Caminetti v. United States

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Caminetti v. United States

Argued November 13-14, 1916
Decided January 15, 1917

Full case name:	F. Drew Caminetti v. United States; Maury I. Diggs v. United States; L.T. Hays v. United States

Citations:	242 U.S. 470; 37 S. Ct. 192; 61 L. Ed. 442

Prior history:	Diggs v. United States, 220 F. 545 (9th Cir.), cert. granted, 238 U.S. 637 (1915). Hays v. United States, 231 F. 106 (8th Cir.), cert. granted, 241 U.S. 674 (1916).

Holding

Court membership

Chief Justice: Edward Douglass White
Associate Justices: Joseph McKenna, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William R. Day, Willis Van Devanter, Mahlon Pitney, James Clark McReynolds, Louis Brandeis, John Hessin Clarke

Case opinions

Majority by: Day
Joined by: Holmes, Hughes, Van Devanter, Lamar, Pitney
Dissent by: McKenna
Joined by: Clarke, White
McReynolds took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

Laws applied

White-Slave Traffic (Mann) Act, ch. 395, 36 Stat. 825 (1910) (codified as amended at 18 U.S.C. §§ 2421-2424).

Caminetti v. United States, 242 U.S. 470 (1917), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case involving the Mann Act. The Court decided that the Mann Act applied not only to purposes of prostitution but also to other noncommercial consensual sexual liaisons. Thus, consensual extramarital sex falls within the genre of "immoral sex."

The case was historic in that it was one of the first where the court embraced the idea of the Plain Meaning Rule, where if the language of the statute is plain, the courts must enforce it, literally, according to its terms.