United States v. Virginia

518 U.S. 515 (1996), argued 17 Jan. 1996, decided 26 June 1996 by vote of 7 to 1; Ginsburg for the Court, Scalia in dissent; Thomas took no part in the consideration or the decision of the case since his son was a student at the Virginia Military Academy (VMI). By 1995 only two state‐supported all‐male military colleges existed in the United States: The Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina, and VMI, in Lexington, Virginia. In both instances, the colleges had excluded women from their ranks. VMI did so on the grounds that its “adversative” method of training was not appropriate for women. The Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had concluded that excluding women from a state‐supported military education violated the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws. In the case of VMI, however, the Fourth Circuit had accepted Virginia's plan to offer a military‐style education for women in the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership (VWIL) at Mary Baldwin College in nearby Staunton, Virginia. The Clinton administration then appealed this decision on the grounds that Virginia had actually made the situation worse by not even meeting the constitutionally discredited standard of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

Counsel for Virginia argued to the Supreme Court that single‐sex education offered distinctive advantages for men that would be fundamentally altered if women were admitted to the program. Women, Virginia argued, differed from men in their psychological and physical makeup. Men were better equipped for self‐reliance; women were better suited to relationships. Women could not and would not be able to perform under the “adversative” method of training that had become the hallmark of an education at VMI.

The United States countered by arguing that the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited a state from limiting individual rights by resorting to stereotypes. The government struck especially hard at the VWIL program set up for women who wanted military training, insisting that such a program not only denied the women the same facilities and training methods used by the men but it prevented them from demonstrating that they could ever succeed in the more rigorous environment of VMI. Finally, the government insisted that the Court should apply a standard of strict scrutiny, which had been applied to racial categories, in dealing with matters of gender discrimination.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's opinion for the Court brought an end to the 157‐year tradition of all‐male education at VMI. Ginsburg held that the practice violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. “While Virginia serves the state's sons,” Ginsburg wrote, “it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection.” Ginsburg also dismissed VWIL at Mary Baldwin College as distinctly inferior based on the quality of the faculty, the academic skills of the student body, and the physical facilities. The justice also reminded Virginia that women already attended the nation's military academies. “There is no reason,” Ginsburg concluded, “to believe that the admission of women capable of all the activities required of V.M.I. cadets would destroy the Institute rather than enhance its capacity. …”

Justice Antonin Scalia denounced the majority for destroying VMI, “an institution that has served the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia with pride and distinction for over a century and half. … I do not think any of us, women included, will be better off for its destruction.” Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who refused to sign Ginsburg's opinion, authored a concurring opinion that accepted the outcome but rejected the majority's rationale for reaching it. If, according to Rehnquist, VWIL had offered a program comparable to VMI's, he likely would have voted in support of it.

The VMI decision was viewed at the time as a test case for all single‐sex education, even private schools that receive public funds. Whether it will prove to be that sweeping, as Scalia warned in his dissent, remains to be seen. Strikingly, the Court refused to adopt a new standard for deciding the legality of any classification based on sex, continuing as a result to adhere to the “intermediate scrutiny” test rather than replacing it with a strict scrutiny standard. At the same time, Justice Ginsburg's decision does make clear that the traditional standard will be applied in a more forceful way. Government has, therefore, to produce an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for any classification based on sex. This principle is what Ginsburg termed “skeptical scrutiny.”

— Kermit L. Hall

• 518 U.S. 515 (1996)
• Vote: 7–1
• For the Court: Ginsburg
• Dissent: Scalia
• Not participating: Thomas

In 1990, a female student (never identified) in a Virginia public high school filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice. She charged the Virginia Military Academy (VMI), a state-supported institution of higher education, with illegal sex discrimination in violation of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.

In 1990, VMI and the Citadel in South Carolina were the only government supported all-male military colleges in the United States. Both institutions had long, proud records of distinguished service and achievement. And they were committed to the preservation of their venerable traditions, especially their men-only admissions policies. The time-honored principles and practices of VMI and the Citadel were suddenly and critically threatened by the legal complaint of an anonymous high school senior, who charged that the VMI office of admissions failed to acknowledge or respond to her application to attend the college. The case initiated by the 1990 complaint against VMI reached the U.S. Supreme Court after more than five years in lower federal courts.

