MATHEWS v. LUCAS 427 U.S. 495 (1976 )

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The Social Security Act provides that a child of an individual who died fully insured under the Act, is entitled to surviving child's benefits if the child is under 18, or a student under 22, and was dependent at the time of the parent's death. A child is considered dependent if the insured parent was living with him or contributed to the child's support at the time of death. Certain children, however, need not submit such individualized proof of dependency. Unless adopted by some other person, a child who is legitimate or would be entitled to inherit from the insured parent under state law is considered dependent at the time of the parent's death, or even lacking this relationship under state intestacy law is entitled to a presumption of dependency if the decedent before death had gone through a marriage ceremony with the other parent, resulting in a purported marriage which, but for a nonobvious defect, would have been valid, or had acknowledged in writing that the child was his, or had been decreed by a court to be the child's father, or had been ordered by a court to support the child because the child was his. After their father died, appellee illegitimate children were administratively denied surviving children's benefits on the ground that they failed to show dependency by proof that their father lived with them or was contributing to their support at the time of his death, or by any of the statutory presumptions of dependency. After this ruling was upheld on administrative appeal, appellees filed an action for review against appellant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, alleging that the denial of benefits violated the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment because other children, including all legitimate children, are statutorily entitled, as appellee children are not, to survivors' benefits regardless of actual dependency. The District Court held that the statutory classifications were constitutionally impermissible, reversing the administrative decision and ordering that benefits be paid to the children. Held:

Although the District Court concluded that close judicial scrutiny of the statute's classifications was not necessary to its conclusion invalidating those classifications, it also concluded that legislation treating legitimate and illegitimate offspring differently is constitutionally suspect,8 390 F. Supp., at 1318-1319, and requires the judicial scrutiny traditionally devoted to cases involving discrimination along lines of race9 or national origin.10 Appellees echo this approach. We disagree.11 [427 U.S. 495, 505]

It is true, of course, that the legal status of illegitimacy, however defined, is, like race or national origin, a characteristic determined by causes not within the control of the illegitimate individual, and it bears no relation to the individual's ability to participate in and contribute to society. The Court recognized in Weber that visiting condemnation upon the child in order to express society's disapproval of the parents' liaisons

"is illogical and unjust. Moreover, imposing disabilities on the illegitimate child is contrary to the basic concept of our system that legal burdens should bear some relationship to individual responsibility or wrongdoing. Obviously, no child is responsible for his birth and penalizing the illegitimate child is an ineffectual - as well as an unjust - way of deterring the parent." 406 U.S., at 175. (Footnote omitted.)

But where the law is arbitrary in such a way, we have had no difficulty in finding the discrimination impermissible on less demanding standards than those advocated here. New Jersey Welfare Rights Org. v. Cahill, 411 U.S. 619 (1973); Richardson v. Davis, 409 U.S. 1069 (1972); Richardson v. Griffin, 409 U.S. 1069 (1972); Weber, supra; Levy v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 68 (1968). And such irrationality in some classifications does not in itself demonstrate that other, possibly rational, distinctions made in part on the basis of legitimacy are inherently untenable. Moreover, while the law has long [427 U.S. 495, 506] placed the illegitimate child in an inferior position relative to the legitimate in certain circumstances, particularly in regard to obligations of support or other aspects of family law, see generally, e. g., H. Krause, Illegitimacy: Law and Social Policy 21-42 (1971); Gray & Rudovsky, The Court Acknowledges the Illegitimate: Levy v. Louisiana and Glona v. American Guarantee & Liability Insurance Co., 118 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1, 19-38 (1969), perhaps in part because the roots of the discrimination rest in the conduct of the parents rather than the child,12 and perhaps in part because illegitimacy does not carry an obvious badge, as race or sex do, this discrimination against illegitimates has never approached the severity or pervasiveness of the historic legal and political discrimination against women and Negroes. See Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677, 684-686 (1973) (plurality opinion).
We therefore adhere to our earlier view, see Labine v. Vincent, 401 U.S. 532 (1971), that the Act's discrimination between individuals on the basis of their legitimacy does not "command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process," San Antonio School Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 28 (1973), which our most exacting scrutiny would entail.13 See Jimenez, 417 U.S., at 631-634, 636; Weber, 406 U.S., at 173, 175-176. [427 U.S. 495, 507]