Jim Crow. Segregation laws spread through public accommodations, schools, hospitals, parks, and cemeteries. The "equal" half of "separate but equal" was a fiction from the start. The doctrine governed for fifty-eight years until Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overturned it in the school context. Harlan's dissent is now the canonical statement and is invoked across the ideological spectrum.
Contested or settled? Universally rejected. Both colorblind originalists and antisubordination progressives reject the holding, though they disagree about Harlan's full meaning.
See also: Chapter 6 (Civil Rights), Chapter 14 (Constitutional Interpretation).
Civil Rights Cases (1883), 109 U.S. 3
Holding: The Fourteenth Amendment authorizes Congress to regulate state action only, not the conduct of private individuals or businesses.
Vote: 8–1. Opinion by Justice Joseph Bradley; dissent by Justice John Marshall Harlan.
Background. A consolidated set of cases challenged the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had banned racial discrimination in inns, public conveyances, and theaters. Defendants argued that Congress lacked the constitutional power to reach private discrimination.
Reasoning. Bradley held that the Fourteenth Amendment is "prohibitory upon the states" and that section 5's enforcement power therefore reached only state action, not the discriminatory conduct of private parties. The Thirteenth Amendment reached private slaveholding, but mere "social" discrimination — refusing service in a hotel or theater — was not a "badge or incident of slavery" within Congress's enforcement power. Harlan again dissented in solitary form, arguing that the inn, the railway, and the theater were sufficiently public in character that congressional regulation was within the post-war amendments' power.
Significance. The decision constitutionalized the state-action doctrine, which has structured civil-rights litigation ever since. After 1883, federal civil-rights legislation reaching private discrimination had to find authority in the Commerce Clause — which is the route Congress took in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The state-action requirement remains a major doctrinal limit and has been invoked in modern cases involving social-media platforms, private universities, and shopping malls.
Contested or settled? The state-action framework is settled but its applications continue to be contested.
See also: Chapter 6 (Civil Rights), Chapter 4 (Federalism).
Korematsu v. United States (1944), 323 U.S. 214
Holding: A wartime exclusion order targeting Japanese Americans on the West Coast did not violate equal protection because it was justified by military necessity.
Vote: 6–3. Opinion by Justice Hugo Black; dissents by Justices Owen Roberts, Frank Murphy, and Robert Jackson.
Background. After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military to designate exclusion zones. The Army ordered all persons of Japanese ancestry — citizens and non-citizens alike — to leave the West Coast and report to internment camps. Fred Korematsu, an American citizen, refused and was prosecuted.
Reasoning. Black's majority opinion announced that "all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect" and "courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny" — the formulation that became "strict scrutiny." Yet the Court applied that scrutiny so deferentially that the exclusion was upheld on a thin record of military "necessity." Justice Murphy's dissent called the order a "legalization of racism." Justice Jackson's dissent warned that the precedent "lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."
Significance. Korematsu established the strict-scrutiny formulation but applied it dishonestly. Decades later, the federal Coram Nobis litigation showed that the government had concealed evidence undermining the military-necessity claim. Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, formally apologizing and providing reparations. In Trump v. Hawaii (2018), Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Korematsu "was gravely wrong the day it was decided" and "has no place in law under the Constitution."
Contested or settled? Effectively repudiated in dicta. No current justice would defend the holding; the doctrinal innovation (strict scrutiny for racial classifications) survives.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties), Chapter 6 (Civil Rights), Chapter 9 (The Presidency).
Section 3 — Federalism
These five cases trace the modern doctrinal arc of federalism: from the New Deal expansion of federal power through the Commerce Clause, to the post-1995 effort to identify enforceable limits on that power, to the recent revival of structural doctrines like anticommandeering. The arc is not a clean ideological story. Wickard expanded federal power; Garcia declined to enforce structural limits; Lopez brought structural limits back; NFIB split the difference on the Affordable Care Act in a way that surprised both sides; Murphy used anticommandeering doctrine to strike down a federal sports-betting law that many conservatives had supported. The political-science lesson is that federalism doctrine is not the property of one ideological camp — it has been alternately a shield for state power against the New Deal and a sword used by states to resist federal civil-rights enforcement, environmental rules, and immigration policy. The cases below define the current terrain.
Wickard v. Filburn (1942), 317 U.S. 111
Holding: Congress may regulate purely local activity under the Commerce Clause when the activity, taken in the aggregate, has a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
Vote: 9–0. Opinion by Justice Robert Jackson.
Background. Roscoe Filburn was a small Ohio farmer who grew 23 acres of wheat — exceeding his 11.1-acre quota under the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The excess was for his own family's consumption. The federal government fined him; he argued that wheat consumed on his own farm was not "commerce" at all, much less interstate commerce.
Reasoning. Jackson held that even if Filburn's individual contribution to demand was trivial, the aggregate effect of all home-consumed wheat on the national wheat market was substantial. The principle: where Congress is regulating an interstate market, it may reach intrastate activity that, in the aggregate, would substantially affect that market. The fact that Filburn's wheat never crossed state lines was irrelevant; the federal regulatory scheme would be undermined if every farmer could opt out by consuming his own production.
Significance. Wickard is the high-water mark of Commerce Clause expansion. It made nearly every economic activity at least theoretically reachable by Congress, since aggregation reasoning could extend Commerce Clause authority almost anywhere. Wickard was the doctrinal foundation for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Endangered Species Act, and most of the modern federal regulatory state. Lopez (1995) and Morrison (2000) later cabined the doctrine, but Wickard itself remains good law for economic activity.
Contested or settled? Holding is settled for economic activity; aggregation reasoning for non-economic activity was foreclosed in Lopez and Morrison.
See also: Chapter 4 (Federalism).
Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985), 469 U.S. 528
Holding: The Tenth Amendment does not exempt state and local governments from federal regulation of their employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Vote: 5–4. Opinion by Justice Harry Blackmun; dissents by Justices Powell, O'Connor, Rehnquist, and Chief Justice Burger.
Background. Federal law extended minimum-wage and overtime protections to mass-transit employees. The San Antonio transit authority claimed that, as a state instrumentality engaged in a "traditional governmental function," it was constitutionally exempt under National League of Cities v. Usery (1976).
Reasoning. Blackmun overruled National League of Cities. The line between "traditional" and "non-traditional" governmental functions had proven unworkable. More fundamentally, the Court held that the principal protections for state sovereignty are "structural" — built into the political process by which Congress is constituted (state representation in the Senate, the Electoral College). Federal courts should not police federalism in addition to those structural safeguards. The dissenters argued that Congress's track record showed structural safeguards were inadequate without judicial backstop.
Significance. Garcia represents the most deferential modern position on Tenth Amendment limits to federal power: that the political process, not the judiciary, is the principal check on federal overreach into state operations. The Rehnquist Court's New York v. United States (1992), Printz v. United States (1997), and Lopez (1995) revivals partly walked back Garcia's broader logic without overruling it.
Contested or settled? Holding survives but is in tension with later anticommandeering decisions; periodically debated.
See also: Chapter 4 (Federalism).
United States v. Lopez (1995), 514 U.S. 549
Holding: Congress's Commerce Clause power does not extend to regulating non-economic activity that does not substantially affect interstate commerce; the Gun-Free School Zones Act exceeded that power.
Vote: 5–4. Opinion by Chief Justice William Rehnquist; dissents by Justices Stevens, Souter, Breyer, and Ginsburg.
Background. The Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 made it a federal crime to possess a firearm in a school zone. Alfonso Lopez, a high-school senior, was arrested for carrying a gun on campus. He challenged the statute as exceeding Congress's Commerce Clause authority.
Reasoning. Rehnquist identified three categories of Commerce Clause regulation: channels of interstate commerce, instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and activities that substantially affect interstate commerce. Carrying a gun in a school zone was none of these. Possession of a gun is not itself economic activity, and the government's chain of inferences from school violence to economic productivity to interstate commerce was so attenuated that, if accepted, it would convert the Commerce Clause into a general police power.
Significance. Lopez was the first time since 1937 that the Court invalidated a federal statute as exceeding Commerce Clause authority. It signaled the Rehnquist Court's federalism revival. Morrison (2000), striking down part of the Violence Against Women Act, followed the same logic. Together they restored at least nominal limits on Commerce Clause authority, though Wickard's aggregation principle remains intact for economic activity.
Contested or settled? Settled in form; its bite remains contested.
See also: Chapter 4 (Federalism).
NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), 567 U.S. 519
Holding: The Affordable Care Act's individual mandate exceeded Commerce Clause authority but was a constitutional exercise of the taxing power; the Medicaid expansion was unconstitutionally coercive on states.
Vote: Multiple alignments. Chief Justice Roberts authored the controlling opinion; Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan joined the taxing-power holding; Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito would have struck the entire act.
Background. The Affordable Care Act required most individuals to maintain health insurance or pay a tax penalty, and conditioned states' continued receipt of Medicaid funds on their accepting the ACA's expansion of Medicaid eligibility. Twenty-six states and the National Federation of Independent Business challenged both provisions.
Reasoning. On the mandate, Roberts held that requiring individuals to engage in commerce (purchase insurance) exceeded the Commerce Clause, but that the penalty operated functionally as a tax and was sustainable under the taxing power. On Medicaid expansion, a 7–2 majority held that conditioning all existing Medicaid funds on accepting the expansion was so coercive — "a gun to the head" of state budgets — that it violated the Spending Clause. States could choose whether to expand Medicaid without losing their preexisting Medicaid funding.
Significance. NFIB preserved the ACA but established two doctrinal limits with continuing force: that the Commerce Clause does not authorize Congress to compel commercial activity, and that there is a constitutional ceiling on coercive Spending Clause conditions. The Medicaid holding produced a coverage gap in twelve states (as of 2026, ten remain non-expansion states), affecting roughly 1.5 million low-income adults who would qualify in expansion states but do not in their own.
Contested or settled? The taxing-power rationale is settled doctrine; the political contestation over the ACA itself continues.
See also: Chapter 4 (Federalism), Chapter 8 (Congress), Chapter 28 (Healthcare Policy).
Murphy v. NCAA (2018), 584 U.S. 453
Holding: The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act's prohibition on state authorization of sports gambling violated the Tenth Amendment by commandeering state legislatures.
Vote: 7–2. Opinion by Justice Samuel Alito; partial dissents by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor.
Background. The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 prohibited states (with grandfathered exceptions for Nevada and a few others) from authorizing sports betting. New Jersey amended its state laws to repeal prohibitions on sports betting, and the leagues sued.
Reasoning. Alito held that PASPA did not regulate gambling directly; rather, it commanded state legislatures not to repeal their own prohibitions. The anticommandeering doctrine of New York v. United States (1992) and Printz v. United States (1997) bars Congress from compelling state legislatures or executives to enact or enforce federal regulatory programs. PASPA's command — "you may not authorize what would otherwise be lawful" — was, in substance, a directive about how state law must be structured. Congress could regulate sports betting directly under the Commerce Clause; it could not require states to do the regulating.
Significance. Murphy significantly expanded the anticommandeering doctrine and led directly to the explosion of legalized sports betting across the country. Beyond gambling, it has been invoked by sanctuary jurisdictions resisting federal immigration enforcement requests and by state cannabis regulators. The decision is one of the few areas of contemporary federalism doctrine that crosses ideological lines.
Contested or settled? Settled in core form; applications continue to develop.
See also: Chapter 4 (Federalism).
Section 4 — First Amendment: Speech
The free-speech doctrine that governs today is largely a twentieth- and twenty-first-century construction. The first half of the country's history saw little Supreme Court engagement with the First Amendment; the cases below trace the development of modern speech doctrine from the World War I-era "clear and present danger" formulation through the libertarian turn of the Warren Court and its successors. The political valence of free-speech doctrine has shifted across this period. Mid-twentieth-century speech doctrine was associated with civil-rights and anti-war movements; in recent decades, it has been associated with conservative challenges to campaign-finance regulation and to compelled speech. The doctrinal core — that government must justify speech-restrictive laws under demanding scrutiny — has become broadly bipartisan, though specific applications (campaign finance, corporate speech, professional speech) remain contested.
Schenck v. United States (1919), 249 U.S. 47
Holding: Speech that creates "a clear and present danger" of bringing about substantive evils Congress has a right to prevent is not protected by the First Amendment.
Vote: 9–0. Opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Background. Charles Schenck, secretary of the Socialist Party, mailed leaflets urging draft-eligible men to resist conscription as illegal involuntary servitude. He was prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for obstructing military recruitment.
Reasoning. Holmes wrote the famous formulation that "the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." The character of every act, he said, depends on the circumstances; speech that would be permissible in peacetime might be punishable when it creates "a clear and present danger" of substantive evils Congress had power to prevent.
Significance. Schenck gave birth to the "clear and present danger" formulation but applied it permissively to uphold the conviction. Holmes himself, joined by Brandeis, soon began applying the test more rigorously in dissent (Abrams v. United States, 1919; Whitney v. California, 1927). The modern doctrine, articulated in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), is far more speech-protective. Schenck's "fire in a theatre" line has had a long afterlife in popular argument — usually in service of speech restrictions Holmes himself would not have endorsed in his later writings.
Contested or settled? Schenck's deferential application has been displaced by Brandenburg; Holmes's better-known dissents represent the doctrinal direction the law took.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties).
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), 376 U.S. 254
Holding: The First Amendment requires public officials to prove "actual malice" — knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth — to recover for defamation.
Vote: 9–0. Opinion by Justice William Brennan.
Background. The New York Times ran an advocacy advertisement, "Heed Their Rising Voices," seeking funds for civil-rights efforts in the South. The ad contained minor factual errors. L.B. Sullivan, an Alabama police commissioner, sued for libel under Alabama law and won a $500,000 judgment. The Times appealed.
Reasoning. Brennan held that Alabama's defamation law, applied to allow recovery for unintentional errors in commentary on public officials' conduct, violated the First Amendment. A central principle of free expression is "uninhibited, robust, and wide-open" debate on public issues, which "may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials." To recover, public-official plaintiffs must therefore show "actual malice" — knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth.
Significance. Sullivan nationalized libel law and prevented public officials from using state defamation suits to deter coverage of civil-rights protests. It remains the foundational case for press freedom in covering public affairs. In recent years, several justices (notably Thomas and Gorsuch) have written separately questioning whether Sullivan's constitutional rule should be reconsidered. As of 2026, the Court has not granted review of the underlying rule, but the question is live.
Contested or settled? Holding is largely settled but has drawn renewed criticism from the right; possible future re-examination.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties), Chapter 16 (Media).
Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), 395 U.S. 444
Holding: Government may proscribe advocacy of force or unlawful action only when it is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
Vote: 9–0. Per curiam opinion.
Background. Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan leader in Ohio, was convicted under Ohio's criminal-syndicalism statute for advocating violence at a rally that included weapons and racist statements. He was filmed by a television crew he had invited.
Reasoning. The per curiam opinion held that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a state to forbid advocacy of the use of force or law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. Speech that merely advocates violence in the abstract — without imminence and without likelihood of immediate effect — is constitutionally protected.
Significance. Brandenburg set the modern doctrine on incitement and remains the controlling test. It is one of the most speech-protective rules in any democracy. The doctrine has been applied to protect speakers from across the ideological spectrum: anti-war protestors, civil-rights organizers, white nationalists, and (in lower-court applications) online speakers whose words later led to violence. The "imminence" requirement makes most online incitement claims fail.
Contested or settled? Settled at the doctrinal core; debates focus on application to internet speech.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties).
Texas v. Johnson (1989), 491 U.S. 397
Holding: Burning the American flag as a form of political protest is expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.
Vote: 5–4. Opinion by Justice William Brennan; dissents by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices White, O'Connor, and Stevens.
Background. Gregory Lee Johnson burned a U.S. flag during a protest at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, while chanting political slogans. He was convicted under Texas's flag-desecration statute.
Reasoning. Brennan held that Johnson's flag burning was expressive conduct: it conveyed a political message, and the audience understood it as such. The state's interest in preserving the flag as a symbol of national unity was insufficient to overcome the First Amendment, because the law penalized the expressive content of the act. "If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment," Brennan wrote, "it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable."
Significance. Johnson is one of the most widely cited statements of viewpoint-neutrality. It has been invoked across the ideological spectrum to protect controversial expression. Congress responded to Johnson with the Flag Protection Act of 1989; the Court struck down that statute in United States v. Eichman (1990) on the same logic. Multiple proposed flag-protection constitutional amendments have failed in Congress in the years since.
Contested or settled? Settled doctrinally; politically contested in the abstract but no current legislative path to overrule.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties).
Citizens United v. FEC (2010), 558 U.S. 310
Holding: The First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures on political speech by corporations and unions.
