Landmark Supreme Court Cases

The Constitution was written more than two centuries ago when slavery was the law of the land in half of the United States and women had few legal rights. In the first 160 years of the Court’s existence, the justices tended to reflect these biases, largely ruling to defend the interests of businesses and the wealthy elite rather than the general public.

But in the 1950s and 1960s, a change came. Many Americans rallied for protections for the civil rights and liberties of all people, regardless of race, gender, or sexuality. Congress passed legislation and constitutional amendments to enshrine evolving notions of equality into law. And the Supreme Court helped drive fundamental social change across the nation for a half century.

Its rulings during this period led to significant advances for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights, as well as the rights of criminal defendants, protesters, and the press. Yet more recent years have seen the Court backslide in many areas, with reduced protections for reproductive freedom, voting rights, and fair representation.

The following decisions show how the high court has wrestled with some of history’s biggest social, legal, and political issues.

The struggle for racial equality and social justice in the United States is ongoing, and the nation’s highest court has been at the center of some of the highest and lowest points in this fight. After handing down devastating decisions expanding slavery and blessing segregation, the justices attempted to reverse course, issuing rulings that achieved momentous gains for the civil rights of Black Americans.

Dred Scott v. Sandford

The Court’s most infamous decision, Dred Scott escalated the debate around slavery to a fever pitch and helped push the nation toward civil war.

At the heart of the case was Dred Scott, an enslaved Black man who sued to seek emancipation for himself and his wife and child. He argued that his family had gained their freedom by living in free states as well as in territories where slavery was banned under the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

The sweeping 7–2 opinion authored by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that Scott — along with all others of African descent, enslaved or free — was not a U.S. citizen and therefore lacked the right to even file a lawsuit. Taney asserted that the Constitution’s drafters considered African Americans inferior and would not have granted them the right of citizenship, leaving them unprotected by the federal government or courts.

This holding would have been damaging enough on its own, but Taney went further. He ruled that slaves were property, not citizens, stripping Congress of the authority to pass laws depriving slave owners of their human “property.” The ruling invalidated the Missouri Compromise and effectively barred Congress from legislating against slavery in any U.S. territory.

For Dred Scott, the aftermath was bittersweet. His family’s freedom was ultimately secured by the son of his former master, but the Supreme Court’s decision had profound consequences. It expanded the reach of slavery and inflamed tensions between the North and the South, contributing to the onset of the Civil War. Scott didn’t live to witness the reversal of the ruling, but his wife, Harriet, saw the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, which officially abolished slavery and granted citizenship to all individuals born in the United States.

Plessy v. Ferguson

Even after Black Americans won citizenship and voting rights through the post­–Civil War constitutional amendments, they faced relentless violence, intimidation, and myriad discriminatory practices that denied them true social equality.

In 1890, Louisiana passed a law requiring racially segregated accommodations on railroads. Outraged local activists planned to challenge the policy in court. Seeking a test case, they recruited Homer Plessy, who considered himself seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth Black but was deemed Black under Louisiana law.

Plessy purposefully defied the segregation law, sitting in the whites-only car of the East Louisiana Railroad and refusing to leave. As anticipated, he was arrested, and following years of failed lawsuits and appeals, his case wound up before the Supreme Court. His lawyer argued that Louisiana’s segregation law, along with other state laws like it, violated the 14th Amendment’s promise of equality.

The Court was unswayed. Justice Henry Billings Brown’s majority opinion reasoned that separate facilities for Black and white Americans were constitutional as long as they were “equal.”

In a lone dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan condemned the ruling for undermining the “color-blind” spirit of the U.S. Constitution, which “neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” He predicted that the decision would spur new attacks on the rights of Black citizens — words that proved prophetic.

Many Southern states seized on the “separate but equal” doctrine established in Plessy to implement Jim Crow laws, imposing rigid racial segregation in public spaces, schools, transportation, and many other aspects of daily life. This legal framework reinforced and institutionalized racial inequality and discrimination for the six decades that followed.

Brown v. Board of Education

In 1954, the Supreme Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The decision itself was transformative, and equally as remarkable is the fact that it was unanimous. This harmony was no accident — and it very nearly didn’t come to fruition.

The Court originally heard arguments in the five public school segregation cases packaged under Brown in 1952 under the leadership of Chief Justice Fred Vinson, who was reluctant to overturn the deeply entrenched “separate but equal” doctrine. When Vinson’s sudden death led to the appointment of charismatic politician Earl Warren, a staunch advocate for desegregation, the fate of the case took a turn.

Warren, aware that a divided Court would give segregationists ammunition to fight any order to integrate schools, spent months swaying each of his fellow justices to his side. In particular, he had multiple lunches aiming to win over Justice Stanley Reed, who initially contemplated dissenting for fear that a decision ending segregation would overstep the bounds of judicial power.

After months of top-secret deliberations among the justices, Warren crafted an opinion that he said must be short, readable, and nonaccusatory — the best way to minimize disagreements among the members of the Court as well as the public. Not only were Black and white public schools fundamentally unequal, Warren wrote, but forcing Black children to attend inferior schools damaged their self-esteem and was a violation of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

Justice Robert Jackson, who had planned to author a concurrence disagreeing with certain elements of the majority opinion, read the draft while recovering from a major heart attack in the hospital and declared it a “master work.” Just as Warren intended, his simple yet powerful words convinced all the justices to speak against racially segregated public education in one voice.

