Shapiro v. Thompson

Vivian Marie Thompson was a 19-year old single mother who was pregnant with her second child when she moved from Massachusetts to Hartford, Connecticut. She first lived with her mother, a Hartford resident, then later moved into her own apartment. Unable to work or attend job training programs because of her pregnancy, she applied for assistance under Connecticut's Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. In accordance with their regulations, the state denied her aid because she had not yet resided in Connecticut for one full year. Thompson brought action against the state in the District Court for the District of Connecticut. That court found that because the waiting period requirement had "a chilling effect on the right to travel" it was unconstitutional. It also held that the same requirements violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it was intended, as Connecticut acknowledged, to discourage people who need aid from moving into Connecticut.

On appeal, the case moved on to the U.S. Supreme Court. It was considered together with two similar cases, Washington v. Legrant, and Reynolds v. Smith. In the Washington case, three people had been denied AFDC aid because they had not met a District of Columbia one-year residency requirement. In Reynolds, two people had been denied aid in Pennsylvania for the same reason.

Writing for the majority, Justice Brennan first established that the one-year residency requirement created two classes of needy resident families. These two classes, he said, were different only in that one group had resided in the particular area for over one year, and one group for less than a year. That distinction, he stated, was not reason enough for a government to deny one group the necessities of life.

The appellants had argued that the residency requirements were intended to keep public assistance programs functional by preventing a rush of destitute newcomers from draining state welfare resources. They maintained that people who entered welfare programs during their first year of residence in a new state were likely to stay on those programs. This would eventually impair the state's ability to assist its needy long-time residents, they said. Justice Brennan centered his response to this on every U.S. citizen's right to travel freely throughout the country. This right was not expressly named in the Constitution, he said, but was a product of both that document and the "nature of our Federal Union." Thus, he reasoned, if a classification of residents was created solely for the purpose of deterring the poor from moving between states, then it was unconstitutional.

The appellants further argued that even if it was unconstitutional for a state to try to prevent an influx of poor into its population, then the requirement could still be justified as a way to keep out those who were moving in simply to try to obtain larger benefits. Justice Brennan responded by noting that the state's requirements did not attempt to find out if that was the applicant's reason for moving, but simply presumed that it was the reason in all cases. Regardless, he wrote, the state could not discriminate against such a motive, no more than they could against an individual who changed residence to take advantage of a better educational system. The appellants presented yet another justification of the requirement: that in differentiating old from new residents, it identified who was making a greater economic contribution to the state through tax payments. Justice Brennan quickly dispensed with an analysis of facts in the case, instead contending that the appellants' reasoning would allow a state to distribute public benefits and services based on a citizen's past tax payments. This, he said, would be forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause.

Justice Brennan then challenged the argument that the waiting period requirement was justified by several administrative purposes. Although he acknowledged that the state had a valid interest in each purpose, those interests, he concluded, did not outweigh the constitutional right to interstate travel. Finally, the appellants contended that the constitutionality of the waiting period requirement could not be challenged because Congress had approved the requirement. As part of the joint federal-state AFDC program, they argued, Congress had authorized the states and the District of Columbia to impose the waiting period requirement. Justice Brennan disagreed. The relevant provision of the Social Security Act, he wrote, only prevented the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare from rejecting state AFDC plans simply because they included such a requirement. He suggested that perhaps the provision itself was unconstitutional, in that "Congress may not authorize the States to violate the Equal Protection Clause."