Vote: 5–4. Opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy; dissent by Justice John Paul Stevens (joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor).
Background. Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, produced a critical documentary about Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary campaign. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act ("McCain–Feingold") prohibited corporate-funded "electioneering communications" within thirty days of a primary. Citizens United challenged the prohibition as applied to its film and on its face.
Reasoning. Kennedy held that political speech does not lose its First Amendment protection because the speaker is a corporation. The only legitimate state interest in restricting independent campaign expenditures, the Court said, is preventing quid pro quo corruption — actual exchange of money for official acts — and independent expenditures, by definition, lack the coordinated quality necessary for quid pro quo corruption. The Court therefore overruled Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990) and the relevant portions of McConnell v. FEC (2003). Stevens's 90-page dissent argued that corporations are state-created entities whose political activity is not "speech" in the constitutional sense and that the majority had read history selectively.
Significance. Citizens United, combined with the lower-court SpeechNow.org v. FEC (D.C. Cir. 2010), enabled super PACs that can raise and spend unlimited sums for or against candidates as long as they do not coordinate with campaigns. Total outside spending in federal elections grew from roughly $338 million in 2008 to over $4 billion in 2024. Whether Citizens United corrupted American politics is genuinely contested. Defenders argue the decision protected core First Amendment rights against speaker-based discrimination; critics argue it allowed wealthy donors and corporations to exercise outsized influence under a thin doctrinal cover. Polling consistently shows majority support for limits on corporate political spending across both parties; Congress has not enacted significant amendments.
Contested or settled? Holding remains good law and is settled doctrine; political contestation is among the most intense in modern constitutional law.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties), Chapter 34 (Money in Politics).
Section 5 — First Amendment: Religion
Religion-clause doctrine has changed substantially in the past decade. The cases below trace that change. Lemon set the framework for Establishment Clause analysis for half a century. Smith sharply limited Free Exercise Clause challenges to neutral, generally applicable laws. Kennedy signaled a shift toward "history and tradition" analysis, with the Court explicitly stating that Lemon had been abandoned. The Court is now reworking religion doctrine in real time, and many of the questions you will read about (school chaplains, prayer at public events, religious accommodation in public institutions, contraceptive coverage requirements) involve doctrines still in formation.
Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), 403 U.S. 602
Holding: A law violates the Establishment Clause unless it has a secular purpose, has a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion, and does not foster excessive government entanglement with religion.
Vote: 8–0 (Justice Marshall not participating). Opinion by Chief Justice Warren Burger.
Background. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island had programs subsidizing salaries of teachers in nonpublic (largely Catholic) schools who taught secular subjects. Taxpayers and church-state-separation organizations sued, arguing the programs amounted to public support of religious institutions.
Reasoning. Burger synthesized prior Establishment Clause cases into a three-part test: (1) the law must have a secular legislative purpose; (2) its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; and (3) the law must not foster excessive government entanglement with religion. The state programs failed the entanglement prong, because they would require ongoing surveillance of religious-school classrooms to ensure that subsidies were spent on secular instruction.
Significance. The "Lemon test" governed Establishment Clause analysis for decades, applied to a wide range of disputes involving public displays, school prayer, religious-school funding, and public-property religious symbols. The test became a frequent target of conservative critique, with Justice Scalia memorably comparing it to "some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried." In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), the Court declared that Lemon had been "long ago abandoned."
Contested or settled? Effectively abandoned. The Court's current Establishment Clause analysis uses "history and tradition" instead.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties).
Employment Division v. Smith (1990), 494 U.S. 872
Holding: The Free Exercise Clause does not require religious exemptions from neutral, generally applicable laws.
Vote: 6–3 (with various concurrences and partial dissents). Opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia; partial dissents by Justices O'Connor, Brennan, Marshall, and Blackmun.
Background. Two members of the Native American Church were fired from their jobs as drug counselors and denied unemployment benefits because they had ingested peyote in a religious ceremony. Oregon law made peyote use a crime without religious exemption.
Reasoning. Scalia held that the Free Exercise Clause does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a "valid and neutral law of general applicability" merely because the law incidentally burdens religious practice. Pre-Smith doctrine had applied strict scrutiny to such laws (Sherbert v. Verner, 1963; Wisconsin v. Yoder, 1972); Scalia limited those cases to their specific contexts (unemployment compensation; hybrid-rights claims combining Free Exercise with parental-rights or speech claims).
Significance. Smith dramatically reduced the constitutional scope of religious-exemption claims. Congress responded with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), which restored strict scrutiny for federal laws as a statutory matter. RFRA was held unconstitutional as applied to states in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997); many states subsequently passed state-level RFRAs. Smith itself remains controlling for constitutional Free Exercise analysis, though the Roberts Court has at times signaled willingness to reconsider it (Fulton v. Philadelphia, 2021, declined to overrule Smith but distinguished it narrowly).
Contested or settled? Holding remains good law but is unstable; reconsideration is periodically sought.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties).
Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), 597 U.S. 507
Holding: A public-school football coach's post-game prayer at midfield was protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses, and the Establishment Clause did not require the school district to prohibit it.
Vote: 6–3. Opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch; dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Background. Joseph Kennedy, an assistant football coach at Bremerton High School in Washington State, prayed visibly at midfield after games. Players sometimes joined him. The school district directed him to stop on Establishment Clause grounds. Kennedy sued after the district declined to renew his contract.
Reasoning. Gorsuch held that Kennedy's prayer was private religious expression rather than government speech, and that the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses protected him from school discipline. On the Establishment Clause question, Gorsuch wrote that "this Court long ago abandoned Lemon and its endorsement test offshoot." Establishment Clause analysis must instead be guided by reference to "historical practices and understandings." The dissent argued that Kennedy's prayers were not private (he had explicitly invited attention), that students felt coercive pressure to join, and that the majority had distorted the factual record.
Significance. Kennedy signaled that the Court has formally moved away from the Lemon framework toward a history-and-tradition methodology. Lower courts have begun applying that methodology in cases involving public-school religious activity, religious displays on public property, and government accommodations of religion. The doctrine remains in formation, and the precise content of "historical practices and understandings" is contested.
Contested or settled? Methodological shift is recent; many follow-on questions are unresolved.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties), Chapter 14 (Constitutional Interpretation).
Section 6 — Other Bill of Rights Protections
The cases in this section trace the incorporation of key Bill of Rights protections against the states and the development of criminal-procedure doctrine that constrains police, prosecutors, and trial courts. Three of these (Mapp, Gideon, Miranda) are products of the Warren Court's "rights revolution" of the 1960s. Carpenter extended Fourth Amendment doctrine into the digital age. Heller recognized the Second Amendment as an individual right after a century and a half of doctrinal silence on the question. The cases together represent the modern reach of the Bill of Rights into police conduct, criminal prosecutions, and ordinary citizens' encounters with the state.
Mapp v. Ohio (1961), 367 U.S. 643
Holding: Evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment is inadmissible in state criminal trials.
Vote: 6–3. Opinion by Justice Tom C. Clark; dissent by Justice John Marshall Harlan II.
Background. Cleveland police forced their way into Dollree Mapp's home without a valid warrant, looking for a bombing suspect. They found pornography (then a state crime), arrested her, and used the evidence to convict her. She challenged the search.
Reasoning. Clark held that the exclusionary rule of Weeks v. United States (1914) — which barred federal prosecutors from using illegally seized evidence — must apply to states through the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment's protection would be a "form of words" if illegally seized evidence could still be used to convict. Without exclusion, there is no effective remedy for unconstitutional searches.
Significance. Mapp incorporated the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule against the states, fundamentally restructuring American criminal procedure. The rule has been narrowed since by good-faith exceptions (Leon, 1984) and inevitable-discovery doctrine (Nix v. Williams, 1984), but its core remains. The exclusionary rule is among the most heavily debated features of American criminal procedure, both in Court doctrine and in academic literature.
Contested or settled? Core holding settled; specific exceptions and applications remain contested.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties), Chapter 12 (Federal Judiciary).
Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), 372 U.S. 335
Holding: The Sixth Amendment right to counsel applies to the states and requires appointment of counsel for indigent defendants in felony cases.
Vote: 9–0. Opinion by Justice Hugo Black.
Background. Clarence Earl Gideon was charged with felony breaking and entering in Florida. He could not afford a lawyer; Florida law provided counsel only in capital cases. He defended himself, was convicted, and filed a handwritten habeas petition with the Supreme Court.
