[ Back | Home ]

[Cite as Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 515, 542-543 (1961). Note: This decision regards a Connecticut law criminalizing contraceptive devices and information. The majority decision chose not to decide the matter. In dissenting opinions it was said concerning the Fourteenth Amendment, "The first eight Amendments to the Constitution have been made applicable to the States only in part." (Douglass, J., P. 515) "This 'liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on." (Harlan, J., P. 543). Listing the Second Amendment among individual rights is similar to Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275, 281-282 (1897) and United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 265 (1990).]

[Poe v. Ullman continued
Return to pages 497-508 (Majority opinion).
Currently at pages 509-541 (Dissenting opinions).
Proceed to pages 542-543.
Proceed to pages 544-555]

[paragraph continued from previous page] including the appropriateness of the issues for decision by this Court and the actual hardship to the litigants of denying them the relief sought. Both these factors justify withholding adjudication of the constitutional issue raised under the circumstances and in the manner in which they are now before the Court.

Dismissed.

Mr. Justice Black dissents because he believes that the constitutional questions should be reached and decided.

Mr. Justice Brennan, concurring in the judgment.

I agree that this appeal must be dismissed for failure to present a real and substantial controversy which unequivocally calls for adjudication of the rights claimed in advance of any attempt by the State to curtail them by criminal prosecution. I am not convinced, on this skimpy record, that these appellants as individuals are truly caught in an inescapable dilemma. The true controversy in this case is over the opening of birth-control clinics on a large scale; it is that which the State has prevented in the past, not the use of contraceptives by isolated and individual married couples. It will be time enough to decide the constitutional questions urged upon us when, if ever, that real controversy flares up again. Until it does, or until the State makes a definite and concrete threat to enforce these laws against individual married couples--a threat which it has never made in the past except under the provocation of litigation--this Court may not be compelled to exercise its most delicate power of constitutional adjudication.

Mr. Justice Douglas, dissenting.

I.

These cases are dismissed because a majority of the members of this Court conclude, for varying reasons, that (p.510)this controversy does not present a justiciable question. That conclusion is too transparent to require an extended reply. The device of the declaratory judgment is an honored one. Its use in the federal system is restricted to "cases" or "controversies" within the meaning of Article III. The question must be "appropriate for judicial determination," not hypothetical, abstract, academic or moot. Aetna Life Ins. Co. v. Haworth, 300 U.S. 227, 240. It must touch "the legal relations of parties having adverse legal interests." Id., 240-241. It must be "real and substantial" and admit of "specific relief through a decree of a conclusive character." Id., 241. The fact that damages are not awarded or an injunction does not issue, the fact that there are no allegations of irreparable injury are irrelevant. Id., 241. This is hornbook law. The need for this remedy in the federal field was summarized in a Senate Report as follows:

"... it is often necessary, in the absence of the declaratory judgment procedure, to violate or purport to violate a statute in order to obtain a judicial determination of its meaning or validity." S. Rep. No. 1005, 73d Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 2-3.

If there is a case where the need for this remedy in the shadow of a criminal prosecution is shown, it is this one, as Mr. Justice Harlan demonstrates. Plaintiffs in No. 60 are two sets of husband and wife. One wife is pathetically ill, having delivered a stillborn fetus. If she becomes pregnant again, her life will be gravely jeopardized. This couple have been unable to get medical advice concerning the "best and safest" means to avoid pregnancy from their physician, plaintiff in No. 61, because if he gave it he would commit a crime. The use of contraceptive devices would also constitute a crime. And it is alleged--and admitted by the State--that the State's Attorney intends to enforce the law by prosecuting offenses under the laws.(p.511)

A public clinic dispensing birth-control information has indeed been closed by the State. Doctors and a nurse working in that clinic were arrested by the police and charged with advising married women on the use of contraceptives. That litigation produced State v. Nelson, 126 Conn. 412, 11 A.2d 856, which upheld these statutes. That same police raid on the clinic resulted in the seizure of a quantity of the clinic's contraception literature and medical equipment and supplies. The legality of that seizure was in question in State v. Certain Contraceptive Materials, 126 Conn. 428, 11 A.2d 863.

The Court refers to the Nelson prosecution as a "test case" and implies that it had little impact. Yet its impact was described differently by a contemporary observer who concluded his comment with this sentence: "This serious setback to the birth control movement [the Nelson case] led to the closing of all the clinics in the state, just as they had been previously closed in the state of Massachusetts."[511.1] At oral argument, counsel for appellants confirmed that the clinics are still closed. In response to a question from the bench, he affirmed that "no public or private clinic" has dared give birth-control advice since the decision in the Nelson case.[511.2]

These, then, are the circumstances in which the Court feels that it can, contrary to every principle of American or English common law,[511.3] go outside the record to conclude (p.512)that there exists a "tacit agreement" that these statutes will not be enforced. No lawyer, I think, would advise his clients to rely on that "tacit agreement." No police official, I think, would feel himself bound by that "tacit agreement." After our national experience during the prohibition era, it would be absurd to pretend that all criminal statutes are adequately enforced. But that does not mean that bootlegging was the less a crime. Cf. Costello v. United States, 365 U.S. 265. In fact, an arbitrary administrative pattern of non-enforcement may increase the hardships of those subject to the law. See J. Goldstein, Police Discretion Not to Invoke the Criminal Process, 69 Yale L.J. 543.