After losing the first round in the federal district court, the U.S. Department of Justice took the case to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which decided that the all-male policy violated the 14th Amendment's guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” Instead of ordering immediate admission of women to VMI, however, the appeals court remanded the case to the district court of original jurisdiction to explore alternative remedies to the nullified admissions policy. In response, VMI created a plan to offer state-supported military education for women in the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership (VWIL), which it established at nearby Mary Baldwin College. The U.S. government appealed this outcome of the appellate court's decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The federal government's lawyers charged that the VWIL plan did not satisfy the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection. Further, they claimed it did not even meet the now discredited standard of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)—“separate but equal”—and thereby was a disgraceful attempt to avoid compliance with constitutional law.

Advocates for the state of Virginia defended the VWIL plan as an equitable alternative that provided new opportunities for women. At the same time, it preserved a hallowed and publicly useful tradition of all-male military education that had demonstrated its worth by producing leaders who, generation after generation, served the common good in Virginia and the United States. Further, the counsel for Virginia claimed that women were not capable of performing competently under the physically and psychologically stressful “adversative” method of training used at VMI.

The Issue

Does the 14th Amendment's guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” prohibit a state government from maintaining an all-male military college? Or is such a policy justified by serving important governmental objectives that contribute uniquely and compellingly to the common good?

Opinion of the Court

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's opinion ended the 157-year tradition of all-male education at VMI, and by extension at the Citadel in South Carolina. Justice Ginsburg wrote, “While Virginia serves the state's sons [at VMI] it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection” as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Ginsburg's opinion rejected Virginia's claim that the VWIL program at Mary Baldwin College provided an equal opportunity for the state's women. Further, the justice pointed out that women successfully attended and graduated from the United States Military Academy. This repudiated the Virginia counsel's claim that women could not meet standards at VMI suitable only for males. Justice Ginsburg concluded, “Women seeking and fit for a VMI-quality education cannot be offered anything else.” (Justice Thomas did not participate in the Court's decision because his son, Jamal, was a student at VMI.)

Dissent

Justice Antonin Scalia objected strongly to the Court's decision. He lamented, “Today the Court shuts down an institution that has served the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia with pride and distinction for over a century and a half.” He argued that single-sex public schools should and could be constitutionally permitted for those who wanted them.

Significance

The Court's opinion in the VMI case requires government to make an “exceedingly persuasive justification” based on a compelling public interest for the maintenance of a single-sex public school or even private school that receives public funds.

Both VMI and the Citadel complied with the Court's decision. VMI, however, did it reluctantly at first. The school's superintendent called the decision “a savage disappointment” and proposed that VMI should become a private school without obligation to comply with the Court's ruling in this case. But the VMI Board of Visitors rejected this proposal and approved the admission of women beginning in 1997.

United States v. Virginiaet al.,518 U.S. 515 (1996) redefined the standard for how state or federal governments determine constitutional and unconstitutional sex discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment. Previous to this case, the Supreme Court of the United States used an "intermediate" standard of scrutiny to determine that all discrimination based on sex by state and federal government violates the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, unless the government wishing to discriminate can show "important governmental objectives" for the discrimination, and that the discrimination is "substantially related" to achieving those objectives. The Supreme Court had already set a stricter standard for determining constitutional and unconstitutional discrimination based on race or national origin in 1976. The Court, however, had refused to institute the same strict standard for discrimination based on sex.

