United States v. Seeger

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This is about the First-Amendment- and pacifism-related case that involved Daniel Seeger; for the Fifth-Amendment- and HUAC-related case Seeger v. United States, see Pete Seeger.

United States v. Seeger

Supreme Court of the United States

Argued November 16 – 17, 1964
Decided March 8, 1965

Full case name:	United States v. Seeger

Citations:	380 U.S. 163; 85 S. Ct. 850; 13 L. Ed. 2d 733; 1965 U.S. LEXIS 1666

Prior history:	Cert. to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit

Holding

Court membership

Chief Justice: Earl Warren
Associate Justices: Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Tom C. Clark, John Marshall Harlan II, William J. Brennan, Jr., Potter Stewart, Byron White, Arthur Goldberg

Case opinions

Majority by: Clark
Joined by: Warren, Black, Harlan, Brennan, Stewart, White, Goldberg
Concurrence by: Douglas

Laws applied

U.S. Const. amends. I, XIV

United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 (1965),^[1] was a case in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that the exemption from the military draft for conscientious objectors could not be reserved only for those professing conformity with the moral directives of a supreme being, but also for those whose views on war derived from a "sincere and meaningful belief which occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to that filled by the God of those" who had routinely gotten the exemption.

The case resolved, on diverse but related grounds, three cases, each involving conviction for failure to accept induction into the armed forces on the part of someone who sought conscientious objector status without "belong[ing] to an orthodox religious sect". The accused, whose cases were otherwise unrelated, were Arno Sascha Jakobson, Forest Britt Peter, and Daniel Andrew Seeger; it was Seeger's case that gave its name to the multi-case decision.

[edit] Further reading

In stillness there is fullness: a peacemaker's harvest: essays and reflections in honor of Daniel A. Seeger's four decades of Quaker service; edited by Peter Bien and Chuck Fager, Belfonte, Pennsylvania, Kimo Press, ISBN 0-947177-17-8. This festschrift includes:
- "Excerpts from and comments on a Thesis called 'The challenge to the Supreme Court of the case United States v. Seeger'" by Margery W. Rubin
- "The Seeger decision" by L. William Yolton
- "The Supreme Court decision"