When the Court goes outside the record to determine that Connecticut has adopted "The undeviating policy of nullification ... of its anti-contraceptive laws," it selects a particularly poor case in which to exercise such a novel power. This is not a law which is a dead letter. Twice since 1940, Connecticut has re-enacted these laws as part of general statutory revisions. Consistently, bills to remove the statutes from the books have been rejected by the legislature. In short, the statutes--far from being the accidental left-overs of another era--are the center of a continuing controversy in the State. See, e.g., The New Republic, May 19, 1947, p. 8.

Again, the Court relies on the inability of counsel to show any attempts, other than the Nelson case, "to enforce the prohibition of distribution or use of contraceptive devices by criminal process." Yet, on oral argument, counsel for the appellee stated on his own knowledge (p.513)that several proprietors had been prosecuted in the "minor police courts of Connecticut" after they had been "picked up" for selling contraceptives. The enforcement of criminal laws in minor courts has just as much impact as in those cases where appellate courts are resorted to. The need of the protection of constitutional guarantees, and the right to them, are not less because the matter is small or the court lowly. See Thompson v. City of Louisville, 362 U.S. 199; Tumey v. Ohio, 273 U.S. 510. Nor is the need lacking because the dispensing of birth-control information is by a single doctor rather than by birth-control clinics. The nature of the controversy would not be changed one iota had a dozen doctors, representing a dozen birth-control clinics, sued for remedial relief.

What are these people--doctor and patients--to do? Flout the law and go to prison? Violate the law surreptitiously and hope they will not get caught? By today's decision we leave them no other alternatives. It is not the choice they need have under the regime of the declaratory judgment and our constitutional system. It is not the choice worthy of a civilized society. A sick wife, a concerned husband, a conscientious doctor seek a dignified, discrete, orderly answer to the critical problem confronting them. We should not turn them away and make them flout the law and get arrested to have their constitutional rights determined. See Railway Mail Assn. v. Corsi, 326 U.S. 88. They are entitled to an answer to their predicament here and now.

II.

The right of the doctor to advise his patients according to his best lights seems so obviously within First Amendment rights as to need no extended discussion. The leading cases on freedom of expression are generally framed (p.514)with reference to public debate and discourse. But as Chafee said, "the First Amendment and other parts of the law erect a fence inside which men can talk. The law-makers, legislators and officials stay on the outside of that fence. But what the men inside the fence say when they are let alone is no concern of the law." The Blessings of Liberty (1956), p. 108.

The teacher (Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234) as well as the public speaker (Thomas v. Collins, 323 U.S. 516) is included. The actor on stage or screen, the artist whose creation is in oil or clay or marble, the poet whose reading public may be practically nonexistent, the musician and his musical scores, the counselor whether priest, parent or teacher no matter how small his audience--these too are beneficiaries of freedom of expression. The remark by President James A. Garfield that his ideal of a college was a log in the woods with a student at one end and Mark Hopkins at another (9 Dict. Am. Biog., p. 216) puts the present problem in proper First Amendment dimensions. Of course a physician can talk freely and fully with his patient without threat of retaliation by the State. The contrary thought--the one endorsed sub silentio by the courts below--has the cast of regimentation about it, a cast at war with the philosophy and presuppositions of this free society.

We should say with Kant that "It is absurd to expect to be enlightened by Reason, and at the same time to prescribe to her what side of the question she must adopt."[514.4] Leveling the discourse of medical men to the morality of a particular community is a deadening influence. Mill spoke of the pressures of intolerant groups that produce "either mere conformers to commonplace, or time-servers for truth."[514.5] We witness in this case a sealing of the lips of a doctor because he desires to observe (p.515)the law, obnoxious as the law may be. The State has no power to put any sanctions of any kind on him for any views or beliefs that he has or for any advice he renders. These are his professional domains into which the State may not intrude. The chronicles are filled with sad attempts of government to stomp out ideas, to ban thoughts because they are heretical or obnoxious. As Mill stated, "Our merely social intolerance kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion."[515.6] When that happens society suffers. Freedom working underground, freedom bootlegged around the law is freedom crippled. A society that tells its doctors under pain of criminal penalty what they may not tell their patients is not a free society. Only free exchange of views and information is consistent with "a civilization of the dialogue," to borrow a phrase from Dr. Robert M. Hutchins. See Wieman v. Updegraff, 344 U.S. 183, 197 (concurring opinion).

III.

I am also clear that this Connecticut law as applied to this married couple deprives them of "liberty" without due process of law, as that concept is used in the Fourteenth Amendment.

