| United States v. Seeger | ||||||
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Supreme Court of the United States |
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| Argued November 16–17, 1964 Decided March 8, 1965 |
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| Full case name | United States v. Seeger | |||||
| Citations | 380 U.S. 163 (more) 85 S. Ct. 850; 13 L. Ed. 2d 733; 1965 U.S. LEXIS 1666 |
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| Prior history | Cert. to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit | |||||
| Court membership | ||||||
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| Case opinions | ||||||
| Majority | Clark, joined by Warren, Black, Harlan, Brennan, Stewart, White, Goldberg | |||||
| Concurrence | 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.