Reasoning. Black held that the right to counsel is fundamental to a fair trial. Lawyers in criminal courts are necessities, not luxuries; "any person hauled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him." The earlier rule of Betts v. Brady (1942), which had required appointed counsel only in special-circumstances felony cases, was overruled.
Significance. Gideon required every state to build a public-defender system. Implementation has been deeply uneven across states; many public-defender offices remain underfunded relative to caseloads. Subsequent cases extended the right to misdemeanor cases involving incarceration (Argersinger v. Hamlin, 1972) and to certain stages of pre-trial proceedings. The right to counsel is now part of the basic fabric of American criminal procedure.
Contested or settled? Holding settled; implementation quality remains a major policy issue.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties).
Miranda v. Arizona (1966), 384 U.S. 436
Holding: Before custodial interrogation, police must inform suspects of their rights to remain silent and to have counsel; statements obtained without these warnings are inadmissible.
Vote: 5–4. Opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren; dissents by Justices Harlan II, White, Stewart, and Clark.
Background. Ernesto Miranda was arrested for kidnapping and rape and confessed during a two-hour interrogation. He had not been advised of his right to remain silent or to consult counsel. The confession was used at trial.
Reasoning. Warren held that the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination requires procedural safeguards in the inherently coercive setting of custodial interrogation. Police must warn suspects: that they have the right to remain silent; that anything they say can be used against them; that they have the right to an attorney; and that an attorney will be appointed if they cannot afford one. Statements obtained without these warnings are inadmissible regardless of voluntariness.
Significance. "Miranda warnings" became a fixture of American criminal procedure and popular culture. Congress attempted to override Miranda through 18 U.S.C. § 3501 (1968), which made voluntariness the sole test; the Court rebuffed that effort in Dickerson v. United States (2000), holding Miranda was a constitutional rule. Critics argue Miranda hampers law enforcement; defenders argue it produces only modest reductions in confession rates while protecting fundamental rights.
Contested or settled? Core holding settled; specific applications continue to develop.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties).
Carpenter v. United States (2018), 585 U.S. 296
Holding: Government acquisition of historical cell-site location information from a wireless carrier is a Fourth Amendment "search" requiring a warrant.
Vote: 5–4. Opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts; dissents by Justices Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch.
Background. FBI agents investigating a series of robberies obtained 127 days of cell-site location data for Timothy Carpenter from his cell carriers under the Stored Communications Act, on a showing less than probable cause. The data placed Carpenter near the robbery sites.
Reasoning. Roberts held that the third-party doctrine of United States v. Miller (1976) and Smith v. Maryland (1979) — that a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily turned over to third parties — does not extend to comprehensive cell-site location records. The data revealed an "all-encompassing record" of a person's whereabouts. The voluntariness assumption fails when carrying a phone is essentially a precondition of modern life.
Significance. Carpenter signaled the Court's willingness to revisit Fourth Amendment doctrine in light of digital realities. Subsequent lower-court cases have applied or distinguished Carpenter in disputes over geofence warrants, IP-address records, browsing data, and third-party app data. The decision is doctrinally narrow on its face but doctrinally generative in lower courts.
Contested or settled? Holding settled; lower-court applications continue to develop.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties), Chapter 16 (Media).
District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), 554 U.S. 570
Holding: The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms unconnected with service in a militia, including for self-defense in the home.
Vote: 5–4. Opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia; dissents by Justices Stevens and Breyer.
Background. District of Columbia law banned handgun possession in the home and required other firearms to be kept disassembled or with trigger locks. Dick Heller, a special D.C. police officer, applied to register a handgun for home defense; the District denied him.
Reasoning. Scalia parsed the Second Amendment's text — "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" — and held that the prefatory clause announces a purpose without limiting the operative clause. The "right of the people to keep and bear Arms" is an individual right, not a collective militia right. The home-handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement violated that right. Scalia noted the right was not unlimited: the decision did not cast doubt on prohibitions on possession by felons and the mentally ill, regulations on commercial sale, or bans on dangerous and unusual weapons. Stevens's dissent argued the prefatory clause was integral to the meaning, that the historical evidence cut against an individual-right reading, and that the Court was inventing a constitutional rule out of recent political-movement preferences.
Significance. Heller established the individual-right interpretation as constitutional law. McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) incorporated that right against the states. New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen (2022) further held that gun regulations must be evaluated against "the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation" — a methodology that has produced extensive lower-court litigation about which historical analogues count and how closely they must match modern regulations. Whether Heller was correctly decided remains genuinely contested. Defenders argue it vindicates the Second Amendment's text and history; critics argue it reads centuries of regulatory practice out of the Constitution.
Contested or settled? Holding remains good law; doctrine remains in active development.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties), Chapter 14 (Constitutional Interpretation).
Section 7 — Equal Protection
Equal Protection doctrine is the modern engine for civil-rights litigation. The Fourteenth Amendment's text — "No State shall... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" — was for decades read narrowly. The cases below trace the doctrine's expansion through Brown and the application of strict scrutiny to racial classifications, the extension to sex classifications under intermediate scrutiny, and the recent rollback of race-conscious admissions. The constitutional question that runs through this section is whether the Equal Protection Clause requires colorblindness (no racial classifications, even ostensibly remedial ones) or whether it permits race-conscious measures aimed at addressing historical and contemporary inequalities. As of 2026, the Court has substantially adopted the colorblindness reading; the political contestation continues.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 347 U.S. 483
Holding: Racially segregated public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause; "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
Vote: 9–0. Opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Background. Linda Brown, a Black third-grader in Topeka, Kansas, was assigned to a segregated school far from her home rather than a closer all-white school. The case was consolidated with similar challenges from Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia.
Reasoning. Warren held that public education had become essential to citizenship and that segregation, even if formally equal in physical facilities, "generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." Drawing on social-science evidence, the Court declared that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The opinion was deliberately short and unanimous, reflecting Warren's effort to present a unified Court.
Significance. Brown overruled Plessy's "separate but equal" doctrine in the school context. Its implementation was slow and contested — Brown II (1955) ordered desegregation "with all deliberate speed," and many districts resisted for decades. The decision remains the single most celebrated case of the modern Supreme Court and is cited across the political spectrum as the model of the Court correcting a deep moral and constitutional wrong. Doctrinally, Brown established that the Equal Protection Clause forbids state-imposed racial segregation regardless of formal equality.
Contested or settled? Universally settled.
See also: Chapter 6 (Civil Rights), Chapter 12 (Federal Judiciary).
Loving v. Virginia (1967), 388 U.S. 1
Holding: State laws prohibiting interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses.
Vote: 9–0. Opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Background. Mildred Jeter (Black) and Richard Loving (white) married in the District of Columbia, then returned to their home in Virginia. They were arrested under Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made interracial marriage a felony. They pleaded guilty in exchange for a suspended sentence on condition of leaving Virginia.
Reasoning. Warren held that Virginia's law was a racial classification deserving "the most rigid scrutiny" under equal protection. The state's claim that the law applied "equally" to whites and Blacks was rejected — the law existed only to maintain racial separation, and that purpose was constitutionally illegitimate. The decision also held that marriage is a fundamental right protected by substantive due process; restrictions on marriage based on race could not survive heightened scrutiny.
Significance. Loving invalidated the antimiscegenation laws still on the books in sixteen states. It is also a cornerstone case for marriage as a fundamental right under the Due Process Clause, a thread that runs through Zablocki v. Redhail (1978), Turner v. Safley (1987), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). The Loving family's story is one of the most widely taught civil-rights narratives in American education.
Contested or settled? Universally settled.
See also: Chapter 6 (Civil Rights).
Reed v. Reed (1971), 404 U.S. 71
Holding: A state law preferring men over women as estate administrators violates the Equal Protection Clause.
Vote: 9–0. Opinion by Chief Justice Warren Burger.
Background. Sally and Cecil Reed were separated parents of a son who died intestate. Both sought appointment as administrator of his estate. Idaho law preferred males to females among equally qualified applicants. The probate court applied the preference and appointed Cecil. Sally challenged the law.
Reasoning. Burger held that the gender preference, even if rationally related to administrative convenience, was an arbitrary distinction that the Equal Protection Clause forbade. The opinion was brief and applied (nominally) rational-basis scrutiny, but it reached a result inconsistent with the deferential application that scrutiny normally received. Subsequent cases (Frontiero v. Richardson, 1973; Craig v. Boren, 1976) applied progressively heightened scrutiny to sex classifications, culminating in the modern intermediate-scrutiny test ("substantially related to an important government interest").
