Griswold v. Connecticut
"Griswold v. Connecticut" was a landmark Supreme Court case in 1965 that established the right to privacy in the context of marital relations. The case struck down a Connecticut law prohibiting the use of contraceptives, asserting that the Constitution protected the right to privacy. This decision laid the groundwork for future cases involving privacy rights and has had a lasting impact on reproductive rights and personal autonomy.
5 Key excerpts on "Griswold v. Connecticut"
eBook - ePubBeyond Abortion
Roe v. Wade and the Battle for Privacy
- Mary Ziegler(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
...Buxton and Griswold’s arrest and fine laid the groundwork for the suit that would become Griswold v. Connecticut. 25 Planned Parenthood and the ACLU revived the constitutional privacy arguments made in Poe, but this time the strategy worked. In a majority penned by Justice William O. Douglas, Griswold struck down the Connecticut law. Rather than relying on any single constitutional amendment, Douglas wrote that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” According to Douglas, the text of the Constitution implied the existence of other privacy rights. 26 Griswold emphasized that the Connecticut law all but required intrusion into the places where Americans most expected to be left alone, particularly “the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms.” Nevertheless, Douglas’s majority suggested that the right to privacy extended to the marital relationship, not merely the home. Griswold described marriage as part of a “right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights,” “an association that promotes a way of life.” In a concurrence that relied on the Ninth Amendment as a source of privacy, Justice Arthur Goldberg agreed that the right to privacy protected “the marital relation and the marital home.” 27 The understanding of privacy set out in Griswold broke from an earlier narrative centered on snooping and leaked information or even the control of one’s image or identity. While focusing on the traditional importance of marriage, the Court described a far more expansive right. Griswold suggested that the right to privacy also covered certain relationships and life decisions. Although the academic response to Griswold was mixed, the decision intensified interest in privacy arguments among feminists, civil libertarians, and family-planning proponents. Just the same, for all of these advocates, privacy claims remained one part of a much broader argumentative agenda...
eBook - ePubAmerican Constitutional Law
Introductory Essays and Selected Cases
- Donald Grier Stephenson Jr., Alpheus Thomas Mason(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Of this whole “private realm of family life” it is difficult to imagine what is more private or more intimate than a husband and wife’s marital relations…. [T]he intimacy of husband and wife is necessarily an essential and accepted feature of the institution of marriage, an institution which the State not only must allow, but which always and in every age it has fostered and protected. It is one thing when the State exerts its power either to forbid extra-marital sexuality altogether, or to say who may marry, but it is quite another when, having acknowledged a marriage and the intimacies inherent in it, it undertakes to regulate by means of the criminal law the details of that intimacy…. Thus, by 1961, thinking about privacy had evolved well beyond Warren and Brandeis’s article of 1890. The rudiments of a new constitutional right were at hand. Invigorating a Right of Privacy The Connecticut anticontraceptive statute came before the Court again in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut. “Any person who uses any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception,” declared the act, “shall be fined not less than fifty dollars or imprisoned not less than sixty days nor more than one year or be both fined and imprisoned.” The law had been on the books since 1879, but this was apparently only the second time anyone had been charged. Arrested and convicted were the state director of Planned Parenthood and a medical professor at Yale. Both had given instruction and advice to married persons. Though it violated no express provision in the Constitution, the ban foundered on the right of privacy implicit in the Constitution...
eBook - ePubCivil Rights in America
A Handbook of Legal History
- Daniel H McLinden(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Universal-Publishers(Publisher)
...This caught the attention of the CBCL leaders, who were promoting the importance of birth control. During the 1940s several cases arose involving the Waterbury clinic, leading to legal challenges to the constitutionality of the Comstock law but the cases failed on technicalities. Finally, in this case (Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)) the Supreme Court held that the statute was unconstitutional, and that “the clear effect of [the Connecticut law …] is 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 US 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. It recognized the basic need for protection from governmental intrusion. The Court could not point to a constitutional provision specifically mentioning personal privacy. It was not in the Constitution. Looking for something to hang the Court’s hat on Justice William O...
eBook - ePubRoe v. Wade
The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History
- N. E. H. Hull, Peter Charles Hoffer(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- University Press of Kansas(Publisher)
...Private decisions about whether to have children were among these. Griswold controlled Rosen, or should have, for its “broad command” was to “protect the privacy and the intimacy of family life” from state intrusion. Federal district judge Don J. Young wrote for the two to one majority in Steinberg v. Ohio, the opinion announced on December 18, 1970. His writing, unlike Ainsworth’s, had a sharp, almost bitter tone. The plaintiffs included a physician (Dr. A. H. Steinberg), a psychiatrist, a social worker, a minister, and a married woman separated from her husband who wished to terminate a pregnancy. The judge knew that repeal forces had recruited this slate of plaintiffs to challenge the state’s law from all directions. There was also an intercessor, one Homer Schroeder, a doctor who wished to be named guardian ad litem of the unborn child. No one was threatened with prosecution, so Young denied the plea for injunctive relief. Authorities were divided on whether a statute like Ohio’s was too vague, but taken in its ordinary meaning, instead of the “strained construction” of the doctors, the statute seemed clear to Young. The privacy argument failed as well. “When the meringue is sluiced away,” Young opined, the contention that Griswold extended to abortions vanished. Roe and its companion cases “have not been based on a proper legal or factual understanding.” The state had a legitimate right to protect the fetus. “One of the great puzzles of the law is why its practitioners blithely argue their cases and make the decision in total disregard, if not ignorance, of the laws of nature . .. the facts of biology.” Young did not see this as a religious question. Griswold dealt with very tentative life forms, which might or might not survive. “Once the preliminaries have ended, and a new life has begun,” the very same constitutional amendments that the plaintiffs cited required the state to protect the fetus...
eBook - ePubJudicial Review and Judicial Power in the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court in American Society
- Kermit L. Hall, Kermit L. Hall(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Thus, in Griffin v. Illinois, 101 the Warren Court continued to rest with the states the responsibility for deciding whether they shall “provide appellate courts or a right to appellate review at all.” 102 Nevertheless, the Court held that if a state chooses to provide appellate review, a matter genuinely affecting “fundamental rights,” the “equality demanded by the Fourteenth Amendment” 103 requires that it do not “do so in a way that discriminates against some convicted defendants on account of their poverty.” 104 The “rise of egalitarianism” 105 is conceded, but it is to be commended. In fact, perhaps its rise may not have been extensive enough. Perhaps the decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, 106 invalidating the Connecticut anticontraceptive law, might better have been grounded in equal protection rather than in the substantive “peripheries,” “penumbras,” and “emanations” “created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees,” 107 or in “the language and history of the Ninth Amendment,” 108 or in the seemingly discredited doctrine of substantive due process. 109 The fact appears to be that, in Connecticut, those informed persons who could afford to consult private physicians within or without the state had no difficulty obtaining advice about contraception; that the law was enforced effectively only against birth control clinics which, in the main, aided those “without either adequate knowledge or resources to obtain private counseling.” 110 Had the Court held that the operative discrimination of the law in this “fundamental” area of privacy, requiring “strict scrutiny,” 111 violated equal protection, it could have immunized itself from Mr...
