The Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution addresses rights, retained by the people, that are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. It is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment was introduced during the drafting of the Bill of Rights when some of the American founders became concerned that future generations might argue that, because a certain right was not listed in the Bill of Rights, it did not exist. However, the Ninth Amendment has rarely played any role in U.S. constitutional law, and until the 1980s was often considered "forgotten" or "irrelevant" by many legal academics.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. Often considered as one of the most consequential amendments, it addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War. The amendment was bitterly contested, particularly by the states of the defeated Confederacy, which were forced to ratify it in order to regain representation in Congress. The amendment, particularly its first section, is one of the most litigated parts of the Constitution, forming the basis for landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) regarding racial segregation, Roe v. Wade (1973) regarding abortion, Bush v. Gore (2000) regarding the 2000 presidential election, and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) regarding same-sex marriage. The amendment limits the actions of all state and local officials, and also those acting on behalf of such officials.
Hugo Lafayette Black was an American lawyer, politician, and jurist who served as a U.S. Senator from Alabama from 1927 to 1937 and as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1937 to 1971. A member of the Democratic Party and a devoted New Dealer, Black endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt in both the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections. Before he became a Senator, Black espoused anti-Catholic views and was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, from which he resigned in 1925. In 1937, upon being appointed to the Supreme Court, Black said: "Before becoming a Senator I dropped the Klan. I have had nothing to do with it since that time. I abandoned it. I completely discontinued any association with the organization." Black served as the Secretary of the Senate Democratic Conference and the Chair of the Senate Education Committee during his decade in the Senate. Having gained a reputation in the Senate as a reformer, Black was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Roosevelt and confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 63 to 16. He was the first of nine Roosevelt appointees to the court, and he outlasted all except for William O. Douglas.
Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects the liberty of married couples to buy and use contraceptives without government restriction. The case involved a Connecticut "Comstock law" that prohibited any person from using "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception". The court held that the statute was unconstitutional, and that its effect was "to deny disadvantaged citizens ... access to medical assistance and up-to-date information in respect to proper methods of birth control." By a vote of 7–2, the Supreme Court invalidated the law on the grounds that it violated the "right to marital privacy", establishing the basis for the right to privacy with respect to intimate practices. This and other cases view the right to privacy as "protected from governmental intrusion".
Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that most sanctions of criminal punishment for consensual, adult non-procreative sexual activity are unconstitutional. The Court reaffirmed the concept of a "right to privacy" that earlier cases had found the U.S. Constitution provides, even though it is not explicitly enumerated. It based its ruling on the notions of personal autonomy to define one's own relationships and of American traditions of non-interference with private sexual decisions between consenting adults.
Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld, in a 5–4 ruling, the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults, in this case with respect to homosexual sodomy, though the law did not differentiate between homosexual and heterosexual sodomy. It was overturned in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), though the statute had already been struck down by the Georgia Supreme Court in 1998.
Substantive due process is a principle in United States constitutional law that allows courts to establish and protect certain fundamental rights from government interference, even if only procedural protections are present or the rights are unenumerated elsewhere in the U.S. Constitution. Courts have asserted that such protections come from the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibit the federal and state governments, respectively, from depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Substantive due process demarks the line between those acts that courts hold to be subject to government regulation or legislation and those that courts place beyond the reach of governmental interference. Whether the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendments were intended to serve that function continues to be a matter of scholarly as well as judicial discussion and dissent. In recent opinions, Justice Clarence Thomas has called on the Supreme Court to reconsider all of its rulings that were based on substantive due process.
A Due Process Clause is found in both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, which prohibit the deprivation of "life, liberty, or property" by the federal and state governments, respectively, without due process of law.
John Marshall Harlan was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1955 to 1971. Harlan is usually called John Marshall Harlan II to distinguish him from his grandfather, John Marshall Harlan, who served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1877 to 1911.