Significance. Reed was the first time the Supreme Court invalidated a law on sex-discrimination grounds under the Equal Protection Clause. It was the doctrinal opening for the modern jurisprudence of sex classifications. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then an ACLU litigator, wrote much of the briefing and went on to argue or brief most of the foundational sex-discrimination cases. United States v. Virginia (1996) — the VMI case, written by Ginsburg as a justice — represents the modern application: sex classifications require an "exceedingly persuasive justification" under intermediate scrutiny.
Contested or settled? Settled; the underlying intermediate-scrutiny framework remains the analytical standard.
See also: Chapter 6 (Civil Rights).
Regents v. Bakke (1978), 438 U.S. 265
Holding: Racial quotas in admissions are unconstitutional, but race may be considered as one factor among many to achieve educational diversity.
Vote: 5–4 controlling opinion alignments (with multiple opinions). Justice Lewis Powell's controlling opinion.
Background. The University of California at Davis Medical School reserved 16 of 100 admission slots for "minority" applicants under a special admissions program. Allan Bakke, a white applicant rejected from the regular admissions process, sued, arguing that his rejection violated equal protection and Title VI.
Reasoning. No single rationale commanded a majority. Powell's opinion articulated the controlling standard: racial quotas are unconstitutional, but race-conscious admissions intended to achieve diversity in higher education are constitutional if narrowly tailored. The diversity rationale, Powell wrote, draws on a university's First Amendment interest in selecting its own student body. Justices Brennan, White, Marshall, and Blackmun would have upheld the quota; Justices Stevens, Stewart, Rehnquist, and Burger would have struck it down without endorsing diversity-based race consciousness.
Significance. Bakke established the framework — quotas no, diversity-conscious holistic admissions yes — that governed higher-education affirmative action for forty-five years. Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) reaffirmed the diversity rationale; Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) struck down a points-based system for being insufficiently individualized. Fisher v. University of Texas (I, 2013, II, 2016) applied the framework with skepticism. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) overruled the diversity rationale.
Contested or settled? Diversity rationale was overruled in 2023; Bakke's ban on quotas survives.
See also: Chapter 6 (Civil Rights).
Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), 600 U.S. 181
Holding: Race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violate the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI.
Vote: 6–3 (UNC); 6–2 (Harvard, Justice Jackson recused). Opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts; dissents by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson.
Background. Students for Fair Admissions, an organization founded by Edward Blum, sued Harvard and UNC, alleging that their race-conscious admissions practices discriminated against Asian-American applicants and violated equal protection.
Reasoning. Roberts held that the universities' admissions programs failed strict scrutiny on multiple grounds. The "compelling interest" in diversity that Bakke and Grutter had recognized was, the Court said, too imprecise to be measured. The programs used race as a "negative" factor for some applicants. They had no logical end point, contrary to Grutter's anticipated 25-year horizon. Race-conscious admissions could not be reconciled with the constitutional command of equal protection. The opinion left open that universities may consider an applicant's discussion of how race has affected their life — a doctrinal carve-out whose practical scope remains to be worked out. The dissents argued the majority misread the historical record on the Fourteenth Amendment, ignored the still-operative effects of segregation, and overruled Grutter without acknowledging it was doing so.
Significance. SFFA ended race-conscious admissions in higher education in the form they had taken since Bakke. Universities have responded with various adjustments — increased emphasis on socioeconomic factors, "diversity statements" in essays, partnerships with predominantly minority high schools, removal of legacy preferences in some cases. Whether the decision was correctly decided is genuinely contested. Supporters argue the Constitution requires colorblindness and that race-conscious admissions had distorted higher education without producing the promised societal benefits. Critics argue the decision misreads the Fourteenth Amendment's antisubordination purpose and will compound underrepresentation of Black, Latino, and Native American students at selective institutions.
Contested or settled? Holding is recent, doctrinally consequential, and politically contested.
See also: Chapter 6 (Civil Rights), Chapter 14 (Constitutional Interpretation).
Section 8 — Privacy and Substantive Due Process
The cases in this section involve constitutional rights that are not explicitly enumerated but were inferred by the Court from the Due Process Clause's protection of "liberty." This is the most contested area of contemporary constitutional law. The trajectory runs from Griswold (contraception), through Roe (abortion), through Lawrence (same-sex intimacy) and Obergefell (same-sex marriage), to Dobbs (overruling Roe). The methodological dispute is whether substantive due process is a legitimate constitutional doctrine at all, and if so, how a court determines which liberties are protected. Originalists generally argue for a narrow "history and tradition" approach; progressives generally argue for a broader inquiry into liberty and dignity. The Court's current majority leans originalist; the Court's recent decisions reflect that orientation.
Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), 381 U.S. 479
Holding: Married couples have a constitutional right to use contraception, derived from a "right of privacy" implicit in the Bill of Rights.
Vote: 7–2. Opinion by Justice William O. Douglas; dissents by Justices Hugo Black and Potter Stewart.
Background. Connecticut law prohibited the use of any drug or device to prevent conception. Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, was prosecuted for providing contraceptive counseling to married couples. She challenged the conviction.
Reasoning. Douglas located a right of privacy in the "penumbras, formed by emanations" of various Bill of Rights provisions — the First (association), Third (no quartering), Fourth (search and seizure), Fifth (self-incrimination), and Ninth (unenumerated rights). The marital relationship, Douglas wrote, is "older than the Bill of Rights" and lay within a zone of privacy that government could not invade. Justice Goldberg's concurrence emphasized the Ninth Amendment; Justices Harlan and White concurred on substantive-due-process grounds. Black and Stewart dissented, arguing the Constitution contained no general right of privacy.
Significance. Griswold established the constitutional right of privacy that Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972, contraception for unmarried persons), Roe v. Wade (1973, abortion), Lawrence v. Texas (2003, same-sex intimacy), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015, same-sex marriage) extended. Justice Thomas's concurrence in Dobbs (2022) suggested the Court should reconsider these substantive-due-process precedents; the Dobbs majority distinguished Griswold and Obergefell on the ground that those cases did not involve "potential life."
Contested or settled? Holding remains in force; the doctrinal foundation has been narrowed by Dobbs.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties).
Roe v. Wade (1973), 410 U.S. 113
Holding: The Constitution protects a woman's right to choose abortion before fetal viability, with state regulation increasing in permissible scope through pregnancy.
Vote: 7–2. Opinion by Justice Harry Blackmun; dissents by Justices William Rehnquist and Byron White.
Background. A pregnant Texas woman ("Jane Roe") challenged Texas's nineteenth-century law banning abortion except to save the mother's life. The case was litigated alongside Doe v. Bolton, which challenged Georgia's more recent therapeutic-exception statute.
Reasoning. Blackmun held that the right of privacy recognized in Griswold "is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." He then established a trimester framework: in the first trimester, the abortion decision rested with the woman and her physician without state interference; in the second trimester, the state could regulate abortion to protect maternal health; in the third trimester (post-viability), the state could prohibit abortion except where necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother. Justices Rehnquist and White dissented on grounds that there was no constitutional basis for the right and that abortion regulation was a question for the political branches.
Significance. Roe nationalized abortion regulation and established federal constitutional protection for abortion access. It became the most contested decision in modern American constitutional law — drawing sustained support and sustained opposition for fifty years. Critics, including some pro-choice scholars, argued Roe was poorly reasoned even on its own terms. Defenders argued the right was firmly grounded in the Court's privacy and bodily-autonomy tradition. Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) modified Roe's framework but reaffirmed its central holding.
Contested or settled? Overruled by Dobbs in 2022.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties), Chapter 14 (Constitutional Interpretation), Chapter 23 (Identity and Politics).
Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), 505 U.S. 833
Holding: States may regulate abortion before viability provided they do not impose an "undue burden" on the abortion right; the trimester framework is replaced.
Vote: Multiple alignments. Joint plurality opinion by Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter; partial concurrences and partial dissents.
Background. Pennsylvania imposed a series of abortion restrictions: a 24-hour waiting period, informed-consent requirements, parental consent for minors, and a spousal-notification provision. Planned Parenthood challenged each.
Reasoning. The joint opinion reaffirmed Roe's "central holding" — that pre-viability abortion is protected — but replaced the trimester framework with a single test: a regulation is unconstitutional if its purpose or effect is to place an "undue burden" (a "substantial obstacle") on women seeking pre-viability abortion. The waiting period, informed consent, and parental consent (with judicial bypass) were upheld; the spousal-notification requirement was struck down. The joint opinion emphasized stare decisis: overruling Roe would undermine the Court's institutional legitimacy.