This case potentially raised the intermediate standard for sex discrimination closer to the strict standard for race and nationality discrimination by stating that, if the government of Virginia wished to discriminate based on sex, it must show an "exceedingly persuasive justification" rather than a "substantially related" justification. The Supreme Court found that the Virginia Military Institute, a state-funded, all male, military style, collegiate institution, could no longer deny women admission. The Court found that Virginia violated the Fourteenth Amendment under the Court's newly articulated sex discrimination standard, because Virginia's governmental objectives of single-sex educational benefits and diversity of education were not "exceedingly persuasive justification" for excluding women. They also found that the creation of a military-influenced program at a private women's college was an insufficient remedy.

The seven to one majority opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was written narrowly, and did not explicitly adopt the strict scrutiny standard for sex discrimination cases. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was uncertain whether the Court would use the newly articulated higher standard for determining unconstitutional and constitutional sex discrimination in other cases.

Bibliography

Ayres, Ian. Pervasive Prejudice? Unconventional Evidence of Race and Gender Discrimination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Baer, Judith A. Women in American Law. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1991.

Falk, Gerhard. Sex, Gender, and Social Change: The Great Revolution. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998. Sunstein, Cass R. One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

In United States v. Virginia, ___U.S. ___ , 116 S. Ct. 2264, 135 L. Ed. 2d 735 (1996), the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision on sex-based discrimination when it ruled that Virginia Military Institute (VMI), a publicly funded military college, must give up its all-male enrollment policy and admit women. The decision, which also affected The Citadel, South Carolina's state-run, all-male, military school, was a decisive blow to state-sponsored discrimination. In so ruling, the Court rejected a proposal by Virginia that it establish a separate military program for women at a private college.

The case began in 1990 when a female high school student complained to the U.S. Justice Department about VMI's male-only admission policy. Her application had been rejected without regard to her qualifications. The Justice Department sued the Commonwealth of Virginia and VMI, arguing that discrimination on the basis of sex violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The district court ruled in VMI's favor, grounding the decision on the need to preserve the "VMI experience," a physically and emotionally demanding military regimen that has remained unchanged since the early nineteenth century (United States v. Virginia, 766 F. Supp. 1407 [W.D. Va. 1991]). The court concluded that this "adversative" method of education could not work in a coeducational environment. The critical component of this method was the subjection of first-year students to the "rat line." First-year students are called "rats" because, as one expert testified, the rat is "probably the lowest animal on earth." During the first seven months of college, the rats are treated miserably.

Features of the rat line include "indoctrination, egalitarian treatment, rituals, minute regulation of individual behaviors, frequent punishment, and the use of privileges to support desired behaviors." Rats have no privacy. The tradition of constant supervision of cadets has led to stark, unaccommodating barracks without curtains, door locks, or other physical barriers that promote privacy.

The judge concluded that coeducation would prevent both men and women from undergoing the "VMI experience." The presence of women would "distract male students from their studies," while tending to "impair the esprit de corps and egalitarian atmosphere." The barracks would have to be modified to provide privacy, and the physical education requirements would have to be altered for women. If women were admitted, VMI would eventually drop the adversative model. Therefore, the judge ruled that VMI was "fully justified" in prohibiting women. The same-sex admission policy promoted diversity of educational opportunities because out of fifteen state-funded colleges and universities in Virginia, VMI alone had this policy. This diversity was a legitimate state objective that rebutted the claim of unequal protection of the law.

The Justice Department appealed the decision. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the decision and sent the case back to the district court (United States v. Virginia, 976 F.2d 890 [4th Cir. 1992]). In his majority opinion, Judge Paul Niemeyer accepted the district court's factual determinations that VMI's adversative model justified a single-sex admission policy and that critical elements of the model would be substantially changed if women were admitted. The appeals court also pointed out that all the parties acknowledged "the positive and unique aspects of the program."

The appeals court concluded, however, that the Commonwealth of Virginia had failed to "articulate an important objective which supports the provision of this unique educational opportunity to men only." Judge Niemeyer stated that the "decisive question" was why the state offered this educational opportunity only to men. The state was required to articulate an objective because of the type of constitutional review in this case. In lawsuits challenging sex discrimination by the government, the government must show that the sex-based classification is "substantially related to an important government objective."

