Griswold v. Connecticut 381 U.S. 479 (1965)

• Author: Kenneth L. Karst
• Pages: 1233-1234

Page 1233

Seen in the perspective of the development of constitutional doctrine, Griswold stands among the most influential Supreme Court decisions of the latter part of the twentieth century. A full understanding of its effect on the constitutional future requires a look at Griswold's antecedents. Even seen narrowly, Griswold was something of a culmination. The BIRTH CONTROL movement had made two previous unsuccessful attempts to get the Court to invalidate Connecticut's law forbidding use of contraceptive devices. In Tileston v. Ullman (1943) a doctor was held to lack STANDING to assert his patients' constitutional claims, and in Poe v. Ullman (1961), when a doctor and his patients sued in their own rights, the Court again dismissed?this time on jurisdictional grounds that could charitably be called ingenuous. Griswold proved to be the charm; operators of a birth control clinic had been prosecuted for aiding married couples to violate the law, furnishing them advice and contraceptive devices. The Supreme Court held the law invalid, 7?2.

Griswold fanned into flames a doctrinal issue that had smoldered in the Supreme Court for nearly two centuries: the question whether the Constitution protects NATURAL RIGHTS or FUNDAMENTAL INTERESTS beyond those specifically mentioned in its text. (See CALDER V. BULL; FUNDAMENTAL LAW AND THE SUPREME COURT; HIGHER LAW.) In the modern era, that question of CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION had focused on Justice HUGO L. BLACK'S argument that the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT fully incorporated the specific guarantees of the BILL OF RIGHTS and made them applicable to the states. Black's dissent in Adamson v. California (1947) had scorned the competing view, limiting the content of the Fourteenth Amendment DUE PROCESS to the fundamentals of ORDERED LIBERTY. This "natural-law-due-process formula," said Black, not only allowed judges to fail to protect rights specifically covered by the Constitution but also permitted them "to roam at large in the broad expanses of policy and morals," trespassing on the legislative domain. In Adamson Justice FRANK MURPHY had also dissented; accepting the INCORPORATION DOCTRINE, Murphy argued that other "fundamental" rights, beyond the specific guarantees of the Bill of Rights, were also protected by due process. Griswold offered a test of the Black and Murphy views.

Justice WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS, who had agreed with Black in Adamson, recognized that the Connecticut birth...