Significance. Casey governed abortion law for thirty years. Its undue-burden standard was applied in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt (2016, striking down Texas TRAP laws) and June Medical Services v. Russo (2020, striking down a similar Louisiana law). The joint opinion's invocation of stare decisis became central to the Dobbs contestation: the Dobbs majority argued that Roe and Casey had been wrongly decided and that stare decisis did not require continued enforcement of error.
Contested or settled? Overruled by Dobbs in 2022.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties), Chapter 14 (Constitutional Interpretation).
Lawrence v. Texas (2003), 539 U.S. 558
Holding: State laws criminalizing private, consensual same-sex sexual conduct between adults violate the Due Process Clause.
Vote: 6–3. Opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy; concurrence by Justice O'Connor (on equal-protection grounds); dissents by Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Chief Justice Rehnquist.
Background. Houston police entered John Lawrence's home in response to a false weapons-disturbance report and observed him engaged in sexual conduct with another man. They were arrested under Texas's "Homosexual Conduct" law, which criminalized same-sex (but not opposite-sex) sodomy.
Reasoning. Kennedy held that the Due Process Clause protects intimate sexual conduct between consenting adults from state criminalization. Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which had upheld Georgia's sodomy law, was overruled. Kennedy emphasized that the case was not just about a sexual act but about the dignity, autonomy, and intimate associations of adults. Justice Scalia's dissent argued the majority had effectively constitutionalized a moral view, that the decision logically led to same-sex marriage, and that Bowers should not be lightly overruled.
Significance. Lawrence repudiated the constitutional approval of state regulation of intimate sexual conduct. It set the stage for Obergefell (Scalia's prediction proved correct) and is cited as a major step in the constitutional recognition of LGBTQ rights. It is also important in the history of substantive due process as an area of doctrinal expansion that did not occur in the Roe tradition: Lawrence was a decriminalization decision, not a balancing-of-state-interests decision.
Contested or settled? Holding remains good law; some justices (Thomas in his Dobbs concurrence) have called for reconsideration.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties), Chapter 6 (Civil Rights).
Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), 576 U.S. 644
Holding: The Fourteenth Amendment requires states to license and recognize same-sex marriages.
Vote: 5–4. Opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy; dissents by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.
Background. Same-sex couples from Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee challenged state laws denying them marriage or refusing to recognize marriages performed in other jurisdictions. Jim Obergefell sought to be listed as the surviving spouse on his late husband's death certificate.
Reasoning. Kennedy identified four reasons marriage is fundamental: it is central to individual autonomy; it supports a unique two-person union unlike any other; it safeguards children and families; and it forms a keystone of the social order. Excluding same-sex couples from marriage was held to violate both the Due Process Clause (denying a fundamental right) and the Equal Protection Clause (constituting a classification with no sufficient justification). Roberts's dissent argued that whatever the wisdom of same-sex marriage as a policy matter, the question was for state political processes, not for the Court. Scalia's dissent attacked the majority's reasoning style as "pretentious" and argued the decision reflected a "judicial putsch."
Significance. Obergefell established the federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage, ending the patchwork of state laws that had recognized same-sex marriages in some states and not others. Congress codified federal recognition in the Respect for Marriage Act (2022) after Dobbs prompted concern about substantive-due-process precedents more broadly. As of 2026, public support for same-sex marriage is at historic highs across both parties.
Contested or settled? Holding remains good law; Justice Thomas's Dobbs concurrence argued for reconsideration. No majority has signaled willingness to reconsider.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties), Chapter 6 (Civil Rights).
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), 597 U.S. 215
Holding: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey are overruled.
Vote: 6–3 (with Roberts concurring in judgment only on the narrower ground of upholding Mississippi's law). Opinion by Justice Samuel Alito; dissents by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.
Background. Mississippi's Gestational Age Act prohibited abortion after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for medical emergency and severe fetal abnormality. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the only abortion clinic in Mississippi, challenged the law.
Reasoning. Alito held that the right to abortion was not "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" — the test for unenumerated rights articulated in Washington v. Glucksberg (1997). Surveying the historical record, the majority concluded that abortion had been a crime in most states at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment's ratification. The Casey stare-decisis analysis was rejected: the majority held that Roe's reasoning was "egregiously wrong" from the start, that the Roe and Casey frameworks had proved unworkable, that those decisions had distorted the Court's broader doctrines, and that no concrete reliance interests outweighed correcting the error. Roberts concurred only in judgment, arguing the Court could have upheld the Mississippi law on a 15-week framework without overruling Roe outright. The dissent argued the majority had abandoned stare decisis without sufficient justification, that the test for unenumerated rights was being applied selectively, and that women's reliance interests in Roe were enormous.
Significance. Dobbs returned abortion regulation to the states. As of 2026, roughly fifteen states had bans on abortion at or near conception; another ten had restrictions kicking in at six, twelve, or fifteen weeks; the remainder had varying levels of legal access. The decision triggered the largest single shift in federal constitutional law in a generation. It is among the most contested decisions in modern Court history. Defenders argue Dobbs corrected a doctrinal error and properly returned a contested moral question to democratic politics. Critics argue it overruled a settled right and disregarded reliance interests of half the population. The political consequences (turnout effects, ballot-initiative outcomes, legislative responses) continue to develop.
Contested or settled? Recent and politically contested in the most intense possible sense.
See also: Chapter 5 (Civil Liberties), Chapter 14 (Constitutional Interpretation), Chapter 23 (Identity and Politics).
Section 9 — Voting Rights and Elections
This section's cases concern the constitutional and statutory framework for elections — the fundamental machinery of democratic legitimacy. Baker and Reynolds nationalized the rule that legislative districts must be roughly equal in population, ending the deeply unequal apportionment that had characterized many state legislatures. Bush v. Gore resolved the 2000 presidential election under unusual constitutional pressure. Shelby County suspended the Voting Rights Act's preclearance regime. Rucho removed federal courts from the partisan-gerrymandering business. Allen v. Milligan preserved Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in a 2023 ruling that surprised many observers. The section is unavoidably charged. The cases tend to track ideological alignments, but the doctrinal substance is independent of any given outcome.
Baker v. Carr (1962), 369 U.S. 186
Holding: Federal courts have jurisdiction over claims that legislative malapportionment violates the Equal Protection Clause; such claims are not "political questions" beyond judicial review.
Vote: 6–2. Opinion by Justice William Brennan; dissents by Justices Felix Frankfurter and John Marshall Harlan II.
Background. Tennessee had not redrawn its state legislative districts since 1901, despite massive population shifts toward urban areas. Rural districts had a tiny fraction of the population of urban ones, but equal representation. Charles Baker, a Republican Memphis voter, sued, arguing the malapportionment diluted urban voters' representation.
Reasoning. Brennan held that the political-question doctrine — which had previously been thought to bar federal-court review of legislative apportionment under Colegrove v. Green (1946) — did not apply. Equal Protection challenges to malapportionment were justiciable. Brennan articulated six factors for political-question analysis (textual commitment, lack of judicially manageable standards, etc.); apportionment did not satisfy them. Frankfurter's dissent (his last major opinion) argued the Court was entering "the political thicket" with unforeseen consequences.
Significance. Baker v. Carr opened the federal courthouse to apportionment claims. Brennan called it "the most important case of my time on the Court." It led directly to Reynolds v. Sims and the one-person-one-vote revolution. It also expanded the operational reach of the federal judiciary into a domain (legislative structure) that had previously been treated as off-limits.
Contested or settled? Settled.
See also: Chapter 12 (Federal Judiciary), Chapter 35 (Redistricting and Gerrymandering).
Reynolds v. Sims (1964), 377 U.S. 533
Holding: Both houses of a state legislature must be apportioned roughly equally on a population basis under the Equal Protection Clause.
Vote: 8–1. Opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren; dissent by Justice John Marshall Harlan II.
Background. Alabama's state legislature had not been reapportioned since 1900. Some senate districts had forty-one times the population of others. Voters challenged the apportionment.
Reasoning. Warren held that "legislators represent people, not trees or acres." Both houses of bicameral state legislatures must apportion seats roughly by population. The "federal analogy" — that the U.S. Senate gives equal representation to states regardless of population, so states could do similarly with their state senates — was rejected because state legislative units are not coequal sovereigns within the state.