Of course, the civil rights triumph in Brown is not only a credit to Chief Justice Warren’s persuasive efforts. It was the culmination of the NAACP’s decades-long strategy to dismantle the legal foundation of segregation. Thurgood Marshall, who led the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, argued for the winning side and went on to become the first Black justice on the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, segregationists mounted a campaign of massive resistance against integration. The Court issued two more decisions ordering the implementation of Brown nationwide “with all deliberate speed,” but states exploited the ambiguous language to delay compliance for decades.

Loving v. Virginia

In the 1950s, interracial marriage was illegal in 17 states, including Virginia. So childhood sweethearts Mildred Jeter, who was Black and Native American, and Richard Loving, who was white, had to travel to Washington, DC, to be lawfully married. Soon after returning to their Virginia home, they were arrested for violating the state’s anti-miscegenation law. The couple pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in jail, which the judge agreed to suspend if the Lovings left the state for 25 years. Though they settled in Washington for a time, they were arrested five years later for returning to Virginia to visit family.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 spurred the Lovings to write to then–Attorney General Robert Kennedy for help with their case, which eventually caught the attention of the ACLU. In 1967, Loving v. Virginia reached the Supreme Court, which unanimously found Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law to be unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren’s opinion declared that the Virginia law and others like it served no rational purpose other than to reinforce racial discrimination. Moreover, he held that laws criminalizing interracial marriage were in clear violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

“Under our Constitution,” wrote Warren, “the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.”

Grutter v. Bollinger

In the 1960s and 1970s, civil rights groups finally succeeded in convincing companies and educational institutions to rectify centuries of educational and workplace discrimination and prioritize hiring, promoting, and admitting women and racial minorities. But these affirmative action policies were quickly challenged in court.

The Supreme Court was first called on to weigh in on the constitutionality of these initiatives in the 1978 case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. A white male applicant to the University of California, Davis, medical school argued he was unfairly denied admission because of the school’s strict racial quota system, which reserved 16 of the 100 spots for racial minorities. While the Court agreed that the system did violate the Equal Protection Clause and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as it meant some applicants would necessarily be rejected for their race alone, it held that a “narrowly tailored” consideration of race as part of a comprehensive admissions process was permissible.

Even after Bakke, challenges to the constitutionality of affirmative action programs persisted. In 1996, Barbara Grutter, a white Michigan resident, was rejected from the University of Michigan Law School, which had instituted an admissions policy four years earlier that considered applicants’ race. She sued the school for unfairly discriminating against her based on her race.

A 5–4 opinion authored by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 2003 upheld the university’s program, holding that “student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify using race in university admissions.” Nevertheless, the majority noted that it didn’t expect such race-conscious admissions policies to be permanent fixtures. “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

Clarence Thomas penned a blistering dissent. He had long been a vocal opponent of affirmative action programs, a view that some speculated stemmed from having been accused of securing his spot at Yale Law School and on the Supreme Court thanks to racial quotas rather than on merit. In Bakke, he argued that not only did any kind of race-based classification go against the Constitution, but it was demeaning to everyone, writing, “I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators.”

Thomas did, however, echo the majority in Grutter on one crucial point: that affirmative action policies in higher education admissions would end in 25 years. His prediction mostly came to pass — and ahead of schedule, too. 

Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College

The downfall of affirmative action in higher education can in part be traced to a campaign led by one man: Edward Blum, a stockbroker turned conservative legal activist with a vision to wipe out considerations of race from American law.

Blum’s crusade began in the early 1990s after he lost a congressional race in Texas and challenged the state’s redistricting for favoring voters of color. His efforts gained national attention when he helped bring the 2013 case of Shelby County v. Holder to the Supreme Court, which eliminated crucial protections against racial discrimination from the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In tandem with his attempts to reshape voting and election laws, he also targeted affirmative action on college campuses. After the Supreme Court dismissed his challenge to the University of Texas at Austin’s admissions policy, Blum’s legal advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) set its sights on Harvard College and the University of North Carolina, claiming their race-conscious admissions policies violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Additionally, SFFA and Asian American coalition groups alleged that Harvard’s policies illegally discriminated against Asian American applicants.

Lower courts sided with the universities, maintaining, consistent with the Grutter decision, that factoring in race as part of a holistic admissions process promoted diverse student bodies. But the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices ruled otherwise in 2023.

The Court held that the universities’ policies did not comply with its previous rulings allowing race to be considered only within “narrow restrictions” and therefore violated the Equal Protection Clause. What’s more, in a significant departure from precedents like Grutter, which upheld the value of diversity in education, Chief Justice John Roberts stated that courts have no way of measuring the educational benefits of diversity. (Justice Clarence Thomas put it more flippantly during oral arguments, quipping, “I’ve heard the word ‘diversity’ a few times, and I don’t have a clue what it means.”) As such, Roberts wrote, courts would have no way of knowing when to end “the perilous remedy of racial preferences.”

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor — who once called herself the “perfect affirmative action baby” — rejected the majority’s claim that the Constitution requires race neutrality. She accused the majority of turning a blind eye to systemic inequalities, noting that “ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal.”

