Landmark Cases

Case Decided: March 6, 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) denied blacks citizenship under the Constitution and invalidated the Missouri Compromise, Congress’ effort to balance slave and free states. The Court’s 7-2 ruling held that a black man—no matter free or slave—could never be a U.S. citizen or sue in federal courts. Born a slave, Dred Scott traveled with his owner, army doctor John Emerson, from the slave state of Missouri to Illinois and Wisconsin (a free state and territory) before returning to St. Louis. Three years after Dr. Emerson died in 1843, Scott sued to win his freedom. He asserted that he became free once he set foot on free soil. Chief Justice Roger Taney, in his opinion for the Supreme Court, stated that Scott’s race barred him from citizenship and legal recourse. The Chief Justice further concluded that it was unconstitutional for an act of Congress to designate free territories. Taney intended his decision to solve the slavery question, but it had the opposite effect, further inflaming tensions between North and South and hastening the Civil War. It is widely regarded as the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court.

Case Decided: April 14, 1873 The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) limited the “privileges and immunities” of U.S. citizenship guaranteed by the newly enacted Fourteenth Amendment. At a time when many rights were given and regulated by states rather than the federal government, the Court’s decision applied the Amendment only to those rights explicitly spelled out in the Constitution. In 1869, the Louisiana state legislature granted a monopoly of the New Orleans slaughtering business to a single corporation. Local butchers operating separate slaughtering businesses sued Louisiana under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges and Immunities Clause. The butchers argued that the state unconstitutionally deprived them of the "privilege" of operating slaughterhouse companies and prevented them from earning a living. The Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that the Privileges and Immunities Clause was not violated by the monopoly. The clause only affected the rights of U.S. citizenship, not state citizenship. By designating the rights of state citizens as beyond federal protection, this decision opened the door for Jim Crow laws in the post-Reconstruction South.

Case Decided: April 17, 1905 Lochner v. New York (1905) is the namesake case of the “Lochner Era,” in which the Court struck down many state and federal regulations on working conditions. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that a New York law limiting the number of hours a baker could work violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guaranteed “liberty of contract.” New York passed the Bakeshop Act in 1895 to improve sanitation and limit bakery employees to a sixty-hour work week. Bakery owner Joseph Lochner ran afoul of the law when his employee worked longer hours than legally permitted. After appeals to New York courts, Lochner took his case to the Supreme Court, which found that the Bakeshop Act infringed on his right to enter into a contract with his worker. In a 5-4 decision overturning the law, the Court recognized a “freedom of contract,” finding the act outside the police powers of the state. By the 1930s the Court began to reject “substantive due process” for economic regulations, but it became the basis for protecting personal rights like privacy in the 1960s.

Case Decided: March 3, 1919 Schenck v. United States (1919) helped define the limits of the First Amendment right to free speech, particularly during wartime. It created the “clear and present danger” standard, which explains when the consequences of speech allow the government to limit it. In this case, the Court chose to unanimously uphold activist Charles Schenck’s conviction after he distributed leaflets urging young men to resist the draft during World War I. As general secretary of the Socialist Party in Philadelphia, Schenck prepared leaflets that urged young men to “assert your rights” in the face of conscription. In the midst of the First World War, the U.S. government regarded calls for draft resistance as dangerous to national security. Charles Schenck was arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917, which prohibited “disloyal” acts. He was convicted and appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that his actions were protected as part of his First Amendment freedom of speech. A wartime Court felt differently and ruled to uphold the Act. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in this famous opinion, compared Schenck’s actions to “falsely shouting fire in the theatre and causing a panic.” This expression is still widely used as an example of the limits of free speech.

Case Decided: December 18, 1944 In Korematsu v. United States (1944), the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 vote, upheld the government’s forceful removal of 120,000 people of Japanese descent, 70,000 of them U.S. citizens, from their homes on the West Coast to internment camps in remote areas of western and midwestern states during World War II. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in December 1941 prompted anti-Japanese sentiment across the country and fears that Japanese Americans on the West Coast were still loyal to Japan. In response to these fears, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the War Department to remove persons of Japanese ancestry from their homes and confine them to internment camps. American-born Fred Korematsu refused to leave his home in California. He tried to avoid capture and relocation, but when he was eventually caught, he challenged his conviction, arguing that internment was a violation of his constitutional rights. In the Court’s 6-3 decision, Justice Hugo Black acknowledged that racial discrimination is “immediately suspect” but said that interning Japanese Americans was within the war powers of Congress and the president. Fred Korematsu’s conviction was eventually overturned in 1983, and in 1998, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton.

Case Decided: June 2, 1952 Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer (1952) significantly curbed executive power when the Court overturned President Truman’s seizure of steel mills during the Korean War. The Court ruled 6-3 that the President’s actions were unconstitutional because they had not been authorized by Congress. By deciding that the Constitution gives Congress and not the president this authority, the Court affirmed the “separation of powers” essential to American government. In 1952, nearly two years into U.S. involvement into the Korean War, the United Steel Workers of America clashed with industry managers and threatened to strike for higher wages. Steel was an integral part of the war effort, and President Truman felt he couldn’t risk a halt in production. Rather than using labor laws passed by Congress to avert a strike, he ordered his secretary of commerce, Charles Sawyer, to seize and operate the steel mills. Appeased, the union called off the strike, but the steel companies immediately fought back against the President’s seizure of their property. The Court sided with the companies, concluding that nothing in the Constitution authorized the president to seize property in wartime without approval from Congress. While cases like Schenck and Korematsu point to the expanded powers of the executive branch during wartime, Youngstown serves as a reminder that these powers have their limits.

Case Decided: May 17, 1954 Brown v. Board of Education (1954) struck down the doctrine of “separate but equal” established by the earlier Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson. In Brown, the Court ruled racial segregation in public schools inherently unequal and unconstitutional based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Even though Linda Brown lived just blocks away from an all-white elementary school, she had to walk across railroad tracks and catch a bus to an all-black school farther away. In 1951, her father, Oliver Brown, joined with other black parents in Topeka and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to sue the local board of education, challenging school segregation. NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who went on to become the Supreme Court’s first African American justice, argued that segregated schools could never be equal. The Supreme Court, in its unanimous opinion, agreed. The justices were influenced by the famous “doll experiments,” which demonstrated the psychological impacts of internalized racism on black children. The Court ruled that segregation itself was harmful and a violation of the constitutional right to equal protection under the law. The decision prompted a backlash across the South but also contributed to a watershed moment in the civil rights movement that struck down segregation laws during the 1960s.

Case Decided: March 26, 1962 Baker v. Carr (1962) established the right of federal courts to review redistricting issues, which had previously been termed "political questions" outside the courts' jurisdiction. The Court’s willingness to address legislative reapportionment in this Tennessee case paved the way for the “one man, one vote” standard of American representative democracy. The early 1900s saw both population increases and rapid urban migration in America. In Tennessee, while people flocked to cities like Memphis, the legislative districts stayed the same. Although more people were voting in urban areas, they still had the same amount of political representation as rural districts with significantly fewer residents. In 1960, roughly two-thirds of Tennessee’s representatives were being elected by one-third of the state’s population. A group of urban voters including Memphis resident Charles Baker sued Tennessee Secretary of State Joseph Carr for more equal representation. In a 6-2 decision, Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause was valid grounds to bring a reapportionment lawsuit. This decision opened the floodgates for similar lawsuits that redrew election maps around the country.