The first eight Amendments to the Constitution have been made applicable to the States only in part. My view has been that when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, its Due Process Clause incorporated all of those Amendments. See Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46, 68 (dissenting opinion). Although the history of the Fourteenth Amendment may not be conclusive, the words "due process" acquired specific meaning from Anglo-American experience.[515.7] As Mr. Justice Brennan recently (p.516)stated, "The Bill of Rights is the primary source of expressed information as to what is meant by constitutional liberty. The safeguards enshrined in it are deeply etched in the foundations of America's freedoms." The Bill of Rights and the States (1961), 36 N.Y.U. L.Rev. 761, 776. When the Framers wrote the Bill of Rights they enshrined in the form of constitutional guarantees those rights--in part substantive, in part procedural--which experience indicated were indispensable to a free society. Some would disagree as to their importance; the debate concerning them did indeed start before their adoption and has continued to this day. Yet the constitutional conception of "due process" must, in my view, include them all until and unless there are amendments that remove them. That has indeed been the view of a full court of nine Justices, though the members who make up that court unfortunately did not sit at the same time.[516.8]

Though I believe that "due process" as used in the Fourteenth Amendment includes all of the first eight Amendments, I do not think it is restricted and confined to them. We recently held that the undefined "liberty" in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment includes freedom to travel. Kent v. Dulles, 357 U.S. 116, 125-127. Cf. Edwards v. California, 314 U.S. 160, (p.517)177, 178 (concurring opinion). The right "to marry, establish a home and bring up children" was said in Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399, to come within the "liberty" of the person protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As I indicated in my dissent in Public Utilities Comm'n v. Pollak, 343 U.S. 451, 467, "liberty" within the purview of the Fifth Amendment includes the right of "privacy," a right I thought infringed in that case because a member of a "captive audience" was forced to listen to a government-sponsored radio program. "Liberty" is a conception that sometimes gains content from the emanations of other specific guarantees (N.A.A.C.P. v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449, 460) or from experience with the requirements of a free society.

For years the Court struck down social legislation when a particular law did not fit the notions of a majority of Justices as to legislation appropriate for a free enterprise system. Mr. Justice Holmes, dissenting, rightly said that "a constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire. It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar or novel and even shocking ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States." Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 75-76.

The error of the old Court, as I see it, was not in entertaining inquiries concerning the constitutionality of social legislation but in applying the standards that it did. See Tot v. United States, 319 U.S. 463; Giboney v. Empire Storage Co., 336 U.S. 490. Social legislation dealing with business and economic matters touches no particularized prohibition of the Constitution, unless it be (p.518)the provision of the Fifth Amendment that private property should not be taken for public use without just compensation. If it is free of the latter guarantee, it has a wide scope for application. Some go so far as to suggest that whatever the majority in the legislature says goes (cf. United States v. Chandler-Dunbar Co., 229 U.S. 53, 64), that there is no other standard of constitutionality. That reduces the legislative power to sheer voting strength and the judicial function to a matter of statistics. As Robert M. Hutchins has said, "It is obviously impossible to raise questions of freedom and justice if the sole duty of the court is to decide whether the case at bar falls within the scope of the duly issued command of a duly constituted sovereign." Two Faces of Federalism (1960), p. 18. While the legislative judgment on economic and business matters is "well-nigh conclusive" (Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26, 32), it is not beyond judicial inquiry. Cf. United States v. Oregon, 366 U.S. 643, 649 (dissenting opinion).

The regime of a free society needs room for vast experimentation. Crises, emergencies, experience at the individual and community levels produce new insights; problems emerge in new dimensions; needs, once never imagined, appear. To stop experimentation and the testing of new decrees and controls is to deprive society of a needed versatility. Yet to say that a legislature may do anything not within a specific guarantee of the Constitution may be as crippling to a free society as to allow it to override specific guarantees so long as what it does fails to shock the sensibilities of a majority of the Court.[518.9](p.519)

The present legislation is an excellent example. If a State banned completely the sale of contraceptives in drug stores, the case would be quite different. It might seem to some or to all judges an unreasonable restriction. Yet it might not be irrational to conclude that a better way of dispensing those articles is through physicians. The same might be said of a state law banning the manufacture of contraceptives. Health, religious, and moral arguments might be marshalled pro and con. Yet it is not for judges to weigh the evidence. Where either the sale or the manufacture is put under regulation, the strictures are on business and commercial dealings that have had a long history with the police power of the States.

The present law, however, deals not with sale, not with manufacture, but with use. It provides:

"Any person who uses any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception 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." Conn. Gen. Stat., 1958, § 53-32.

The regulation as applied in this case touches the relationship between man and wife. It reaches into the intimacies of the marriage relationship. If we imagine a regime of full enforcement of the law in the manner of (p.520)an Anthony Comstock,[520.10] we would reach the point where search warrants issued and officers appeared in bedrooms to find out what went on.[520.11] It is said that this is not that case. And so it is not. But when the State makes "use" a crime and applies the criminal sanction to man (p.521)and wife, the State has entered the innermost sanctum of the home. If it can make this law, it can enforce it. And proof of its violation necessarily involves an inquiry into the relations between man and wife.

That is an invasion of the privacy that is implicit in a free society. A noted theologian who conceives of the use of a contraceptive as a "sin" nonetheless admits that a "use" statute such as this enters a forbidden domain.

"... the Connecticut statute confuses the moral and legal, in that it transposes without further ado a private sin into a public crime. The criminal act here is the private use of contraceptives. The real area where the coercions of law might, and ought to, be applied, at least to control an evil--namely, the contraceptive industry--is quite overlooked. As it stands, the statute is, of course, unenforceable without police invasion of the bedroom, and is therefore indefensible as a piece of legal draughtsmanship." Murray, We Hold These Truths (1960), pp. 157-158.