The "unique benefit" offered by VMI did not answer the question of whether women could be denied admission under a policy of diversity. Judge Niemeyer found nothing in the record that explained why the Commonwealth of Virginia offered this unique benefit only to men. Though VMI had "adequately defended" its system, it had failed to identify or establish the existence of a government objective that justified its single-sex admission policy on the basis of educational diversity.

The appeals court remanded the case to the district court. Virginia then advanced a proposal to create a parallel program for women, called the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership (VWIL). VWIL would be located at Mary Baldwin College, a private liberal arts college for women. VMI would remain all-male. The district court accepted the plan (United States v. Virginia, 852 F. Supp. 471 [W.D. Va. 1994]). The Justice Department appealed again to the Fourth Circuit, but this time the appeals court upheld the remedial plan. The court concluded that Virginia's plan for single-gender options was a legitimate objective. It also found that VMI and VWIL would provide "substantively comparable" benefits (United States v. Virginia, 44 F.3d 1229 [4th Cir. 1995]).

The U.S. Supreme Court found no merit in the lower courts' justifications for maintaining VMI's male-only admission policy. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her majority opinion, essentially agreed with the first decision of the court of appeals, which found no basis for the male-only policy. In her view, "[n]either the goal of producing citizen-soldiers nor VMI's implementing methodology is inherently unsuitable to women."

Ginsburg rejected Virginia's contention that single-sex education yields educational benefits important enough to justify the exclusion of women from VMI. The generalizations about the differences between men and women that were offered to justify the exclusion of women were suspect. According to Ginsburg, the generalizations were too broad and stereotypical, and the predictions that VMI's stature would suffer if women were admitted were no more than self-fulfilling prophecies. The categorical exclusion of women from VMI denied equal protection to women.

The categorical exclusion was unnecessary because the VMI adversative method of training could be modified without destroying the program. In Ginsburg's view, "neither the goal of producing citizen-soldiers, VMI's raison d'|$$|Axetre, nor VMI's implementing methodology is inherently unsuitable to women."

The Court was also unimpressed with the creation of the VWIL as a remedy for the constitutional violation of equal protection. Justice Ginsburg noted numerous deficiencies, pointing out that VWIL afforded women no opportunity to "experience the rigorous military training for which VMI is famed." VWIL did not propose to use the adversative method, nor would the student body, faculty, course offerings, or facilities match VMI's. Ginsburg called the VWIL a "pale shadow" of VMI that would lack substantial equality with the all-male college.

Finally, the Court rejected the appeals court's "substantive comparability" test as plain error. The appellate court's "deferential analysis" did not accord with the "heightened scrutiny" test required when allegations of sex-based discrimination are made. Calling the VWIL remedy "substantially different and significantly unequal," Ginsburg noted that the court of appeals should have inquired as to whether the proposed remedy placed women who were denied the VMI advantage in the position they would have occupied in the absence of discrimination. The answer to this inquiry was clearly negative, thus invalidating the VWIL remedy. Ginsburg stated that "[w]omen seeking and fit for a VMI-quality education cannot be offered anything less under the state's obligation to afford them genuinely equal protection."

See: sex discrimination; women's rights.

United States v. Virginia
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued January 17, 1996 Decided June 26, 1996
Full case name	United States, Petitioner v. Virginia, et al.
Citations	518 U.S. 515 (more) 116 S. Ct. 2264; 135 L. Ed. 2d 735; 1996 U.S. LEXIS 4259; 64 U.S.L.W. 4638; 96 Cal. Daily Op. Service 4694; 96 Daily Journal DAR 7573; 10 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 93
Prior history	Judgment for defendants, 766 F. Supp. 1407 (W.D. Va. 1991) vacated, 976 F.2d 890 (4th Cir. 1992), certiorari denied, 508 U.S. 946 (1993, on remand, judgment for defendants, 852 F. Supp. 471 (W.D. Va. 1994), aff'd, 44 F.3d 1229 (4th Cir. 1995), motion for rehearing en banc denied, 52 F.3d 90 (4th Cir. 1995), certiorari granted ___ U.S. ____ (1995)
Holding
Commonwealth of Virginia's exclusion of women from the Virginia Military Institute violated Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Court membership
Chief Justice William Rehnquist Associate Justices John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy David Souter · Clarence Thomas Ruth Bader Ginsburg · Stephen Breyer
Case opinions
Majority	Ginsburg, joined by Stevens, O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Breyer
Concurrence	Rehnquist
Dissent	Scalia
Thomas took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV

