Selective Service v. Minnesota Public Interest Research Group - Significance

Selective Service v. Minnesota Public Interest Research Group raised issues which date back as far as the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction, when the 1867 cases Cummings v. Missouri and Ex parte Garland addressed concerns over the Bill of Attainder Clause of the Constitution. A bill of attainder, as the Court had defined it in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services (1977), was "a law that legislatively determines guilt and inflicts punishment upon an identifiable individual without provision of the protections of a judicial trial," thus unfairly subjecting an individual to judgment without the benefit of a genuine legal action. The case also established important distinctions regarding prohibitions against self-incrimination embodied in the Fifth Amendment.