Significance. Reynolds and its companion cases produced the "one person, one vote" rule. State senates that had given equal weight to rural counties were forced to redraw to roughly equal populations. The ruling shifted political power away from rural areas and toward the urban and (over time) suburban majorities that the rural-dominated old apportionments had blocked.
Contested or settled? Settled.
See also: Chapter 12 (Federal Judiciary), Chapter 35 (Redistricting and Gerrymandering).
Bush v. Gore (2000), 531 U.S. 98
Holding: Florida's manual-recount procedure for the 2000 presidential election violated the Equal Protection Clause; remand for a constitutional recount before the federal "safe harbor" deadline was impractical.
Vote: 5–4 on the equal-protection holding; 7–2 on the existence of an equal-protection problem; the relief was joined only by the five-justice majority. Per curiam opinion; dissents by Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer.
Background. The 2000 presidential election turned on Florida's electoral votes; the margin was a few hundred votes. The Florida Supreme Court ordered manual recounts in selected counties, with the standard for counting questionable ballots ("the intent of the voter") left to individual canvassers. Bush sought Supreme Court intervention to halt the recount.
Reasoning. The per curiam opinion held that the recount, as designed, treated ballots inconsistently across counties (and within counties), violating equal protection by giving differently weighted treatment to similarly situated ballots. Because the federal "safe harbor" date was imminent and a constitutional recount could not be devised in time, the Florida recount was halted. Bush therefore won Florida and the presidency. The dissents argued that imperfect-but-not-arbitrary recount standards had long been tolerated, that the Court should not have intervened in a state-court remedial decision, and that the Court's "limited to the present circumstances" language was an unusual disclaimer of precedent.
Significance. Bush v. Gore resolved a constitutional crisis in immediate practical terms but at significant cost to the Court's perceived neutrality. Polling at the time and since has shown the decision tracks partisan affiliation closely. Doctrinally, the equal-protection logic could in theory apply to many features of the patchwork American election system, but the per curiam's "limited to the present circumstances" language has discouraged extensive precedential use. Whether the case was correctly decided remains genuinely contested. Defenders argue the Court applied straightforward equal-protection principles and that the recount as designed was constitutionally defective. Critics argue the Court should not have intervened, that the timing of the safe-harbor argument was strained, and that the decision corroded institutional trust.
Contested or settled? Holding has not been overruled but is rarely cited; political contestation persists.
See also: Chapter 22 (Voting and Elections), Chapter 37 (Democratic Erosion).
Shelby County v. Holder (2013), 570 U.S. 529
Holding: Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which determines which jurisdictions are subject to preclearance, is unconstitutional because it relies on outdated formulas.
Vote: 5–4. Opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts; dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Background. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 required jurisdictions with histories of voting discrimination to obtain federal preclearance before changing election laws. Section 4(b) provided the coverage formula; Section 5 imposed the preclearance requirement. Shelby County, Alabama, sued, arguing the formula was based on decades-old data.
Reasoning. Roberts held that the preclearance regime imposed substantial federalism costs and could be sustained only if the coverage formula was based on current conditions. The 2006 reauthorization of the VRA had used the same formula derived from 1960s-1970s data. The "historic accomplishments" of the VRA, Roberts wrote, could not justify continued reliance on a formula that no longer fit current realities. Section 5 was not formally invalidated, but with no operative coverage formula, it became inert. Ginsburg's dissent compared abandoning preclearance to "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." She argued that the dramatic improvement in voting conditions in covered jurisdictions was caused by preclearance — and removing it would predictably bring new restrictions.
Significance. Within hours of the decision, several previously covered states announced new voter-ID laws and other changes that would have required preclearance review. Studies in the years since (Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina) document changes that have produced disparities in turnout and access. Whether the decision was correctly decided remains contested. Defenders argue the formula was constitutionally infirm and that voting-rights enforcement should not rest on outdated data; critics argue the decision dismantled an effective tool against voting discrimination without congressional input. Congress has not enacted a replacement coverage formula despite multiple proposals.
Contested or settled? Holding controls; political contestation continues.
See also: Chapter 6 (Civil Rights), Chapter 22 (Voting and Elections), Chapter 36 (Voting Rights).
Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), 588 U.S. 684
Holding: Partisan-gerrymandering claims are non-justiciable political questions in federal court.
Vote: 5–4. Opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts; dissent by Justice Elena Kagan.
Background. Voters in North Carolina (Republican gerrymander) and Maryland (Democratic gerrymander) challenged their congressional district maps as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. The cases were consolidated to provide bipartisan symmetry to the legal question.
Reasoning. Roberts held that partisan gerrymandering, while distasteful, presents no judicially manageable standards. How much partisanship is too much? The proposed metrics — efficiency gap, partisan symmetry, declination — would require federal courts to make political-process judgments without anchoring constitutional text. The political-question doctrine therefore barred federal-court review. State courts and state constitutions remained available, as did Congress. Kagan's dissent argued that the Court was abandoning its institutional role: the gerrymanders at issue were "wholly extreme," and the Court did possess workable standards (it had used them in racial-gerrymandering cases for decades).
Significance. Rucho removed federal courts from policing partisan gerrymandering. State courts have stepped in (notably the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in League of Women Voters v. Pennsylvania and the North Carolina Supreme Court in Harper v. Hall); state-constitutional reform efforts (citizen redistricting commissions in Michigan, Colorado, Arizona, others) have proliferated. As of 2026, partisan gerrymandering is generally the most extreme it has been in modern history, by most quantitative measures. Whether Rucho was correctly decided is contested. Defenders argue federal courts genuinely lack workable standards and that intervening would unmoor judicial review from constitutional text; critics argue the Court abandoned a structural problem that only the federal judiciary was positioned to address.
Contested or settled? Holding controls; contestation persists in academic literature and reform politics.
See also: Chapter 22 (Voting and Elections), Chapter 35 (Redistricting and Gerrymandering).
Allen v. Milligan (2023), 599 U.S. 1
Holding: Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act remains a valid statutory framework; Alabama's congressional districting plan likely violated Section 2 by failing to include a second majority-Black district.
Vote: 5–4. Opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts; dissents by Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett (in part).
Background. Alabama's 2021 congressional districting plan included one majority-Black district out of seven, despite the Black population being 27% of the state. Plaintiffs argued the plan violated Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits voting practices that result in vote dilution along racial lines.
Reasoning. Roberts held that the Court's longstanding Thornburg v. Gingles (1986) framework for Section 2 vote-dilution claims remained valid. Alabama's proposed reframing — that any race-conscious districting violates the Constitution — would effectively read Section 2 out of the VRA as applied to redistricting. The Court rejected that reframing. The traditional Gingles analysis, which requires a sufficiently large and geographically compact minority population, racially polarized voting, and majority bloc voting that defeats the minority's preferred candidate, was satisfied here. Thomas's dissent argued Section 2 is unconstitutional as applied to redistricting; Alito's dissent argued the Gingles framework's specific requirements were not met.
Significance. Milligan surprised many observers, including those who had expected the Roberts Court to substantially weaken the remaining VRA protections after Shelby County. The decision preserved the principal remaining tool against racial vote dilution. Alabama was ordered to draw a new map; subsequent litigation forced a court-imposed map for the 2024 election. Similar Section 2 cases have proceeded in Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina. The decision also signaled that the Roberts Court is not uniformly hostile to civil-rights statutory frameworks.
Contested or settled? Holding controls; doctrinal evolution continues with subsequent Section 2 cases.
See also: Chapter 22 (Voting and Elections), Chapter 36 (Voting Rights).
Section 10 — Executive and Administrative Power
The cases in this final section concern the powers of the executive branch — the presidency proper and the administrative agencies that exercise delegated authority. Youngstown set the framework for analyzing presidential power against congressional action. Nixon established that even the president is subject to legal process. Chevron shaped the relationship between courts and administrative agencies for forty years; Loper Bright dismantled it in 2024. Trump v. United States recognized substantial presidential immunity for official acts. The doctrinal questions in this area are rapidly evolving as of 2026, and several of the cases below have produced doctrines whose practical scope remains to be worked out.
Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer (1952), 343 U.S. 579
Holding: The president lacked constitutional authority to seize the nation's steel mills during the Korean War.
Vote: 6–3. Opinion by Justice Hugo Black; concurrences by Justices Frankfurter, Douglas, Jackson, and Burton; dissent by Chief Justice Vinson.