This notion of privacy is not drawn from the blue.[521.12] It emanates from the totality of the constitutional scheme under which we live.[521.13]

"One of the earmarks of the totalitarian understanding of society is that it seeks to make all (p.522)subcommunities--family, school, business, press, church--completely subject to control by the State. The State then is not one vital institution among others: a policeman, a referee, and a source of initiative for the common good. Instead, it seeks to be coextensive with family and school, press, business community, and the Church, so that all of these component interest groups are, in principle, reduced to organs and agencies of the State. In a democratic political order, this megatherian concept is expressly rejected as out of accord with the democratic understanding of social good, and with the actual make-up of the human community."[522.14]

Can there be any doubt that a Bill of Rights that in time of peace bars soldiers from being quartered in a home "without the consent of the Owner"[522.15] should also bar the police from investigating the intimacies of the marriage relation? The idea of allowing the State that leeway is congenial only to a totalitarian regime.

I dissent from a dismissal of these cases and our refusal to strike down this law.

Mr. Justice Harlan, dissenting.

I am compelled, with all respect, to dissent from the dismissal of these appeals. In my view the course which the Court has taken does violence to established concepts (p.523)of "justiciability," and unjustifiably leaves these appellants under the threat of unconstitutional prosecution. Regrettably, an adequate exposition of my views calls for a dissenting opinion of unusual length.

Between them these suits seek declaratory relief against the threatened enforcement of Connecticut's antibirth-control laws making criminal the use of contraceptives, insofar as such laws relate to the use of contraceptives by married persons and the giving of advice to married persons in their use.[523.1] The appellants, a married couple, a married woman, and a doctor, ask that it be adjudged, contrary to what the Connecticut courts have held, that such laws, as threatened to be applied to them in circumstances described in the opinion announcing the judgment of the Court (ante, pp. 498-500), violate the Fourteenth Amendment, in that they deprive appellants of life, liberty, or property without due process.

The plurality opinion of the Court gives, as the basis for dismissing the appeals, the reason that, as to the two married appellants, the lack of demonstrated enforcement of the Connecticut statute bespeaks an absence of exigent adversity which is posited as the condition for evoking adjudication from us, and, as to the doctor, that his compliance with the state statute is uncoerced by any "realistic fear of prosecution," giving due recognition to his "standing as a physician and to his personal sensitiveness." With these reasons it appears that the concurring opinion agrees.

In Alabama State Federation of Labor v. McAdory, 325 U.S. 450, 462, it was said that "declaratory judgment procedure may be resorted to only in the sound discretion of the Court and where the interests of justice will be (p.524)advanced and an adequate and effective judgment may be rendered." In my view of these cases a present determination of the Constitutional issues is the only course which will advance justice, and I can find no sound reason born of considerations as to the possible inadequacy or ineffectiveness of the judgment that might be rendered which justifies the Court's contrary disposition. While ordinarily I would not deem it appropriate to deal, in dissent, with Constitutional issues which the Court has not reached, I shall do so here because such issues, as I see things, are entangled with the Court's conclusion as to the nonjusticiability of these appeals.

Part One.
Justiciability.

There can be no quarrel with the plurality opinion's statement that "Justiciability is of course not a legal concept with a fixed content or susceptible of scientific verification," but, with deference, the fact that justiciability is not precisely definable does not make it ineffable. Although a large number of cases are brought to bear on the conclusion that is reached, I think it is fairly demonstrable that the authorities fall far short of compelling dismissal of these appeals.[524.2] Even so, it is suggested that the cases (p.525)do point the way to a "rigorous insistence on exigent adversity" and a "policy against premature constitutional decision," which properly understood does indeed demand that result.

The policy referred to is one to which I unreservedly subscribe. Without undertaking to be definitive, I would suppose it is a policy the wisdom of which is woven of several strands: (1) Due regard for the fact that the source of the Court's power lies ultimately in its duty to decide, in conformity with the Constitution, the particular controversies which come to it, and does not arise from some generalized power of supervision over state and national legislatures; (2) therefore it should insist that litigants bring to the Court interests and rights which require present recognition and controversies demanding immediate resolution; (3) also it follows that the controversy must be one which is in truth and fact the litigant's own, so that the clash of adversary contest which is needed to sharpen and illuminate issues is present and gives that aid on which our adjudicatory system has come to rely; (4) finally, it is required that other means of redress for the particular right claimed be unavailable, so that the process of the Court may not become overburdened and conflicts with other courts or departments of government may not needlessly be created, which might come about if either those truly affected are not the ones demanding relief, or if the relief we can give is not truly needed.

In particularization of this composite policy the Court, in the course of its decisions on matters of justiciability, has developed and given expression to a number of important limitations on the exercise of its jurisdiction, the (p.526)presence or absence of which here should determine the justiciability of these appeals. Since all of them are referred to here in one way or another, it is well to proceed to a disclosure of those which are not involved in the present appeals, thereby focusing attention on the one factor on which reliance appears to be placed by both the plurality and concurring opinions in this instance.

