Loving v. Virginia: Information from Answers.com Mobile

Loving v. Virginia

388 U.S. 1 (1967), argued 10 Apr. 1967, decided 12 June 1967 by vote of 9 to 0; Warren for the Court, Stewart concurring. In Pace v. Alabama (1883), the Court upheld an Alabama law that punished interracial fornication more severely than when the partners were of the same race. Since both partners were punished equally, it said, there was no violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This became known as the “equal discrimination” or “equal application” exception.

Later cases, such as Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), refused to apply it, however, and it was clearly inconsistent with the principle of racial nondiscrimination enunciated in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). But the Court was reluctant to address formally this very sensitive issue head on, recognizing that, coming on the heels of Brown, prohibiting laws against racial intermarriage would only further inflame southern resistance (Naim v. Naim, 1955). The doctrine was finally repudiated in the Loving case.

Loving, a white man who had married a black woman, challenged his conviction under the Virginia antimiscegenation law, which prohibited and punished racial intermarriage. Virginia was then one of sixteen southern states that had such laws. In the previous fifteen years, fourteen states had repealed laws outlawing interracial marriages. Chief Justice Earl Warren, for a unanimous Court, invalidated the law as an invidious racial classification prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Warren held that “under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State” (p. 12). In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Justice Anthony Kennedy, in the majority opinion, ruled on states' ability to establish a particular moral standard and then create criminal penalties for violating that standard. He asserted that “[the fact] that the governing majority in a state has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice; neither history nor tradition could save a law prohibiting miscegenation from constitutional attack.”