The ruling sent shockwaves through higher education, leaving colleges scrambling to find new ways to maintain diversity without violating the Court’s newfound embrace of race neutrality.

Having cinched this long-sought victory for the conservative legal movement, Blum pushed forward with legal challenges to affirmative action policies at military academies and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the workplace.

In the 1970s, the ACLU hired Ruth Bader Ginsburg to spearhead its Women’s Rights Project. Just as the NAACP had done with segregation decades earlier, Ginsburg mapped out a detailed strategy for dismantling the legal framework of sexual discrimination that hinged on establishing protections for women’s rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. She participated in 34 sex discrimination cases argued before the Supreme Court and won five of the six cases in which she served as lead or co-counsel.    

Reed v. Reed

For her first case with the ACLU before the Supreme Court, Ginsburg looked for a state law that was in clear violation of the Equal Protection Clause. She found it in Reed v. Reed. After the death of divorced couple Sally and Cecil Reed’s adopted son, Idaho state law automatically appointed the husband as the administrator of their son’s estate. Sally sued the state, arguing that the Idaho law discriminated against women.

The justices agreed, siding unanimously with Sally Reed. But more than that, the Court recognized that laws like Idaho’s that enabled dissimilar treatment for men and women were, in the words of Justice Warren Burger, “the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

For Ginsburg and the Women’s Rights Project, Reed v. Reed set the stage for a string of Supreme Court rulings that struck down sexually discriminatory laws nationwide.

Roe v. Wade

Two years after Reed, the Supreme Court handed down one of its most consequential and controversial decisions affecting women’s rights. In the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, the justices were asked to decide if a near-total abortion ban in Texas was constitutional. The justices ruled 7–2 that the right to an abortion was protected by the Constitution’s implied “right to privacy.”

The road to Roe v. Wade was paved by several Supreme Court cases that addressed a woman’s right to birth control and reproductive care. The right to an abortion wouldn’t have been possible without the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized contraception by recognizing certain “inexplicit” rights contained in the Constitution, including an unspoken “right to privacy” that protected individuals and couples from government intrusion in their personal reproductive decisions.

In Roe, the justices held that this right to privacy or “liberty” was guaranteed by the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which protects against government actions that would “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist dissented, rejecting the idea that a “right to privacy” was guaranteed anywhere in the Constitution — an argument that ultimately prevailed in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which reversed Roe in 2022 and placed the fate of abortion rights back in the hands of the states.

United States v. Virginia

Two decades after leading the ACLU’s charge for women’s rights as an attorney, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was on the Supreme Court bench to hear United States v. Virginia in 1996. In question was whether the all-male Virginia Military Academy violated the constitutional rights of female applicants by denying them admission.

In perhaps her most important majority opinion, Ginsburg rejected the state’s argument that women could receive a comparable education at the newly formed Virginia Women’s Institute for Leadership. There was no compelling reason to deny women admission, Ginsburg wrote, except to imply that women were inherently inferior and not able to meet the all-male academy’s rigorous academic and physical standards. Due in part to Ginsburg’s earlier work as an advocate, that reasoning could not prevail.

The justices ruled 7–1 against Virginia Military Academy, holding that its admission practices violated the Equal Protection Clause. “[Sex] classification,” Ginsburg wrote in the Court’s opinion, “may not be used . . . to create or perpetuate the legal, social, and economic inferiority of women.”

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization

With Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing came the beginning of a new era at the Supreme Court. After decades of lobbying to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Court’s newly installed conservative supermajority upset nearly 50 years of precedent and eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion in 2022, setting off public backlash and a seismic shift in reproductive rights across the United States.

The issue began when Mississippi’s sole abortion provider challenged the constitutionality of a 2018 state law banning almost all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Lower courts sided with the health clinic, finding that the law contradicted Supreme Court precedent established in Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Nevertheless, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court chose to overturn those landmark decisions. It held that the Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion, as this right isn’t explicitly mentioned in the text, nor is it sufficiently “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition” to be considered an implied right under the Due Process Clause.

In the majority ruling, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the move would return the question of how to regulate abortion “to the people and their elected representatives.” Consequently, the United States is now a patchwork of reproductive rights, and state supreme courts have become major players in ongoing disputes over the issue.

A dissent by the three liberals on the Court called the opinion a “curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.” They warned that Dobbs also risked unsettling other individual rights and liberties rooted in the implied right to privacy, including the rights to same-sex marriage and contraception.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court recognized that the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the 14th Amendment protect the rights of Americans in ways that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, including by mandating racial integration in schools, women’s rights in the workplace, and access to contraception and abortion. But it took until the 21st century for the Court to begin extending those same rights and liberties to the LGBTQ+ community.

Bowers v. Hardwick

In 1982, when nearly half the country still had laws criminalizing homosexuality, a 29-year-old gay man successfully won a challenge against Georgia’s anti-sodomy law. His victory, however, was fleeting.

Michael Hardwick was charged with violating Georgia’s anti-sodomy law after a police officer, who went to his home to serve him an (expired) arrest warrant for a minor offense, stumbled upon him having sex with another man. Hardwick sued the state, arguing that the law was unconstitutional, and an appeals court sided with him. Looking to Supreme Court decisions on other matters involving bodily autonomy and procreation, such as Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut, the court ruled that the law impinged on Hardwick’s fundamental rights, as private, consensual sexual activities between adults were outside the sphere of government control.