United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996), is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the Virginia Military Institute's long-standing male-only admission policy in a 7-1 decision. (Justice Clarence Thomas recused himself from the case, presumably because his son was enrolled at VMI at the time.)

Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stated that because VMI failed to show "exceedingly persuasive justification" for its sex-biased admissions policy, it violated the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. In an attempt to satisfy equal protection requirements, the state of Virginia had proposed a so-called "separate but equal" parallel program for women, called the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership (VWIL), located at Mary Baldwin College, a private liberal arts women's college.

However, Justice Ginsburg held that the VWIL would not provide women with the same type of rigorous military training, facilities, courses, faculty, financial opportunities, and/or alumni reputation and connections that VMI affords male cadets, a decision evocative of Sweatt v. Painter, when the Court ruled in 1946 that segregated law schools in Texas were unconstitutional, since a newly-formed black law school clearly did not provide the same benefits to its students as the state's prestigious and long-maintained white law school.

Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote a concurrence agreeing to strike down the male-only admissions policy of the Virginia Military Institute, as violative of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.^[1][2] However, he declined to join the majority opinion's bases for using the Fourteenth Amendment, writing: "Had Virginia made a genuine effort to devote comparable public resources to a facility for women, and followed through on such a plan, it might well have avoided an equal protection violation."^[2] This rationale supported separate but equal facilities separated on the basis of gender: "it is not the 'exclusion of women' that violates the Equal Protection Clause, but the maintenance of an all-men school without providing any -- much less a comparable -- institution for women... It would be a sufficient remedy, I think, if the two institutions offered the same quality of education and were of the same overall caliber."^[2]

Justice Scalia's lone dissent argued that the standard applied by the majority was closer to a strict scrutiny standard than the intermediate scrutiny standard applied to previous cases involving equal protection based on sex. Notably, however the opinion for the Court eschewed either standard; its language did not comport with the "important governmental interest" formula used in prior intermediate scrutiny cases. Scalia argued that "if the question of the applicable standard of review for sex-based classifications were to be regarded as an appropriate subject for reconsideration, the stronger argument would be not for elevating the standard to strict scrutiny, but for reducing it to rational-basis review."

Justice Thomas did not participate because his son was attending the Virginia Military Institute at the time.

With the VMI decision, the high court effectively struck down any law which, as Justice Ginsburg wrote, "denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature — equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society."

Following the ruling, VMI contemplated going private to exempt itself from the 14th Amendment, and thus this ruling. The Department of Defense warned the school that it would withdraw all ROTC programs from the school if this privatization took place. As a result of the DOD action, Congress amended 10 USC 2111a, to prohibit the military from withdrawing or diminishing any ROTC program at one of the six senior military colleges, including VMI. However, VMI's Board of Visitors had already voted 8-7 to admit women and did not revisit the issue after the law was amended.

VMI was the last all-male public school in the United States.

Contents 1 See also 2 Further reading 3 References 4 External links

See also

• Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan

Further reading

• Bowsher, David K. (1998). "Cracking the Code of United States v. Virginia". Duke Law Journal 48 (2): 305–339. doi:10.2307/1373108. 
• Stobaugh, Heather L. (2002). "The Aftermath of United States v. Virginia: Why Five Justices are Pulling in the Reins on the ‘Exceedingly Persuasive Justification’". SMU Law Review 55: 1755–1779. ISSN 10661271. 

References

1. ^ United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996)
2. ^ ^{a b c} http://supreme.justia.com/us/518/515/case.html

External links

• Text of United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996) is available from:  · Enfacto · Findlaw · LII

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