Background. Facing a steelworkers' strike that he believed would cripple Korean War production, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 10340 directing the Secretary of Commerce to seize and operate steel mills. The companies sued, seeking an injunction.
Reasoning. Black held that the president lacked statutory authority for the seizure (Congress had previously rejected such authority) and that the Constitution did not authorize it independently. Justice Jackson's concurrence — now more frequently cited than Black's majority opinion — articulated a tripartite framework: presidential power is at its peak when Congress has authorized the action; in a "zone of twilight" when Congress has neither authorized nor prohibited; and at its "lowest ebb" when Congress has prohibited. The steel seizure fell in the third category, given prior congressional rejection of seizure authority.
Significance. Youngstown and Jackson's concurrence remain the basic framework for analyzing assertions of presidential power in domestic affairs. Cited in nearly every modern executive-power decision (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 2004; Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 2006; Trump v. Hawaii, 2018), the Jackson framework is one of the most enduring concurrences in Supreme Court history.
Contested or settled? Settled framework; specific applications continue to develop.
See also: Chapter 9 (The Presidency), Chapter 11 (The Bureaucracy).
United States v. Nixon (1974), 418 U.S. 683
Holding: Executive privilege exists but is not absolute; it must yield to a demonstrated need for evidence in a criminal trial.
Vote: 8–0 (Justice Rehnquist recused). Opinion by Chief Justice Warren Burger.
Background. During the Watergate prosecutions, special prosecutor Leon Jaworski subpoenaed President Nixon's Oval Office tape recordings. Nixon resisted on executive-privilege grounds. The case reached the Supreme Court on an expedited basis.
Reasoning. Burger acknowledged that executive privilege has constitutional roots in the separation of powers, particularly for sensitive military and diplomatic communications. But the privilege is qualified, not absolute. When weighed against the Sixth Amendment rights of criminal defendants and the public interest in fair criminal trials, a generalized claim of confidentiality must yield. The tapes were ordered produced. Within sixteen days, Nixon resigned.
Significance. Nixon established that even the president is subject to legal process. The opinion's specific holding — qualified executive privilege subject to balancing against compelling judicial needs — has shaped every subsequent dispute over executive testimony, document production, and prosecutorial subpoena. The case is also a touchstone of the proposition that no one is above the law. Trump v. Vance (2020) extended Nixon's principle to state grand-jury subpoenas of presidential records.
Contested or settled? Settled.
See also: Chapter 9 (The Presidency), Chapter 12 (Federal Judiciary).
Chevron U.S.A. v. NRDC (1984), 467 U.S. 837
Holding: Courts must defer to a reasonable agency interpretation of an ambiguous statute the agency administers.
Vote: 6–0 (three justices not participating). Opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens.
Background. The Reagan EPA reinterpreted the Clean Air Act's "stationary source" definition to allow plant-wide netting of emissions ("bubble policy"). Environmental groups challenged the reinterpretation. Environmental groups, ironically, were challenging an interpretation that benefited polluters; the doctrine the case produced has been used in many directions since.
Reasoning. Stevens articulated a two-step framework. Step one: has Congress directly spoken to the precise question at issue? If yes, both court and agency must follow congressional intent. If no — if the statute is silent or ambiguous — step two: is the agency's interpretation a permissible (reasonable) construction of the statute? If so, the court must defer. The rationale: agencies have technical expertise, are politically accountable to the elected president, and operate within a delegation framework that legitimates their gap-filling choices.
Significance. Chevron became the most-cited Supreme Court case in administrative law and shaped the federal regulatory state for forty years. It allowed administrations to shift regulatory direction without legislation when statutes were ambiguous. Critics — including its eventual destroyer, the Roberts Court — argued that Chevron improperly transferred interpretive authority from courts (Article III) to executive agencies (Article II), compromising the judicial duty to "say what the law is" and concentrating power. Defenders argued that Chevron respected legislative intent (Congress writes ambiguous statutes precisely because it wants agencies to fill gaps), promoted accountability (agencies answer to elected officials, courts do not), and provided regulatory stability.
Contested or settled? Overruled by Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024).
See also: Chapter 11 (The Bureaucracy), Chapter 14 (Constitutional Interpretation).
Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), 603 U.S. 369
Holding: Chevron v. NRDC is overruled; courts must exercise independent judgment in interpreting statutes that agencies administer, without reflexive deference to agency interpretations.
Vote: 6–3. Opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts; dissent by Justice Elena Kagan.
Background. The National Marine Fisheries Service required commercial fishing vessels to pay for federal monitors. Loper Bright Enterprises and other fisheries challenged the rule, arguing the statute did not authorize the agency to impose the cost on regulated parties.
Reasoning. Roberts held that Chevron deference is incompatible with the Administrative Procedure Act's command that "the reviewing court shall... interpret constitutional and statutory provisions." Statutory interpretation is the province of the courts; deferring to agency interpretations conflicts with the judicial duty articulated in Marbury. Chevron was therefore overruled. Courts should still consider agency expertise as a matter of Skidmore-style respect (Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 1944) — to the extent agency reasoning is persuasive — but they should not defer reflexively. Kagan's dissent argued Chevron had been the bedrock of the modern administrative state, that Congress had legislated against the Chevron backdrop for forty years, and that the Court was upending settled expectations across the regulatory landscape.
Significance. Loper Bright is one of the most consequential administrative-law decisions in modern history. Its practical effect is rippling through every domain of federal regulation — environmental, financial, labor, healthcare, immigration. Whether the decision was correctly decided is genuinely contested. Defenders argue the decision restored the constitutional separation of powers and the proper judicial role; critics argue it transferred authority from politically accountable agencies to unelected federal judges and produced regulatory chaos. Lower courts are still working out the practical implications. Combined with West Virginia v. EPA (2022)'s major-questions doctrine and Jarkesy v. SEC (2024)'s limits on agency adjudication, Loper Bright is part of a broader doctrinal shift constraining federal agency authority.
Contested or settled? Recent and politically contested.
See also: Chapter 11 (The Bureaucracy), Chapter 14 (Constitutional Interpretation).
Trump v. United States (2024), 603 U.S. 593
Holding: A former president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his core constitutional powers, presumptive immunity for other official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts.
Vote: 6–3. Opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts; dissents by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson.
Background. Former President Donald Trump was indicted on federal charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He moved to dismiss on the ground that a former president cannot be criminally prosecuted for official acts taken in office. The district court denied the motion; the D.C. Circuit affirmed.
Reasoning. Roberts established a tripartite immunity framework. For actions within the president's core constitutional powers (e.g., directing the Department of Justice), immunity is absolute — even consideration of motive is forbidden. For other official acts (those at the periphery of presidential authority but still within official duties), the immunity is presumptive: prosecution is permissible only if it would not pose "any dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch." For unofficial acts, no immunity exists. The Court remanded for the district court to apply this framework. Sotomayor's dissent argued the framework had no constitutional grounding, that it placed the president "above the law," and that the absolute-immunity component for "core" functions was particularly indefensible. Jackson's dissent emphasized the long-term implications for accountability.
Significance. Trump v. United States substantially altered the constitutional framework for presidential criminal accountability. The decision effectively pushed any trial of the federal election-interference charges past the 2024 election. Whether the case was correctly decided is among the most contested questions in modern constitutional law. Defenders argue the framework appropriately protects the executive function from harassment and politically motivated prosecution; critics argue it placed the president outside ordinary criminal law and weakened a fundamental constraint on executive power. The decision's longer-term doctrinal consequences are still being worked out as of 2026.
Contested or settled? Recent, structurally significant, and politically contested.
See also: Chapter 9 (The Presidency), Chapter 14 (Constitutional Interpretation), Chapter 37 (Democratic Erosion).
A closing note on reading these cases
A textbook appendix is necessarily a digest. The cases above reward direct reading. Most are accessible to a careful nonspecialist; the controlling opinions tend to be clearer than later commentary suggests. Several — Marbury, Brown, Youngstown's Jackson concurrence, Carolene Products footnote 4 (not in this list, but relevant) — repay rereading throughout a political-science career.
When you encounter a case in this book, treat it as a portal: the brief discussion in a chapter and the entry in this appendix are an introduction. The full opinions, the dissents, the doctrinal scholarship that has accreted around each case, and the political contexts in which the cases were decided are where the substantive learning happens. Some of the cases above will be familiar from prior reading; some will be new. All are part of the constitutional architecture that structures American politics. Knowing them — knowing both what the Court held and how that holding has been received over time — is part of what it means to be literate in American government.