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What Supreme Court decisions have had the greatest impact on the history of the United States? Political scientist and law professor Jethro K. Lieberman discusses the ten decisions that he believes truly transformed American society.
By Jethro K. Lieberman
Between the late 18th century and the beginning of the 21st century, the Supreme Court of the United States decided some 25,000 cases. While hundreds of these decisions have played a significant role in the development of American law, only a few dozen have truly transformed American society, for good or ill.
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These ten cases changed our history.
One of the Supreme Court’s earliest decisions was also among its most momentous. In Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court fashioned judicial review, a tool that would permit courts to veto acts of Congress that violate the Constitution of the United States. Marbury v. Madison established the courts as the ultimate interpreters of the Constitution, giving them an essential role to play in the American system of checks and balances.
On the surface, the case tested whether the Supreme Court would agree to seat as justices of the peace four men who had been appointed by President John Adams. The Senate confirmed Adams’s appointees, but the men had not yet received their commissions when Adams left the presidency in 1801. The disappointed men, who included businessman William Marbury, filed suit against Secretary of State James Madison for his refusal to seat them. Adams’s successor, President Thomas Jefferson, insisted that the Supreme Court did not have the power to give orders to the president or his appointees.
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In an adroit move, Chief Justice John Marshall gave Jefferson the victory in fact but not in theory. He said that the four men had the right to their seats and, moreover, that when the law required the president to carry out duties in a straightforward way, the courts could order him to do so. But Marshall said that in this case, the Supreme Court would not order the president. He reasoned that the law Adams’s four judicial appointees used to bring the suit before the Supreme Court actually violated the Constitution and thus could not be enforced.
In McCulloch v. Maryland the Supreme Court grappled with how much leeway Congress should have in enacting law if the Constitution does not assign it specific power to do so. Chief Justice John Marshall's decision established the idea that certain congressional powers are implied in the Constitution.
In the late 18th century Alexander Hamilton, then secretary of the treasury, suggested that Congress form a Bank of the United States. Thomas Jefferson, then secretary of state, opposed Hamilton’s suggestion. He argued that the Constitution did not grant Congress an express power to create a bank. Hamilton reasoned that Congress had the power to do anything not explicitly prohibited by the Constitution. President George Washington sided with Hamilton, and the Bank of the United States was given a charter.
Years later, many state banks began objecting to the conservative fiscal policy established by the federal bank. At the urging of state banks, Maryland imposed a tax on the federal bank to restrict its operations. James McCulloch, an employee of the Baltimore branch of the federal bank, refused to pay the tax. The case went to the Supreme Court, with Maryland challenging the constitutionality of a national bank.
Chief Justice Marshall decided in favor of McCulloch, striking down the tax. Marshall also concluded that Congress had the right to establish a national bank, reasoning that the Constitution empowered Congress to enact laws that were “legitimate and proper” and that if a law concerns the means of carrying out a legitimate end, then it does not matter if the Constitution is silent on the matter. This decision set the stage for the historical development of a strong and expanding federal government.
In the late 18th century, intrastate (in-state) commerce constituted a large part of the economic activity of the United States. Because the Constitution stipulates only that Congress may regulate interstate (among states) commerce, it might have seemed that Congress would play a minor role in the American economy. But in Gibbons v. Ogden the Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Chief Justice John Marshall, defined commerce in an expansive way that would ultimately permit Congress to play a major role in economic regulation.
The question was whether Congress could regulate the shipment of goods across state lines. In 1818 Thomas Gibbons began running a steamboat between New York and New Jersey under a federal license. He was sued by Aaron Ogden, who held exclusive rights to steamboat traffic in New York State under a state law.
Strict interpreters of the Constitution argued that Congress could not regulate navigation across state lines, on the basis that commerce refers only to actual buying and selling. But Marshall said that Congress’s power over commerce embraces all aspects of commercial activity and that Congress may regulate any activity, even one that seems to be local and to occur entirely within a state, if the activity “affects” interstate commerce. The Court’s opinion also struck down the state monopoly as invalid.
The logic behind this single opinion led in the 20th century to an immense expansion of the powers of Congress, and in areas far beyond economic transactions. For example, Marshall’s broad definition of commerce has been used to uphold legislation protecting civil rights.
Perhaps the most infamous decision in the Supreme Court’s history, Scott v. Sandford (also known as the Dred Scott case) in 1857 struck down the Missouri Compromise and held that African Americans could never be citizens of the United States. The Missouri Compromise, passed by Congress in 1820, had prohibited the extension of slavery in the United States north and west of Missouri.
In 1846 Dred Scott, a slave in St. Louis, Missouri, sued to establish his right to freedom after living in Illinois, a free state, for four years. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney ruled against Scott, arguing that African Americans could not become U.S. citizens and thus had no right to sue in federal courts.
The decision stymied Congress in its attempts to ban slavery in new states and was one of the primary causes of the American Civil War. The case was directly overturned by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which gives citizenship to anyone born in the United States except the children of foreign diplomats.
In 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court had approved state legislation that enforced separation of the races in railroads, as long as the cars for blacks and whites were “equal,” a word the Court never defined. In approving the practice of legalized racial segregation, the Court set back the cause of racial equality in the United States for more than half a century.
The principle of “separate but equal” established by Plessy v. Ferguson was not overturned until 1954, when the Supreme Court began to dismantle official racial segregation with Brown v. Board of Education. Oliver Brown filed suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, on behalf of his daughter, Linda, who had to travel more than an hour each way to a segregated school, when a school for white students was only blocks from her home. This was one of a number of cases challenging Plessy v. Ferguson that Thurgood Marshall, the chief lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), brought before the Court in the early 1950s.
Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the unanimous decision of the Court, which held that laws requiring racial discrimination in public schools violate a clause of the 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law to all citizens. This landmark decision eventually led to the overturning of thousands of laws and ordinances that had succeeded in keeping African Americans out of the mainstream of American life. At the same time it provoked immense political upheaval and altered voting patterns throughout the South and other parts of the country.
For most of American history, an impoverished criminal defendant could be tried, convicted, and sent to jail even though the defendant was too poor to afford a lawyer. Until Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963, state and local courts had to provide a lawyer only for offenses for which capital punishment was possible.
Clarence Earl Gideon was tried for burglary in Florida in 1961 and asked the court to provide a lawyer because he could not afford one. The court refused; Gideon conducted his own defense and was convicted. He then sent a petition to the Supreme Court. Louie L. Wainwright, head of the Florida prison system, was named defendant in the case.
In Gideon v. Wainwright the Court overruled an earlier decision that the right to legal counsel was not guaranteed in state criminal cases. The majority opinion, written by Justice Hugo Black, for the first time stated that anyone accused of a crime had a fundamental right to legal counsel. Another trial was held. Gideon was defended by a court-appointed lawyer and was acquitted.
The Supreme Court ruled that because the legal process is so complex, the state must provide a lawyer at its own expense to any defendant in a criminal trial. Although having a lawyer does not, of course, guarantee a fair trial, not having a lawyer makes it much more likely that the legal process will be unfair, because police and prosecutors will have far fewer incentives to follow investigative leads and constitutional procedures. Gideon and later cases that extended the right to counsel make it less likely that innocent people will be brought to trial on trumped-up charges and more likely that even the guilty will be dealt with fairly.
Although the First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press, it was long possible for government officials to silence the press by filing lawsuits over stories that carried inaccuracies, even if the inaccurate statements occurred by mistake.
In 1962 L. B. Sullivan, a city commissioner in Montgomery, Alabama, filed a libel suit against the New York Times for publishing an advertisement alleging misdeeds by the Montgomery police. Although the descriptions of the police actions were inaccurate, the Supreme Court ruled in New York Times v. Sullivan that the First Amendment protects even untruthful stories about government and government officials, unless the stories are written or published with “actual malice”—that is, with knowledge of the story’s falsity or with reckless disregard for the likelihood that it is false.
The Court’s decision, followed by other rulings, guards against official attempts to “chill” speech by threatening lawsuits.
The Miranda warnings that are now a ubiquitous feature of police shows on television and in motion-picture thrillers were not a constitutional requirement until Miranda v. Arizona. In its decision the Supreme Court for the first time said that all state and local police must warn a suspect being held in custody of several rights: to remain silent, to have an attorney present, and to have the state appoint an attorney if the suspect cannot afford one. In addition, the police must warn suspects that any statements they make can be used against them.
The question before the Court was how to ensure that a suspect’s constitutional rights were protected—the right to legal representation established by Gideon v. Wainwright and the right not to incriminate oneself, guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. The case involved a truck driver, Ernesto Miranda, who confessed to a crime during police interrogation without having been informed of his right to an attorney. He was convicted on the basis of his confession. Miranda was retried after the Court’s decision and was convicted without the use of the confession.
Miranda v. Arizona has sparked scores of other cases in the Supreme Court and thousands of cases in the lower courts, all aimed at defining what makes a criminal investigation and trial fair. The Miranda case became an important issue in national politics because critics feared that the Court’s decision would hamper the police in convicting criminals. A 1999 case threatened to overturn Miranda, but the Court rebutted claims that Miranda had no constitutional basis. The warnings are required by the 14th Amendment, the Court said, and Congress may not abolish them.
Although Brown v. Board of Education began the process of dismantling legalized segregation, its underlying rationale did not necessarily point to an eradication of every type of racial discrimination enshrined in law. The Supreme Court took that step in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia.
The Lovings were a couple convicted in 1958 of violating a Virginia state law that prohibited miscegenation (interracial marriage). She was black and Native American, and he was white. Their jail sentence was suspended on condition that they leave Virginia. They filed suit, and the Supreme Court struck down the Virginia law because it violated 14th Amendment guarantees of equal protection and due process of law. In essence, the Court held that it is not a permissible end of either the states or the federal government to segregate along racial lines.
In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court ruled that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion during the first six months of pregnancy. Before this ruling, abortion was illegal in most states, except when the pregnancy endangered the woman’s life.
In 1970 a Texas woman challenged the constitutionality of a Texas law outlawing abortion. Using the pseudonym Jane Roe, she sued Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade for the right to end an unwanted pregnancy. Although Texas judges ruled in Roe’s favor, they refused to void the Texas law and the case went to the Supreme Court.
Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion of the Court. He argued that although the Constitution does not explicitly guarantee a right to privacy, a later Court decision and the 14th Amendment established that right, which restrictive state abortion laws violated. In its essence, Roe established a zone of personal autonomy in matters of reproduction, a right that continues to the present day, although later cases have modified the reach of Roe’s protections.
Roe is the most significant example of the theory that the due process clauses of the 5th and 14th amendments protect substantive liberties of individual citizens. The decision ignited a continuing firestorm of political controversy and significantly affected electoral politics at the state and national levels.
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