First: It should by now be abundantly clear that the fact that only Constitutional claims are presented in proceedings seeking anticipatory relief against state criminal statutes does not for that reason alone make the claims premature. See, e.g., Terrace v. Thompson, 263 U.S. 197; Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510; Euclid v. Ambler Co., 272 U.S. 365. Whatever general pronouncements may be found to the contrary must, in context, be seen to refer to considerations quite different from anything present in these cases.

Thus in Alabama State Federation of Labor v. McAdory, supra, anticipatory relief was withheld for the precise reason that normally this Court ought not to consider the Constitutionality of a state statute in the absence of a controlling interpretation of its meaning and effect by the state courts. To the same effect see Parker v. Los Angeles County, 338 U.S. 327; Watson v. Buck, 313 U.S. 387; Beal v. Missouri Pacific R. Co., 312 U.S. 45. Indeed, without belaboring the point, the principle that anticipatory relief against state criminal statutes is not unavailable as a general matter may best be illustrated by several cases recently decided in this Court. In Harrison v. N.A.A.C.P., 360 U.S. 167, the premise of our action was that anticipatory relief should be obtained, if possible--with review here on certiorari or appeal--in a state court which could then authoritatively construe a new and ambiguous state statute; only if such relief were unavailable, should a Federal District Court exercise its (p.527)statutory jurisdiction. And in our recent decisions upholding the Constitutionality of state Sunday-closing laws, 366 U.S. 420, et seq., not one of the opinions paused even slightly over the appropriateness of anticipatory relief, although in one case that issue was argued, Gallagher v. Crown Kosher Super Market, 366 U.S. 617.

Hence, any language in the cases where the Court has abstained from exercising its jurisdiction, to the effect that we should not "entertain constitutional questions in advance of the strictest necessity," Parker v. Los Angeles County, supra, at 333, is not at all apposite in the present cases. For these appeals come to us from the highest court of Connecticut, thus affording us--in company with previous state interpretations of the same statute--a clear construction of the scope of the statute, thereby in effect assuring that our review constitutes no greater interference with state administration than the state procedures themselves allow.

Second: I do not think these appeals may be dismissed for want of "ripeness" as that concept has been understood in its "varied applications."[527.3] There is no lack of "ripeness" in the sense that is exemplified by cases such as Stearns v. Wood, 236 U.S. 75; Electric Bond & Share Co. v. Securities & Exchange Comm'n, 303 U.S. 419; United Public Workers v. Mitchell, 330 U.S. 75; International (p.528)Longshoremen's Union v. Boyd, 347 U.S. 222; and perhaps again Parker v. Los Angeles County, supra. In all of those cases the lack of ripeness inhered in the fact that the need for some further procedure, some further contingency of application or interpretation, whether judicial, administrative or executive, or some further clarification of the intentions of the claimant, served to make remote the issue which was sought to be presented to the Court. Certainly the appellants have stated in their pleadings fully and unequivocally what it is that they intend to do; no clarifying or resolving contingency stands in their way before they may embark on that conduct. Thus there is no circumstance besides that of detection or prosecution to make remote the particular controversy. And it is clear beyond cavil that the mere fact that a controversy such as this is rendered still more unavoidable by an actual prosecution, is not alone sufficient to make the case too remote, not ideally enough "ripe" for adjudication, at the prior stage of anticipatory relief.

Moreover, it follows from what has already been said that there is no such want of ripeness as was presented in Rescue Army v. Municipal Court, 331 U.S. 549, or in our recent decisions dismissing the appeals in Atlanta Newspapers v. Grimes, 364 U.S. 290, and United States v. Fruehauf, 365 U.S. 146, where the records presented for adjudication a controversy so artificially truncated as to make the cases not susceptible to intelligent decision. I cannot see what further elaboration is required to enable us to decide the appellants' claims, and indeed neither the plurality opinion nor the concurring opinion--notwithstanding the latter's characterization of this record as "skimpy"--suggests what more grist is needed before the judicial mill could turn.

Third: This is not a feigned, hypothetical, friendly or colorable suit such as discloses "a want of a truly adversary (p.529)contest." Clearly these cases are not analogous to Wood-Paper Co. v. Heft, 8 Wall. 333, or South Spring Hill Gold Mining Co. v. Amador Medean Gold Mining Co., 145 U.S. 300, where prior to consideration the controversy in effect became moot by the merger of the two contesting interests. Nor is there any question of collusion as in Lord v. Veazie, 8 How. 251, or in United States v. Johnson, 319 U.S. 302. And there is nothing to suggest that the parties by their conduct of this litigation have cooperated to force an adjudication of a Constitutional issue which--were the parties interested solely in winning their cases rather than obtaining a Constitutional decision--might not arise in an arm's-length contested proceeding. Such was the situation in Chicago & Grand Trunk R. Co. v. Wellman, 143 U.S. 339, where the parties sought a ruling as to whether a particular passenger rate was unconstitutionally confiscatory, having stipulated all the debatable and contingent facts which otherwise might have rendered a Constitutional decision unnecessary.