Wolf v. Colorado, 338 U.S. 25 (1949), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held 6—3 that, while the Fourth Amendment was applicable to the states, the exclusionary rule was not a necessary ingredient of the Fourth Amendment's right against warrantless and unreasonable searches and seizures. In Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383 (1914), the Court held that as a matter of judicial implication the exclusionary rule was enforceable in federal courts but not derived from the explicit requirements of the Fourth Amendment. The Wolf Court decided not to incorporate the exclusionary rule as part of the Fourteenth Amendment in large part because the states which had rejected the Weeks Doctrine had not left the right to privacy without other means of protection. However, because most of the states' rules proved to be ineffective in deterrence, the Court overruled Wolf in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961). That landmark case made history as the exclusionary rule enforceable against the states through the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the same extent that it applied against the federal government.
The People v. Ronald Onofre, 51 N.Y.2d 476, 415 N.E.2d 936, 434 N.Y.S.2d 947 (1980), was an appeal against New York's sodomy laws, decided in the New York Court of Appeals.
Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that established the right of unmarried people to possess contraception on the same basis as married couples.
Twining v. New Jersey, 211 U.S. 78 (1908), was a case of the U.S. Supreme Court. In this case, the Court established the Incorporation Doctrine by concluding that while certain rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights might apply to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, the Fifth Amendment's right against self-incrimination is not incorporated.
Catherine Gertrude Roraback was a civil rights attorney in Connecticut, best known for representing Estelle Griswold and Dr. C. Lee Buxton in the famous 1965 Supreme Court case, Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized the use of birth control in Connecticut and created the precedent of the right to privacy. She is also known for such cases as the New Haven Black Panther trials of 1971, in which she defended Black Panther member Ericka Huggins after she was accused of murder. Roraback dealt with issues such as women's rights and racial discrimination, and lived her life to defend the rights of the "dissenters and the dispossessed".
Tileston v. Ullman, 318 U.S. 44 (1943), was a United States Supreme Court case.
Carey v. Population Services International, 431 U.S. 678 (1977), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court held that it was unconstitutional to prohibit anyone other than a licensed pharmacist to distribute nonprescription contraceptives to persons 16 years of age or over, to prohibit the distribution of nonprescription contraceptives by any adult to minors under 16 years of age, and to prohibit anyone, including licensed pharmacists, to advertise or display contraceptives.
Estelle Naomi Trebert Griswold was a civil rights activist and feminist most commonly known as a defendant in what became the Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, in which contraception for married couples was legalized in the state of Connecticut, setting the precedent of the right to privacy. Griswold served as the Executive Director of Planned Parenthood in New Haven when she and Yale professor C. Lee Buxton opened a birth control clinic in New Haven in an attempt to change the Connecticut law banning contraception. Their actions set into motion legislation that resulted in both Poe v. Ullman and Griswold v. Connecticut.
Charles Lee Buxton was an American gynecologist, professor at the Yale School of Medicine, and appellant in US Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut. He best known as a birth control advocate and, along with Estelle Griswold, party to several legal cases that ultimately repealed Connecticut's Comstock laws and established a Constitutional right to privacy for married couples.
In United States constitutional law, the penumbra includes a group of rights derived, by implication, from other rights explicitly protected in the Bill of Rights. These rights have been identified through a process of "reasoning-by-interpolation", where specific principles are recognized from "general idea[s]" that are explicitly expressed in other constitutional provisions. Although researchers have traced the origin of the term to the nineteenth century, the term first gained significant popular attention in 1965, when Justice William O. Douglas's majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut identified a right to privacy in the penumbra of the constitution.
Privacy and the United States government consists of enacted legislation, funding of regulatory agencies, enforcement of court precedents, creation of congressional committees, evaluation of judicial decisions, and implementation of executive orders in response to major court cases and technological change. Because the United States government is composed of three distinct branches governed by both the separation of powers and checks and balances, the change in privacy practice can be separated relative to the actions performed by the three branches.