But after Georgia’s attorney general appealed to the Supreme Court, the justices decided otherwise. In a 5–4 ruling that shocked civil rights and civil liberties advocates, the Court upheld the constitutionality of Georgia’s law. The majority declared there was no constitutional right to engage in homosexual sodomy, citing the long history of moral, legal, and social condemnation of same-sex relationships. In essence, it placed the state’s supposed interest in regulating what it deemed to be moral conduct over individual privacy rights.

Lawrence v. Texas

The Court’s reasoning had changed by 2003 when it heard Lawrence v. Texas. In 1998, Houston police were called to John Lawrence’s house on a false report of a weapons disturbance, where they found Lawrence having sex with another man. The men were arrested for violating Texas’s “Homosexual Conduct” law.

Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, appealed the case to the Supreme Court on the grounds that anti-sodomy laws such as Texas’s were unconstitutional. The justices ruled 6–3 for Lawrence, extending the Constitution’s implied privacy rights to the consensual and private intimate decisions of all American adults, regardless of sexual orientation.

“Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion. “The Texas statute furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual.”

Obergefell v. Hodges

In 1970, during the early days of the gay rights movement, law student Jack Baker and university librarian Michael McConnell applied for a marriage license and were denied by a Minnesota court clerk on grounds that only “persons of the opposite sex” could be married. They sued the state for discrimination, but their complaint was dismissed. They appealed again and again until their case, Baker v. Nelson, arrived at the Supreme Court. But in a one-sentence dismissal, the justices refused to hear it, citing no “substantial federal question.”

Four decades later, the social and political climate in the United States had changed. Same-sex marriage was legal in most states. And between 2012 and 2014, several same-sex couples sued state agencies in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee for refusing to recognize the legality of their marriages that were performed in other states. The cases split the circuit courts, so it was left to the Supreme Court to decide in Obergefell v. Hodges whether same-sex marriage was protected by the same constitutional principles as interracial marriage.

Unlike in Loving v. Virginia, this was not a unanimous decision. Some justices agreed that both the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses protect same-sex marriage. Others, including conservative justices Antonin Scalia and John Roberts, felt that the matter should be left to individual states, not the federal courts.

In a watershed 2015 decision, the justices voted 5–4 to declare all state bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, therefore legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. Writing the majority opinion, Justice Kennedy defended marriage as a “fundamental” American right and a “keystone of our social order.” In Obergefell, the petitioners asked for “equal dignity in the eyes of the law,” wrote Kennedy. “The Constitution grants them that right.”

Bostock v. Clayton County

A trio of cases asked the Court to consider whether existing protections against workplace discrimination extended to LGBTQ+ individuals. Gerald Bostock, the person who brought the titular case, was fired after 10 years as a child welfare services coordinator for Clayton County, Georgia. He claimed the county terminated him for “conduct unbecoming of its employees” after he joined a gay recreational softball league and was disparaged by coworkers over his sexual orientation.

His attempts to sue the county for discriminating based on his sexual orientation, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, failed repeatedly. Courts held that the statute, which prohibits employment discrimination “because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” did not apply to sexual orientation.

Two other cases brought by gay and transgender people similarly claimed that they had been wrongfully fired by employers due to their sexuality and gender identity, respectively. The justices ruled 6–3 in their favor in 2020, holding that Title VII does, in fact, protect LGBTQ+ people from workplace discrimination. As Justice Neil Gorsuch explained, “an employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex,” which is exactly the kind of sex-based discrimination that the statute explicitly forbids.

The freedom to express one’s views through speech or protest without fear of government censorship or retaliation is a hallmark of a functioning democracy. Today, this applies not only to everyday citizens but also to the press, which ensures that those in power are held accountable and that the public has access to reliable information and open debate. Even still, disagreements over what constitutes protected speech and what exceptions exist to First Amendment free speech rights are ongoing.

Schenck v. United States

During World War I, socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer distributed leaflets encouraging people to defy the military draft. Conscription orders, they claimed, violated the 13th Amendment’s prohibition against indentured servitude. Both were convicted of conspiring to violate the Espionage Act of 1917 by attempting to hijack recruitment efforts and incite military insubordination. Schenck and Baer appealed the decision, arguing that convicting them for opposing the draft violated their First Amendment free speech rights.

In a unanimous 1919 opinion authored by Civil War veteran Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., he upheld their conviction and stated that free speech rights aren’t absolute. In doing so, he established what is now known as the “clear and present danger” test. Using the example of a person falsely shouting “fire” in a theater and causing a panic, he held that speech is not protected when it can create dangerous circumstances that government has a right to prevent.

Holmes retreated from this standard in another case, Abrams v. United States, and Schenck’s “clear and present danger” test was overruled altogether in Brandenburg v. Ohio. Today, the test focuses on whether speech incites “imminent lawless action.”

New York Times Company v. Sullivan

First Amendment protections today may give media organizations a great deal of freedom, but that wasn’t the case in the 1960s when the rights of the press were severely restricted by state laws that shielded public figures from libel and defamation.

