Final Flashcards
A strong state interest in protecting women’s health justified state limits on the working hours of women. Expert reports on the harmful physical, economic, and social effects of long working hours on women heavily influenced Brewer’s ruling that physical and social differences between the sexes warranted a different rule respecting labor contracts. Female inequality and inferiority to men demanded legislative protection that superceded distinctions of gender that could have been deemed unconstitutional.
Muller v. Oregon (1908)
Minimum wage law for women violates the due process right to contract freely.
Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923)
Bakers. The state’s regulation of the working hours of bakers was not a justifiable restriction on the right to freedom of contract under the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of liberty. Police powers have been overstepped because it must be in the name of public safety or public good.
Lochner v. New York (1905)
State establishment of a minimum wage law for private employees is constitutional. Employers and women employees, in particular, are unequal in their negotiation of contract. States must regulate these contracts in the name of public welfare.
West Coast Hotel v. Parish (1937)
A woman’s right to practice law is not protected under the privileges and immunities clause of the fourteenth amendment. While the Court agreed that all citizens enjoy certain privileges and immunities which individual states cannot take away, it did not agree that the right to practice law in a state’s courts is one of them. There was no agreement, argued Justice Miller, that this right depended on citizenship. In his concurrence, Justice Bradley went above and beyond the constitutional explanations of the case to describe the reasons why it was natural and proper for women to be excluded from the legal profession. He cited the importance of maintaining the “respective spheres of man and woman,” with women performing the duties of motherhood and wife in accordance with the “law of the Creator.”
Bradwell v. Illinois (1873)
A state law prohibiting women from being licensed as a bartender unless she was the wife or daughter of the bar owner did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the fourteenth amendment. The Constitution does not prevent the States from distinguishing between the sexes or to utilize sociological insight anymore than it prevents them from using scientific insight. The Court cannot influence Michigan legislators in their use of police power.
Goesaert v. Cleary (1948)
A state statute automatically exempted women from jury duty and did not place women on jury lists, however women could register and volunteer for jury duty. The Court found this statute constitutional since women were still the center of home and family life, and should not be prevented from their domestic responsibilities in favor of their civic ones. This was distinguished from Strauder v. West Virginia using a different level of scrutiny, and claiming that male-female disproportions on jury lists carried no constitutional significance.
Hoyt v. Florida (1961)
A state statute preferencing males over females in the administrators of estates is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other, merely to accomplish the elimination of hearings on the merits, is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause.
Reed v. Reed (1971)
Government statutes that subject husbands of servicewomen to evaluations as to military spousal benefits, but do not subject the wives of servicemen to the same evaluations are unconstitutional. Any statutory scheme which draws a sharp line between the sexes solely for the purpose of achieving administrative convenience necessarily commands dissimilar treatment for men and women who are similarly situated. Majority included gender as a suspect class subject to strict scrutiny. The concurrence introduced the concept of intermediate scrutiny, disagreeing that sex should join race and national origin as a suspect class subject to intermediate scrutiny, and warned prudentially against the ruling at the time the ERA was up for state ratification.
Frontiero v. Richardson (1973)
A state law that established different drinking laws for men and women violated the Equal Protection Clause because it failed to demonstrate that its use of sex-based criteria was substantially related to the achievement of important government objectives. In their ruling, the Court established a new standard for review in gender discrimination cases known as intermediate scrutiny that was more demanding than rational basis, but less demanding than strict scrutiny.
Craig v. Boren (1976)
The Supreme Court has jurisdiction over individual challenges to state statutes that make gender distinctions. Statutes that grant alimony only to women violate the Equal Protection Clause because classifications by gender must serve important governmental objectives, and gender was not an accurate proxy for financial need.
Orr v. Orr (1979)
Intentional discrimination on the basis of gender by state actors through peremptory strikes in jury selection violates the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. Parties may remove jurors whom they feel might be less acceptable than others on the panel; gender simply may not serve as a proxy for bias.
J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel., T.B. (1994)
A state’s male-only admissions policy did not satisfy the equal protection clause because it failed to show exceedingly persuasive justification for the school’s gender-biased admissions policy. It failed to show that the school’s male-only admissions policy was created or maintained in order to further educational diversity. Additionally, their all-female alternative did not offer women the same benefits as men. Thirdly, the Court found that the Fourth Circuit’s “substantive comparability” standard was a displacement of the Court’s more exacting standard that required that “all gender-based classifications today” be evaluated with “heightened scrutiny” and that when evaluating it with “heightened scrutiny” the state’s plan to provide women with the same opportunities would fail to meet the requirements. Use of intermediate scrutiny with teeth.
United States v. Virginia (1996)
A state statute that prevented men from enrolling in a state nursing school violated the equal protection clause. The state failed to provide exceedingly persuasive justification for the gender-based distinction and was unpersuasive in their argument that it provided affirmative action for women. The majority argued that the statute, rather than equalizing educational opportunities for women, perpetuated stereotypes of women in the field of nursing.
Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan (1982)
A state statute which allowed for sexual sterilization of inmates did not violate the constitution since sterilization could not occur until a proper hearing had occurred and after the Circuit Court of the County and of the Supreme Court of Appeals had reviewed the case. The Court deferred to the best interests of the state in stating that these laws prevent the nation from being swamped with incompetence.
Buck v. Bell (1927)
A state law that prohibited the teaching of modern foreign languages to grade school children violated the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. It violated the liberty that exceeded freedom of bodily restraint, and included liberty to teach or employ a teacher during a time of “peace and domestic tranquility”. The state claimed that the legislative purpose of the law was to promote assimilation and civic development, but this was not compelling enough to interfere with the liberty of the persons involved. Since there was no reasonable relation to a proper state objective in prohibiting the teaching of the language, it was ruled unconstitutional.
Meyer v. Nebraska (1923)
A state’s compulsory education act that required attendance at public schools, forbidding private school attendance, was held unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The unanimous Court held that “the fundamental liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”
Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925)
