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Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia - Significance, Interracial Marriage

Appellants

Mildred Jeter Loving, Richard Perry Loving

Appellee

Commonwealth of Virginia

Appellants' Claim

That Virginia miscegenation statutes violate the equal protection and the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clauses.

Chief Lawyer for Appellants

Bernard S. Cohen

Chief Lawyer for Appellee

R. D. McIlwaine III

Justices for the Court

Hugo Lafayette Black, William J. Brennan, Jr., William O. Douglas, Abe Fortas, John Marshall Harlan II, Potter Stewart, Earl Warren (writing for the Court), Byron R. White

Justices Dissenting

None (Thurgood Marshall did not participate)

Place

Washington, D.C.

Date of Decision

12 June 1967

Decision

The previous convictions were reversed.

Related Cases

  • Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 (1883).
  • Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190 (1888).
  • Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).
  • Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942).

Sources

Statistical Abstract of the United States 1997. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997.

Further Readings

  • Johnson, John W., ed. Historic U.S. Court Cases, 1690-1990: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992.
  • Lieberman, Jethro K. The Evolving Constitution. New York: Random House, 1992.
  • Seidman, Louis M., Gerald R. Stone, Cass R. Sunstein, and Mark V. Tushnet. Constitutional Law. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1986.

Additional Topics

Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia - Significance

This case established that under the Equal Protection Clause, a state cannot regulate marriages because the partners are of different skin color, religions or national origins. When the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted it was designed to ensure all Americans the same civil rights and equal protection under the law. But it went further than that. It took the power away from the individual states to…

Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia - Interracial Marriage

The U.S. Bureau of the Census in 1980 counted 49,714,000 married couples in the United States. Of these, 97 percent or 48,264,000 were "same race couples." About 1.3 percent, or 651,000 couples, were designated as interracial couples, with either a black person married to a white person, a black person married to someone of another race, or a white person married to someone of another race. (In ad…

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