In 1960, the New York Times published a full-page advertisement from a private organization soliciting donations in support of Martin Luther King Jr. The advertisement singled out the Montgomery, Alabama, police department for its mistreatment of King and other civil rights protesters. In response, Montgomery Police Commissioner L.B. Sullivan sued the Times for libel, citing minor inaccuracies in the text of the advertisement, such as the number of times King was arrested.

An Alabama court awarded Sullivan $500,000 — equivalent to nearly $5 million in 2023. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which reversed the lower court’s ruling and delivered a victory for freedom of the press.

In a unanimous decision authored by Justice William J. Brennan Jr., the justices set a new, higher standard for libel claims. Plaintiffs must now prove “actual malice,” meaning a damaging statement was made with full knowledge that it was false and with reckless disregard for the truth. Unless a statement meets the “actual malice” test, no state libel law can infringe on the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press.

Tinker v. Des Moines

Another free speech case from the 1960s concerned the right of public school students to speak their minds. In 1965, a group of students in Des Moines, Iowa, decided to symbolically protest the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands to school.

When school principals heard about the plan, they immediately passed a rule that students wearing black armbands would be suspended. Five students were sent home from school for refusing to remove their armbands, including 13-year-old Mary Beth Tinker and her brother, 15-year-old John Tinker. Through their parents, the students sued the school district for violating their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and expression.

Four years later, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Supreme Court ruled 7–2 against the school. In his majority opinion, Justice Abe Fortas wrote that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” The opinion also established the “Tinker standard” allowing free expression at school as long as it doesn’t disrupt learning or infringe upon anyone else’s rights.

The Warren Court — named for the 15-year term of Chief Justice Earl Warren — ruled on several cases that guaranteed and expanded important rights for criminal defendants.

Gideon v. Wainwright

In 1961, Clarence Earl Gideon was arrested for allegedly breaking into and robbing a Florida pool hall. Gideon couldn’t afford a defense lawyer, so he asked the state to provide one for him. The judge informed him that under Florida law, attorneys were only provided for death penalty cases, not felonies. Gideon tried to defend himself but was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.

In a handwritten note, Gideon appealed his case to the Supreme Court, which had previously ruled in the 1942 case Betts v. Brady that states could refuse an attorney to an “indigent” defendant without violating their right to due process. The Court accepted Gideon’s appeal, and two years after his arrest, the justices issued a reversal.

In a unanimous decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, the Court held that the Sixth Amendment guarantee of counsel is a fundamental right, and the 14th Amendment extends that right to defendants in state courts, including those charged with felony offenses. Writing the opinion, Justice Hugo Black explained that “reason and reflection require us to recognize that in our adversary system of criminal justice, any person hauled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.”

Miranda v. Arizona

Civil rights and civil liberties are best protected if everyday citizens are aware of those rights. In Miranda v. Arizona in 1966, the Supreme Court considered four separate cases where defendants confessed to crimes after they were arrested and interrogated by police without being informed of their right to have an attorney present.

The named petitioner in the landmark case was Ernesto Miranda, who was arrested by Phoenix police and charged with kidnapping and rape. Miranda was not informed of his right to counsel, and after a two-hour interrogation, he signed a confession admitting to the crimes. He was found guilty and sentenced to 20 to 30 years in prison. On appeal, his court-appointed lawyer argued the confession shouldn’t be admissible since it wasn’t truly voluntary.

In a 5–4 decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren agreed that the interrogation had violated the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination. The ruling established the procedural safeguards police must obey to protect this right. The now-famous words of the Miranda warning spoken by police during arrest are taken straight from Warren’s opinion and have been immortalized in countless films and TV shows through the decades.

Article II of the Constitution presents only a barebones outline of the duties, rights, and privileges of the executive branch, including the office of the president, so Congress and the Supreme Court have wide latitude to define the scope and limitations of executive power. Debates over the president’s authority and privilege often arise when the country finds itself embroiled in national emergencies, war, and — perhaps most famously during the Nixon administration — corruption scandals.

United States v. Nixon

In the summer of 1974, President Richard Nixon was in legal hot water. A grand jury had indicted seven members of his administration and reelection campaign, including his attorney general, for their role in the Watergate scandal. A special prosecutor investigating the break-in at the Democratic Party’s Watergate headquarters filed a subpoena to access Nixon’s secret recordings of Oval Office conversations known as the “White House tapes.” These were widely believed to be the smoking gun connecting Nixon to the cover-up of his administration’s involvement in the burglary and the obstruction of the FBI’s investigation.

Nixon refused to hand over the tapes, arguing that executive privilege allowed him to keep confidential the communications of the executive branch and granted him immunity from judicial review. The question went to the Supreme Court, which had to return from its summer recess to hear the historic case.

In a unanimous decision, the Court ruled against Nixon, rejecting his claim to absolute presidential privilege and ordering him to produce the tapes. Confidentiality, wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger, “cannot prevail over the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of criminal justice.”  Nonetheless, legal experts acknowledge that the decision in some ways significantly expanded executive power, as it was the first time the Supreme Court recognized the existence of executive privilege, which had been a controversial proposition for decades.

