United
States History
Selected
Landmark Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court
1803: Marbury v. Madison.
The Court ruled that Congress exceeded its power in the Judiciary Act of
1789; thus, the Court established its power to review acts of Congress and
declare invalid those it found in conflict with the Constitution.
1819: McCulloch v. Maryland.
The Court ruled that Congress had the authority to charter a national
bank, under the Constitution's granting of the power to enact all laws
"necessary and proper" to exact the responsibilities of government.
The Court also held that the national bank was immune to state taxation.
1819: Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward. The Court ruled that a state could not
arbitrarily alter the terms of a college's contract. (In later years the Court
widened the implications by using the same principle to limit the states'
ability to interfere with business contracts.)
1857: Dred Scott v. Sanford.
The Court declared unconstitutional the already-repealed Missouri
Compromise of 1820 because it deprived a person of his property-a slave-without
due process of law. The Court also ruled that slaves were not citizens of any
state nor of the U.S. (The latter part of the decision was overturned by
ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868.)
1896: Plessy v. Ferguson.
The Court ruled that a state law requiring federal railroad trains to
provide separate but equal facilities for black and white passengers neither
infringed upon federal authority to regulate interstate commerce nor violated
the 13th and 14th Amendments. (The "separate but equal" doctrine remained
effective until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.)
1904: Northern Securities Co. v. U.S. The Court ruled that a holding company formed solely to
eliminate competition between two railroad lines was a combination in restraint
of trade, thus a violation of the federal antitrust act.
1908: Muller v. Oregon. The
Court ruled to uphold a state law limiting the maximum working hours of women.
(Instead of presenting legal arguments, Louis D. Brandeis, counsel for the
state, brought forth evidence from social workers, physicians, and factory
inspectors that the number of hours women worked affected their health and
morals.)
1911: Standard Oil. Co. of New Jersey et al. v. U.S. The Court ruled that the Standard Oil
Trust must be dissolved because of its unreasonable restraint of trade, not
because of its size.
1919: Schenck v. U.S. In its
first decision regarding the extent of protection afforded by the First
Amendment, the Court sustained the Espionage Act of 1917, maintaining that
freedom of speech and press could be constrained if "the words used are in
such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present
danger. . ."
1925: Gitlow v. New York.
The Court ruled that the First Amendment prohibition against government
abridgement of the freedom of speech applied to the states as well as to the
federal government. The decision was the first of a number of rulings holding
that the 14th Amendment extended the guarantees of the Bill of Rights to state
action.
1935: Schechter Poultry Corp. v. U.S. The Court ruled that Congress exceeded its authority to
delegate legislative powers and to regulate interstate commerce when it enacted
the National Industrial Recovery Act, which afforded the U.S. president too
much discretionary power.
1951: Dennis et al. v. U.S.
The Court upheld convictions under the Smith Act of 1940 for speaking
about communist theory that advocated the forcible overthrow of the government.
1957 Yates v. U.S. decision, the Court moderated this ruling by allowing
such advocacy in the abstract, if not connected to action to achieve the goal.)
1954: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The Court ruled that separate public schools for black and
white students were inherently unequal, thus state-sanctioned segregation in
public schools violated the equal protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment.
And in Bolling v. Sharpe the Court ruled that the congressionally-mandated
segregated public school system in the District of Columbia violated the Fifth
Amendment's due process guarantee of personal liberty. (The Brown ruling also
led to the abolition of state-sponsored segregation in other public
facilities.)
1957: Roth v. U.S., Alberts v. California. The Court ruled that obscene material was not protected by
the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and press, defining obscene
as "utterly without redeeming social value" and appealing to
"prurient interests" in the view of the average person. (This
definition, the first offered by the Court, was modified in several subsequent
decisions, and the "average person" standard was replaced by the
"local community" standard in the 1973 Miller v. California case.)
1961: Mapp v. Ohio. The
Court ruled that evidence obtained in violation of the 4th Amendment guarantee
against unreasonable search and seizure must be excluded from use at state as
well as federal trials.
