Would you like to make this site your homepage? It's fast and easy...
Yes, Please make this my home page!
U.S. Supreme Court
HARPER v. VIRGINIA BD. OF ELECTIONS, 383 U.S. 663 (1966)
383 U.S. 663
HARPER ET AL. v. VIRGINIA BOARD OF ELECTIONS ET AL.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT
OF VIRGINIA. No. 48.
Argued January 25-26, 1966.
Decided March 24, 1966.*
Notions of what constitutes equal treatment for purposes of the Equal Protection
Clause do change. This Court in 1896 held that laws providing for separate public
facilities for white and Negro citizens did not deprive the latter of the equal
protection and treatment that the Fourteenth Amendment commands. Plessy v. Ferguson,
163 U.S. 537. Seven of the eight Justices then sitting subscribed to the Court's
opinion, thus joining in expressions of what constituted unequal and discriminatory
treatment that sound strange to a contemporary ear.6 When, in 1954 - more than
a half-century later - we repudiated the "separate-but-equal" doctrine
of Plessy [383 U.S. 663, 670] as respects public education7 we stated: "In
approaching this problem, we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the Amendment
was adopted, or even to 1896 when Plessy v. Ferguson was written." Brown
v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 492.
We have long been mindful that where fundamental rights and liberties are asserted
under the Equal Protection Clause, classifications which might invade or restrain
them must be closely scrutinized and carefully confined. See, e. g., Skinner
v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541; Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 561-562; Carrington
v. Rash, supra; Baxstrom v. Herold, ante, p. 107; Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U.S.
536, 580-581 (BLACK, J., concurring).
The Equal Protection Clause prevents States from arbitrarily treating people
differently under their laws. Whether any such differing treatment is to be
deemed arbitrary depends on whether or not it reflects an appropriate differentiating
classification among those affected, the clause has never been thought to require
equal treatment of all persons despite differing circumstances. The test evolved
by this Court for determining whether an asserted justifying classification
exists is whether such a classification can be deemed to be founded on some
rational and otherwise constitutionally permissible state policy. See, e. g.,
Powell v. Pennsylvania, 127 U.S. 678; Barrett v. Indiana, 229 U.S. 26; Walters
v. City of St. Louis, 347 U.S. 231; Baxstrom v. Herold, ante, p. 107. This standard
reduces to a minimum the likelihood that the federal judiciary will judge state
policies in terms of the individual notions and predilections of its [383 U.S.
663, 682] own members, and until recently it has been followed in all kinds
of "equal protection" cases.3