Guantanamo Bay Cases

In the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush launched the War on Terror to dismantle terrorist networks and prevent future attacks. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. and allied forces captured hundreds of individuals, often with little evidence to suspect that they were members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and detained them at the U.S. naval base of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The legality of these detentions, the rights of the detainees, and the interrogation methods used were called into question in four pivotal Supreme Court cases that examined how to balance national security with individual liberties.

Hamdi v. Rumsfeld

In 2001, U.S. troops detained American citizen Yaser Hamdi in Afghanistan for allegedly fighting for the Taliban. Initially held at Guantanamo Bay, Hamdi was designated an enemy combatant — a legal status used by the George W. Bush administration to enable the military to indefinitely detain individuals. In addition, they were deemed to be “unlawful” combatants, thus allowing the administration to argue they were not entitled to the rights typically afforded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

Three months into his detention, officials transferred Hamdi to a Virginia military prison after learning he was a U.S. citizen. Hamdi argued that detaining him indefinitely and denying him access to an attorney and a trial violated his Fifth Amendment due process rights. On Hamdi’s behalf, his father filed a writ of habeas corpus, in which a person asks a court to decide if they have been wrongfully detained. The government defended its actions on national security grounds, arguing that courts should defer to the executive branch’s wartime decisions.

In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that U.S. citizens retain their due process rights and habeas corpus protection, even if declared enemy combatants. Accordingly, they must be granted a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for their detention before a neutral decisionmaker. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, “A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens,” affirming that courts’ role in checking the executive branch is crucial even in wartime.  

Rasul v. Bush

On the same day the Court ruled on citizen detainees, it handed down a ruling addressing whether non-U.S. citizens held at Guantanamo Bay could also challenge their detention.

The families of four noncitizens held at Guantanamo filed habeas petitions under a statute authorizing courts to hear such claims, arguing that their indefinite detention without charges or judicial review violated their due process rights. The government contended that, because the detainees were being held in Cuba, U.S. courts lacked jurisdiction under the habeas statute.

The Supreme Court disagreed, ruling 6–3 in consolidated cases known as Rasul v. Bush that while Cuba had sovereignty over its territory, the U.S. government had complete jurisdiction and control over the Guantanamo base, meaning detainees had a statutory right — one that did not depend on their citizenship — to challenge their detention in U.S. courts.

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld

Yemeni citizen Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver, was captured in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo Bay. He was tried and designated an enemy combatant by a special military commission set up by the Bush administration. Human rights advocates raised concerns that the commissions violated constitutional rights, as defendants had limited access to legal representation and were not allowed to see the evidence against them.

Hamdan petitioned for his release, claiming that his detention, the military commissions, and the conditions at Guantanamo Bay violated the Geneva Conventions’ protections for prisoners of war. Lower courts upheld the commissions, finding that the president had inherent constitutional authority to establish them.

In 2006, five justices of the Supreme Court held that the military commissions were unconstitutional because the president’s authority, at most, extended to convening military commissions that complied with U.S. military and international laws. The justices found that the administration’s military commissions were inconsistent with the U.S. military’s Code of Justice and the Geneva Conventions.

The Court’s decision seemed to be a win for detainees’ civil rights, but its effects were not long lasting. Congress passed a series of laws, including the Military Commissions Act, that expressly authorized the military commissions while making it nearly impossible for those held at Guantanamo to challenge their detentions.

Boumediene v. Bush

Bosnian police detained Lakhdar Boumediene and five other Algerian nationals in 2002 under suspicion of plotting an attack on the U.S. embassy in Bosnia. They were transferred to Guantanamo Bay and labeled as enemy combatants. Boumediene challenged his detention by filing a habeas corpus petition, but it was initially denied because he was not a U.S. citizen.

The Supreme Court’s Rasul ruling should have cleared the way for Boumediene’s petition to be reviewed, but the Military Commissions Acts of 2006 complicated things. The law barred enemy combatants from filing habeas claims in Article III courts. Boumediene contended that military commissions did not provide an adequate substitute for habeas, and therefore this law violated the Suspension Clause of the Constitution, which states that “the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in favor of Boumediene. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy stated that the right to habeas corpus is so fundamental to the Constitution that its protection in Article I, Section 9, even predates the Bill of Rights. He noted that the Military Commissions Acts also raised separation of powers concerns, writing, “To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will . . . would . . . lead[] to a regime in which Congress and the President, not this Court, say ‘what the law is.’” While acknowledging that courts need to defer to the executive and legislative branches in some matters of national security, Kennedy stressed that protecting core American principles, like freedom from unlawful detention, is equally crucial for maintaining a just and constitutional government.

Trump v. Hawaii

Following the Supreme Court’s conservative shift in 2017, it issued a vigorous defense of executive power in a case centered on President Donald Trump’s controversial “travel bans.”

On the 2016 campaign trail, Trump promised that one of his first actions in office would be a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” As president, Trump took a major step toward making good on his pledge. Among his first executive orders was a temporary ban on all travelers, refugees, and asylum seekers from seven majority-Muslim countries: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. When that order was blocked by the courts, he issued a second version, but it met with a similar fate.

To sidestep accusations that he was targeting Muslim countries, Trump issued a third proclamation restricting travel from eight countries. The list included two non-majority-Muslim nations — North Korea and Venezuela — alongside Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. The revised ban, which was framed as a response to national security concerns, was challenged before the Supreme Court.