In the present appeals no more is alleged or conceded than is consistent with undisputed facts and with ordinary practice in deciding a case for anticipatory relief on demurrer. I think it is unjustifiably stretching things to assume that appellants are not deterred by the threat of prosecution from engaging in the conduct in which they assert a right to engage, or to assume that appellee's demurrer to the proposition that he asserts the right to enforce the statute against appellants at any time he chooses is anything but a candid one.

Indeed, as will be developed below, I think both the plurality and concurring opinions confuse on this score the predictive likelihood that, had they not brought themselves to appellee's attention, he would not enforce the statute against them, with some entirely suppositious "tacit agreement" not to prosecute, thereby ignoring the (p.530)prosecutor's claim, asserted in these very proceedings, of a right, at his unbounded prosecutorial discretion, to enforce the statute.

Fourth: The doctrine of the cases dealing with a litigant's lack of standing to raise a Constitutional claim is said to justify the dismissal of these appeals. The precedents put forward as examples of this doctrine, see the plurality opinion, note 5, as well as cases such as Frothingham v. Mellon and Massachusetts v. Mellon, 262 U.S. 447, and Texas v. Interstate Commerce Comm'n, 258 U.S. 158, do indeed stand for the proposition that a legal claim will not be considered at the instance of one who has no real and concrete interest in its vindication. This is well in accord with the grounds for declining jurisdiction suggested above. But this doctrine in turn needs further particularization lest it become a catchall for an unarticulated discretion on the part of this Court to decline to adjudicate appeals involving Constitutional issues.

There is no question but that appellants here are asserting rights which are peculiarly their own, and which, if they are to be raised at all, may be raised most appropriately by them. Cf. Tileston v. Ullman, 318 U.S. 44; Texas v. Interstate Commerce Comm'n, supra; Yazoo & Mississippi Valley R. Co. v. Jackson Vinegar Co., 226 U.S. 217; Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 297 U.S. 288, 341 (concurring opinion). Nor do I understand the argument to be that this is the sort of claim which is too remote ever to be pressed by anyone, because no one is ever sufficiently involved. Cf. Massachusetts v. Mellon, Frothingham v. Mellon, supra. Thus, in truth, it is not the parties pressing this claim but the occasion chosen for pressing it which is objected to. But as has been shown the fact that it is anticipatory relief which is asked cannot of itself make the occasion objectionable.(p.531)

We are brought, then, to the precise failing in these proceedings which is said to justify refusal to exercise our mandatory appellate jurisdiction: that there has been but one recorded Connecticut case dealing with a prosecution under the statute.[531.4] The significance of this lack of recorded evidence of prosecutions is said to make the presentation of appellants' rights too remote, too contingent, too hypothetical for adjudication in the light of the policies already considered. See pp. 526-530, supra. In my view it is only as a result of misconceptions both about the purport of the record before us and about the nature of the rights appellants put forward that this conclusion can be reached.

As far as the record is concerned, I think it is pure conjecture, and indeed conjecture which to me seems contrary to realities, that an open violation of the statute by a doctor (or more obviously still by a birth-control clinic) would not result in a substantial threat of prosecution. Crucial to the opposite conclusion is the description of the 1940 prosecution instituted in State v. Nelson, 126 Conn. 412, 11 A.2d 856, as a "test case" which, as it is viewed, scarcely even punctuates the uniform state practice of nonenforcement of this statute. I read the history of Connecticut enforcement in a very different light. The Nelson case, as appears from the state court's opinion, was a prosecution of two doctors and a nurse for aiding and abetting violations of this statute by married women in prescribing and advising the use of contraceptive materials by them. It is true that there is (p.532)evidence of a customary unwillingness to enforce the statute prior to Nelson, for in that case the prosecutor stated to the trial court in a later motion to discontinue the prosecutions that "When this Waterbury clinic [operated by the defendants] was opened there were in open operation elsewhere in the State at least eight other contraceptive clinics which had been in existence for a long period of time and no questions as to their right to operate had been raised ...."[532.5]

What must also be noted is that the prosecutor followed this statement with an explanation that the primary purpose of the prosecution was to provide clear warning to all those who, like Nelson, might rely on this practice of nonenforcement. He stated that the purpose of the prosecution was:

"the establishment of the constitutional validity and efficacy of the statutes under which these accused are informed against. Henceforth any person, whether a physician or layman, who violates the provisions of these statutes, must expect to be prosecuted and punished in accordance with the literal provisions of the law."[532.6](p.533)

Thus the respect in which Nelson was a test case is only that it was brought for the purpose of making entirely clear the State's power and willingness to enforce against "any person, whether a physician or layman" (emphasis supplied), the statute and to eliminate from future cases the very doubt about the existence of these elements which had resulted in eight open birth-control clinics, and which would have made unfair the conviction of Nelson.