1962: Engel v. Vitale. The
Court ruled that public school officials could not require pupils to recite a
state-composed prayer at the start of each school day, even if the prayer was
non-denominational and pupils who so desired could be excused from reciting it,
because such official state sanction of religious utterances was an
unconstitutional attempt to establish religion.
1962: Baker v. Carr. The
Court held that the constitutional challenges to the unequal distribution of
voters among legislative districts could be resolved by federal courts,
rejecting the doctrine set out in Colegrove v. Green in 1946 that such
apportionment challenges were "political questions."
1963: Gideon v. Wainwright.
The Court ruled that the due process clause of the 14th Amendment
extended to state as well as federal defendants, thus all persons charged with
serious crimes must be provided with an attorney, and states were required to
appoint counsel for defendants unable to pay their own attorneys' fees.
1964: New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. The Court ruled that the First Amendment guarantee of
freedom of the press protected the press from libel suits for defamatory
reports on public officials unless the officials proved that the reports were
made from actual malice. The Court defined malice as "with knowledge that
(the defamatory statement) was false or with reckless disregard of whether it
was false or not."
1965: Griswold v. Conn. The
Court ruled that a state unconstitutionally interfered with personal privacy in
the marriage relationship when it prohibited anyone, including married couples,
from using contraceptives.
1966: Miranda v. Arizona.
The Court ruled that the guarantee of due process required that before
any questioning of suspects in police custody, the suspects must be informed of
their right to remain silent, that anything they say may be used against them,
and that they have the right to counsel.
1973: Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton. The Court ruled that the right to
privacy inherent in the 14th Amendment's due process guarantee of personal
liberty protected a woman's decision whether or not to bear a child, and was
impermissibly abridged by state laws that made abortion a crime. During the
first trimester of pregnancy, the Court maintained, the decision to have an
abortion should be left entirely to a woman and her physician.
1974: U.S. v. Nixon. The
Court ruled that neither the separation of powers nor the need to preserve the
confidentiality of presidential communications could alone justify an absolute
executive privilege of immunity from judicial demands for evidence to be used
in a criminal trial.
1976: Gregg v. Georgia, Profitt v. Fla, Jurek v. Texas. The Court held that death, as a
punishment for persons convicted of first degree murder, was not in and of
itself cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the 8th Amendment. The
Court also ruled that the Amendment required the sentencing judge and jury to
consider the individual character of the offender and the circumstances of the
particular crime before deciding whether or not to impose the death sentence.
In the associated Woodson v. N.C.,
Roberts v. LA., the Court ruled that states could not make death the
mandatory penalty for first-degree murder, since that would fail to meet the
constitutional requirement for the consideration of the individual offender and
offense.
1978: Regents of Univ. of Calif. v. Bakke. The Court ruled that a special admissions program for a
state medical school under which a set number of places were set aside for
minority group members, with white applicants denied the opportunity to compete
for those seats, violated Title XIV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids
the exclusion of anyone, because of race, from participation in a federally-funded
program. The Court also ruled that admissions programs that considered race as
one of a complex of factors involved in the decision to admit or reject an
applicant were not unconstitutional.
1979: United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, Kaiser Aluminum v. Weber, U.S.
v. Weber. The Court ruled that
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids racial discrimination in
employment, did not forbid employers to adopt voluntarily race-conscious
affirmative action programs to encourage minority participation in areas in
which they traditionally were underrepresented.
1986: Bowers v. Hardwick.
The Court refused to extend the right of privacy inherent in the
Constitution to homosexual activity, upholding a Georgia law that made sodomy a
crime. (Although the Georgia law covered heterosexual sodomy as well as
homosexual sodomy, enforcement in Georgia and most other states had been
confined to homosexual activity.)
1990: Cruzan v. Missouri.
The court ruled that a person had the right to refuse life-sustaining
medical treatment. However, the Court also ruled that such treatment could not
be withheld from comatose patients unless there was "clear and convincing
evidence" that the person would not have wanted to live under those
conditions.
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