The justices were asked to consider whether the president could legally restrict entry into the United States of travelers and asylum seekers from specific countries, most of which had majority-Muslim populations. Opponents claimed that such a move would violate U.S. immigration law and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which bars religious discrimination. They cited a mountain of evidence that the national security justification for the ban was pretextual and that the ban was in fact motivated by animus against Muslims.

In a 5–4 decision, an ideologically split Court ruled in favor of Trump and affirmed the executive branch’s broad discretion in matters of national security. The majority opinion rejected comparisons between Trump’s travel ban and Japanese internment during World War II, as both Muslim and non-Muslim nations were included in the ban, while several Muslim-majority nations were excluded. The Court also held that it must uphold the ban as long as it was “plausibly related” to the government’s “stated objective” to protect the country, even if evidence indicated that the government’s stated objective was a pretext.

In a passionate dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized the majority for its narrow reading of Trump’s proclamation and for ignoring Trump’s stated reason for the travel bans as a candidate. “The United States of America is a Nation built upon the promise of religious liberty,” she wrote, and “the Court’s decision . . . fails to safeguard that fundamental principle.” 

Trump v. United States

Travel bans were far from the only Trump-related controversy in which the Supreme Court was asked to intervene. In 2024, the Court sided with Trump in a landmark decision that dramatically reshaped the landscape of presidential power.

The ruling came against the tumultuous backdrop of Trump’s post-presidency legal battles. After losing the 2020 election, Trump falsely claimed that the election had been stolen from him, despite numerous court rejections and affirmations from his own officials about the election’s integrity. His baseless claims culminated in the January 6, 2021, insurrection, when his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the certification of election results and block the peaceful transfer of power.

Trump was indicted over these events in 2023, making him the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges. His defense hinged on a novel claim: he was immune from prosecution for actions he took while in office because they were part of his “official acts” as president. Lower courts rejected this argument, affirming that presidential immunity did not extend to criminal conduct.

However, in a shocking twist, the six members of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority ruled in Trump’s favor. The opinion established that presidents enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution for their “official acts,” which it defined very broadly. For instance, the decision treated Trump’s efforts to coerce the attorney general into bringing prosecutions for nonexistent voter fraud as “official acts.” In areas where the president is acting within his “exclusive sphere” of constitutional authority — that is, where Congress has no authority to act — that immunity is absolute. In areas where the president and Congress share power, that immunity may be only “presumptive,” but the Court set an extremely high bar for overcoming the presumption.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent was a forceful rebuttal to the majority’s decision. She warned of the dangerous precedent set by the ruling, arguing that it effectively allows presidents to break the law with impunity. The justice painted a stark picture of the potential for abuse, stating that under the majority’s reasoning, a president could theoretically commit severe illegal acts, such as ordering the assassination of political rivals or orchestrating a coup, without facing legal consequences.

“Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done,” she wrote. “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” Her poignant conclusion, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” underscored the profound and unsettling implications of the ruling for the future of American governance.

The Court’s decision in Trump v. United States marked a significant expansion of presidential privilege, raising urgent questions about the balance between executive power and accountability.

While the Court plays a vital role in safeguarding First Amendment rights, in more recent history, it has extended broad free speech protections to corporations and political campaigns in ways that have been detrimental to democracy.

Buckley v. Valeo

Amid public demands to curb the influence of money in politics after the Watergate scandal, Congress sought to overhaul campaign finance regulations. The result was the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974, which set caps on campaign contributions and expenditures and established new record-keeping and disclosure rules. (It wasn’t the first time that a presidential scandal prompted campaign finance reform. Revelations about President Theodore Roosevelt’s big corporate donors in 1904 sparked such public outrage that it inspired the passage of the Tillman Act banning direct corporate contributions to political campaigns altogether.)

Congress’s reform efforts were stymied when Sen. James Buckley of New York, presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, and several others challenged the new regulations as being unconstitutional. The Supreme Court largely agreed.

In a decision with a far-reaching impact on our campaign finance system, the Court struck down the limits on campaign spending. Its rationale rested on a fundamental premise: money spent in the political process is a form of speech. Consequently, it ruled that curbing expenditures amounted to restricting political speech itself. The decision greenlit unlimited campaign spending so long as there wasn’t a compelling government interest justifying a restriction. (Enabling equal political participation by wealthy and non-wealthy Americans alike was not deemed a compelling enough interest.)

The Court did, however, uphold the limits on contributions to political campaigns, ruling that they were necessary for countering “the reality or appearance of improper influence” that large donors could have on candidates. It’s worth noting that even these restrictions were deemed excessive by a dissenting Justice William Rehnquist, who argued that all limits on political contributions and expenditures were unconstitutional infringements on free speech.

The principle that, in the context of elections, money equals speech was further solidified in subsequent Supreme Court decisions that opened the floodgates to big money in politics.

Citizens United v. FEC

For more than 100 years, U.S. law prohibited corporations and unions from making direct monetary contributions to national political campaigns, with the goal of preventing corruption and protecting the interests of everyday Americans from being overshadowed by entities with greater spending power. Additionally, the Federal Election Campaign Act made it illegal for a corporation to produce “electioneering communications” — a TV advertisement or flier, for example — within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election.

