1. Loving v. Virginia, (1967)
2. Facts: A Virgina statute prohibits interracial marriages between whites and blacks. The appellants are an interracial couple who went to D.C. to get married and then returned to Virginia.
3. Procedural Posture: Appellants were convicted, but the trial judge suspended their sentence for 25 years on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years.
4. Issue: Whether forbidding interracial marriages is a violation of the equal protection clause.
5. Holding: Yes.
6. ∆ Argument: The meaning of equal protection is that state penal laws must apply equally to whites as well as blacks in the sense that each member is punished equally. The intent of the framers of the 14th amendment does not show that they intended to make miscegenation laws unconstitutional.
7. Majority Reasoning: This law is based on the promotion of white supremacy, and the purity of the white race. There is no support in the historical context for the proposition that equal protection meant only that penal laws must apply equally to both races. The racial classification here triggers the “most rigid scrutiny”, meaning that they must be shown to be necessary to the accomplishment of some permissible state objective. There is no legitimate purpose here. Restricting the freedom to marry based on racial classifications violates the central meaning of equal protection.
8 Concurrence Reasoning: [Stewart] “ it is simply not possible for a state law to be valid under our Constitution which makes the criminality of an act depend upon the race of the actor.”