The plurality opinion now finds, and the concurring opinion must assume, that the only explanation of the absence of recorded prosecutions subsequent to the Nelson case is that Connecticut has renounced that intention to prosecute and punish "any person ... in accordance with the literal provisions of the law" which it announced in Nelson. But if renunciation of the purposes of the Nelson prosecution is consistent with a lack of subsequent prosecutions, success of that purpose is no less consistent with this lack. I find it difficult to believe that doctors generally--and not just those operating specialized clinics--would continue openly to disseminate advice about contraceptives after Nelson in reliance on the State's supposed unwillingness to prosecute, or to consider that high-minded members of the profession would in consequence of such inaction deem themselves warranted in disrespecting this law so long as it is on the books. Nor can I regard as "chimerical" the fear of enforcement of these provisions that seems to have caused the disappearance of at least nine birth-control clinics.[533.7] In short, I fear that the Court has indulged in a bit of sleight of hand to be rid of this case. It has treated the significance of the absence of prosecutions during the twenty years since Nelson as identical with that of the absence of prosecutions during the years before (p.534)Nelson. It has ignored the fact that the very purpose of the Nelson prosecution was to change defiance into compliance. It has ignored the very possibility that this purpose may have been successful.[534.8] The result is to postulate (p.535)a security from prosecution for open defiance of the statute which I do not believe the record supports.[535.9]

These considerations alone serve to bring appellants so squarely within the rule of Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, and Truax v. Raich, 239 U.S. 33, that further demonstration would be pointless.

But even if Dr. Buxton were not in the litigation and appellants the Poes and Doe were seeking simply to use contraceptives without any need of consulting a physician beforehand--which is not the case we have, although it is the case which the plurality opinion of the Court is primarily concerned to discuss--even then I think that it misconceives the concept of justiciability and the nature of these appellants' rights to say that the failure of the State to carry through any criminal prosecution requires dismissal of their appeals.

The Court's disposition assumes that to decide the case now, in the absence of any consummated prosecutions, is unwise because it forces a difficult decision in advance of any exigent necessity therefor. Of course it is abundantly clear that this requisite necessity can exist prior to any actual prosecution, for that is the theory of anticipatory relief, and is by now familiar law. What must be relied on, therefore, is that the historical absence of prosecutions in some way leaves these appellants free to violate the statute without fear of prosecution, whether or not the law is Constitutional, and thus absolves us from the duty of deciding if it is. Despite the suggestion (p.536)of a "tougher and truer law" of immunity from criminal prosecution and despite speculation as to a "tacit agreement" that this law will not be enforced, there is, of course, no suggestion of an estoppel against the State if it should attempt to prosecute appellants. Neither the plurality nor the concurring opinion suggests that appellants have some legally cognizable right not to be prosecuted if the statute is Constitutional. What is meant is simply that the appellants are more or less free to act without fear of prosecution because the prosecuting authorities of the State, in their discretion and at their whim, are, as a matter of prediction, unlikely to decide to prosecute.

Here is the core of my disagreement with the present disposition. As I will develop later in this opinion, the most substantial claim which these married persons press is their right to enjoy the privacy of their marital relations free of the enquiry of the criminal law, whether it be in a prosecution of them or of a doctor whom they have consulted. And I cannot agree that their enjoyment of this privacy is not substantially impinged upon, when they are told that if they use contraceptives, indeed whether they do so or not, the only thing which stands between them and being forced to render criminal account of their marital privacy is the whim of the prosecutor.[536.10] Connecticut's highest court has told us in the clearest terms that, given proof, the prosecutor will succeed if he decides to bring a proceeding against one of the appellants for taking (p.537)the precise actions appellants have announced they intend to take. The State Court does not agree that there has come into play a "tougher and truer law than the dead words of the written text," and in the light of twelve unsuccessful attempts since 1943 to change this legislation, Poe v. Ullman, 147 Conn. 48, 56, 156 A.2d 508, 513, n.2, this position is not difficult to understand. Prosecution and conviction for the clearly spelled-out actions the appellants wish to take is not made unlikely by any fortuitous factor outside the control of the parties, nor is it made uncertain by possible variations in the actions appellants actually take from those the state courts have already passed upon. All that stands between the appellants and jail is the legally unfettered whim of the prosecutor and the Constitutional issue this Court today refuses to decide.

If we revert again to the reasons underlying our reluctance to exercise a jurisdiction which technically we possess, and the concrete expression of those underlying reasons in our cases, see pp. 526-531, supra, then I think it must become clear that there is no justification for failing to decide these married persons' appeals. The controversy awaits nothing but an actual prosecution, and, as will be shown, the substantial damage against which these appellants, Mrs. Doe and the Poes, are entitled to protection will be accomplished by such a prosecution, whatever its outcome in the state courts or here. By the present decision, although as a general matter the parties would be entitled to our review in an anticipatory proceeding which the State allowed to be instituted in its courts, these appellants are made to await actual prosecution before we will hear them. Indeed it appears that whereas appellants would surely have been entitled to review were this a new statute, see Harrison v. N.A.A.C.P., supra, the State here is enabled to maintain at least some substantial measure of compliance with (p.538)this statute and still obviate any review in this Court, by the device of purely discretionary prosecutorial inactivity. It seems to me to destroy the whole purpose of anticipatory relief to consider the prosecutor's discretion, once all legal and administrative channels have been cleared, as in any way analogous to those other contingencies which make remote a controversy presenting Constitutional claims.