As such, the Federal Election Commission stepped in after the conservative nonprofit group Citizens United made a political documentary in 2008 called Hillary: The Movie that portrayed Hillary Clinton, then a senator and primary candidate for president, in an unflattering light. The FEC barred the group from airing and promoting the film, arguing it violated the prohibitions on electioneering communications by corporations.

In Citizens United v. FEC, however, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United in a 5–4 decision that declared nearly all limitations on corporate free speech to be unconstitutional. The 2010 ruling allowed corporations and wealthy donors to spend unlimited funds on TV advertisements and other election materials as long as they acted independently of the candidate and their campaign.

Citizens United has enabled the creation of super PACs that have contributed billions of dollars in largely untraceable “dark money” to political campaigns, giving wealthy special interests outsize influence over elections.

Since as early as 1876, the Supreme Court has actively scaled back hard-won voting rights for communities that have historically faced obstacles to the ballot box. For decades, it upheld poll taxes, literacy tests, and other measures specifically designed to suppress voters of color, and its decisions promoting free and fair elections are few and far between. Though the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 offered advocates hope for preventing discriminatory voting policies, the Court has spent the past 15 years watering down the law’s protections.

Reynolds v. Sims

In the 1960s, many states were still using legislative districts that were drawn several decades years earlier. The population in urban areas had grown much faster than in rural areas, but the maps were never redrawn to reflect those population shifts. As a result, people living in cities had far less political representation than people living out in the country.

When those skewed districts were challenged before the Supreme Court, justices debated whether they should intervene, preferring to leave political issues to the states. But in a series of cases known as the Reapportionment Cases, the Warren Court provided a constitutional justification for requiring states to create more fairly representative districts at the federal, state, and local levels.

The 1964 case of Reynolds v. Sims involved a challenge to the constitutionality of Alabama’s legislative maps, which hadn’t been redrawn since 1900. The state argued that it was within its authority to maintain districts that favored rural voters, but Chief Justice Warren forcefully disagreed.

“Legislators represent people, not trees or acres,” Warren wrote in the majority opinion. “As long as ours is a representative form of government, and our legislatures are those instruments of government elected directly by and directly representative of the people, the right to elect legislators in a free and unimpaired fashion is a bedrock of our political system.”

While Reynolds v. Sims and other reapportionment cases didn’t explicitly address the barriers faced by Black voters in the segregated South, they laid the legal groundwork for “one person, one vote” to apply to all Americans regardless of race and fueled the pro-democracy movement.

Shelby County v. Holder

In 1965, Congress and President Lyndon Johnson followed the Warren Court’s lead and passed the Voting Rights Act, which put an end to poll taxes, literacy tests, and other Jim Crow–era practices that disenfranchised Black voters. Section 2 of the law allowed people to challenge racially discriminatory policies in court. And Section 5 required states with a history of racially discriminatory voting practices to get federal government approval (known as preclearance) for any changes to their voting policies. The latter was a crucial safeguard, as it meant that communities did not have to wait months or years for courts to grant them relief from harmful policies. Instead, restrictive voting policies could be blocked before they were enacted. In 2013, however, the Supreme Court gutted these protections in Shelby County v. Holder.

Authorities in one of the jurisdictions covered by preclearance — Shelby County, Alabama — challenged the constitutionality of the requirement, arguing that the formula for identifying historical racial discrimination was outdated and placed an unfair burden on the affected states and counties. In a controversial 5–4 decision, the justices agreed, citing higher voter turnout numbers among Black voters in the 2012 election as proof that there was no longer enough of a justification to continue requiring the covered jurisdictions to get special approval for voting rule changes.

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lambasted her colleagues in the majority for missing the entire point of the law. “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” she wrote.

Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee

Freed from the requirement to get federal permission to change their voting policies, dozens of states passed nearly 100 laws making it harder to vote in the decade after Shelby County. Roughly one-third of those could likely have been blocked by Section 5. Two of those laws were passed in Arizona and were the subject of another consequential Supreme Court decision addressing a separate key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits any state law that infringes on a person’s right to vote and participate in the political process based on their race. With Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act effectively put on pause by Shelby County, voting rights advocates relied heavily on Section 2 to challenge racially discriminatory voting laws. But that tactic, too, took a hit in 2021 with Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee.

At issue in the case were two voting laws passed by the Arizona legislature: one that ordered state election officials to throw out ballots cast in the wrong precinct and another that made it a crime for anyone other than a close relative to drop off an absentee ballot for another voter. Both laws were successfully challenged for unfairly targeting racial and ethnic minorities and therefore violating Section 2.

The Supreme Court disagreed with those findings. In a 6–3 decision, the conservative majority rejected the claim that Arizona’s voting laws exceeded the “usual burdens of voting” or that they unfairly targeted racial minorities. It effectively rewrote the Voting Rights Act by considering factors that hadn’t previously been included in Section 2 lawsuits, such as whether a state has increased voting opportunities since Section 2 was last amended in 1982. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan called the majority’s decision “tragic” and chastised her colleagues for setting a dangerous precedent in an era when voting rights are under attack.

“The court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses,” she wrote.

Dave Roos is a journalist and podcaster based in Boise, Idaho.

With thanks to Sasha Jones and Katelin Wong for their contributions to the piece.