United States v. Virginia

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United States v. Virginia

Supreme Court of the United States

Argued January 17, 1996

Decided June 26, 1996

Full case name:	United States v. Virginia et al.
Citations:	518 U.S. 515, 116 S. Ct. 2264, 135 L.Ed. 2d 735
Prior history:	Judgment for defendants, 766 F. Supp. 1407 (W.D. Va. 1991) vacated, 976 F.2d 890 (4th Cir. 1992), certiorari denied, 508 U.S. 946 (1993, on remand, judgment for defendants, 852 F. Supp. 471 (W.D. Va. 1994), aff'd, 44 F.3d 1229 (4th Cir. 1995), motion for rehearing en banc denied, 52 F.3d 90 (4th Cir. 1995), certiorari granted ___ U.S. ____ (1995)

Holding

State of Virginia's exclusion of women from the Virginia Military Institute violated Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Court membership

Chief Justice William Rehnquist

Associate Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer

Case opinions

Majority by: Ginsburg

Joined by: Stevens, O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Breyer

Concurrence by: Rehnquist

Dissent by: Scalia

Recused: Thomas

Laws applied

U.S. Const. Amend. XIV

In United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996), the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the Virginia Military Institute's long-standing male-only admission policy in a 7-1 decision. (Justice Clarence Thomas recused himself from the case, presumably because his son was enrolled at VMI at the time.)

Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stated that because VMI failed to show "exceedingly persuasive justification" for its gender-biased admissions policy, it violated the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. In an attempt to satisfy equal protection requirements, the state of Virginia had proposed a so-called "separate but equal" parallel program for women, called the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership (VWIL), located at Mary Baldwin College, a private liberal arts women's college.

However, Justice Ginsberg held that the VWIL would not provide women with the same type of rigorous military training, facilities, courses, faculty, financial opportunities, and/or alumni reputation and connections that VMI affords male cadets, a decision evocative of Sweatt v. Painter, when the Court ruled in 1946 that segregated law schools in Texas were unconstitutional, since a newly-formed black law school clearly did not provide the same benefits to its students as the state's prestigious and long-maintained white law school.

Justice Scalia's lone dissent argued that the standard applied by the majority was closer to a strict scrutiny standard than the intermediate scrutiny standard applied to previous cases involving equal protection based on gender. Scalia argued that "if the question of the applicable standard of review for sex-based classifications were to be regarded as an appropriate subject for reconsideration, the stronger argument would be not for elevating the standard to strict scrutiny, but for reducing it to rational-basis review."

With the VMI decision, the high court effectively struck down any law which, as Justice Ginsburg wrote, "denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature — equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society."

Following the ruling, VMI contemplated going private to exempt itself from the 14th Amendment, and thus this ruling. The Department of Defense warned the school that it would withdraw all ROTC programs from the school if this privatization took place. As a result of the DOD action, Congress amended 10 USC 2111a, to prohibit the military from withdrawing or diminishing any ROTC program at one of the six senior military colleges, including VMI. However, VMI's Board of Visitors had already voted 8-7 to admit women and did not revisit the issue after the the law was amended.

VMI was the last all-male public school in the United States.