In this light it is not surprising that the Court's position is without support in the precedents.[538.11] Indeed it seems to me that Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, provides very clear authority contrary to the position of the Court in this case, for there a Court which included Justices Holmes, Brandeis, and Stone rejected a claim of prematureness and then passed upon and held unconstitutional a state statute whose sanctions were not even to become effective for more than seventeen months after the time the case was argued to this Court. The Court found allegations of present loss of business, caused by the threat of the statute's future enforcement against the Society's clientele, sufficient to make the injury to the Society "present and very real." 268 U.S., at 536. I cannot regard as less present, or less real, the tendency to discourage the exercise of the liberties of these appellants, caused by reluctance to submit their freedoms from prosecution (p.539)and conviction to the discretion of the Connecticut prosecuting authorities. I therefore think it incumbent on us to consider the merits of appellants' Constitutional claims.

Part Two.
Constitutionality.

I consider that this Connecticut legislation, as construed to apply to these appellants, violates the Fourteenth Amendment. I believe that a statute making it a criminal offense for married couples to use contraceptives is an intolerable and unjustifiable invasion of privacy in the conduct of the most intimate concerns of an individual's personal life. I reach this conclusion, even though I find it difficult and unnecessary at this juncture to accept appellants' other argument that the judgment of policy behind the statute, so applied, is so arbitrary and unreasonable as to render the enactment invalid for that reason alone. Since both the contentions draw their basis from no explicit language of the Constitution, and have yet to find expression in any decision of this Court, I feel it desirable at the outset to state the framework of Constitutional principles in which I think the issue must be judged.

I.

In reviewing state legislation, whether considered to be in the exercise of the State's police powers, or in provision for the health, safety, morals or welfare of its people, it is clear that what is concerned are "the powers of government inherent in every sovereignty." The License Cases, 5 How. 504, 583. Only to the extent that the Constitution so requires may this Court interfere with the exercise of this plenary power of government. Barron v. Mayor of Baltimore, 7 Pet. 243. But precisely because it is the Constitution alone which warrants judicial interference in sovereign operations of the State, (p.540)the basis of judgment as to the Constitutionality of state action must be a rational one, approaching the text which is the only commission for our power not in a literalistic way, as if we had a tax statute before us, but as the basic charter of our society, setting out in spare but meaningful terms the principles of government. McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316. But as inescapable as is the rational process in Constitutional adjudication in general, nowhere is it more so than in giving meaning to the prohibitions of the Fourteenth Amendment and, where the Federal Government is involved, the Fifth Amendment, against the deprivation of life, liberty or property without due process of law.

It is but a truism to say that this provision of both Amendments is not self-explanatory. As to the Fourteenth, which is involved here, the history of the Amendment also sheds little light on the meaning of the provision. Fairman, Does the Fourteenth Amendment Incorporate the Bill of Rights, 2 Stan. L.Rev. 15. It is important to note, however, that two views of the Amendment have not been accepted by this Court as delineating its scope. One view, which was ably and insistently argued in response to what were felt to be abuses by this Court of its reviewing power, sought to limit the provision to a guarantee of procedural fairness. See Davidson v. New Orleans, 96 U.S. 97, 105; Brandeis, J., in Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, at 373; Warren, The New "Liberty" under the 14th Amendment, 39 Harv. L.Rev. 431; Reeder, The Due Process Clauses and "The Substance of Individual Rights," 58 U. Pa. L.Rev. 191; Shattuck, The True Meaning of The Term "Liberty" in Those Clauses in the Federal and State Constitutions Which Protect "Life, Liberty, and Property," 4 Harv. L.Rev. 365. The other view which has been rejected would have it that the Fourteenth Amendment, whether by way of the Privileges and Immunities Clause or the Due (p.541)Process Clause, applied against the States only and precisely those restraints which had prior to the Amendment been applicable merely to federal action. However, "due process" in the consistent view of this Court has ever been a broader concept than the first view and more flexible than the second.

Were due process merely a procedural safeguard it would fail to reach those situations where the deprivation of life, liberty or property was accomplished by legislation which by operating in the future could, given even the fairest possible procedure in application to individuals, nevertheless destroy the enjoyment of all three. Compare, e.g., Selective Draft Law Cases, 245 U.S. 366; Butler v. Perry, 240 U.S. 328; Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214. Thus the guaranties of due process, though having their roots in Magna Carta's "per legem terrae" and considered as procedural safeguards "against executive usurpation and tyranny," have in this country "become bulwarks also against arbitrary legislation." Hurtado v. California, 110 U.S. 516, at 532.

However it is not the particular enumeration of rights in the first eight Amendments which spells out the reach of Fourteenth Amendment due process, but rather, as was suggested in another context long before the adoption of that Amendment, those concepts which are considered to embrace those rights "which are ... fundamental; which belong ... to the citizens of all free governments," Corfield v. Coryell, 4 Wash. C. C. 371, 380, for "the purposes [of securing] which men enter into society," Calder v. Bull, 3 Dall. 386, 388. Again and again this Court has resisted the notion that the Fourteenth Amendment is no more than a shorthand reference to what is explicitly set out elsewhere in the Bill of Rights. Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36; Walker v. Sauvinet, 92 U.S. 90; Hurtado v. California, 110 U.S. 516; Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252; In re Kemmler, 136 U.S. 436; [paragraph continues next page]

[Return to pages 497-508 (Majority opinion).
Currently at pages 509-541 (Dissenting opinions).
Proceed to pages 542-543.
Proceed to pages 544-555]