United States v. Virginia 1996

• Author: Daniel Brannen, Richard Hanes, Elizabeth Shaw
• Pages: 654-658

Contenidos

• Separate but equal?.
• Reversing discrimination.
• A few good women.
• Suggestions for further reading.

Page 654

Petitioner: United States

Respondents: Commonwealth of Virginia, Governor Lawrence Douglas Wilder, Virginia Military Institute, et al.

Petitioner's Claim: That the Virginia Military Institute's refusal to admit female students violated the Fourteenth Amendment

Chief Lawyer for Petitioner: Paul Bender, U.S. Deputy Solicitor General

Chief Lawyer for Respondent: Theodore B. Olsen

Justices for the Court: Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, William H. Rehnquist, David H. Souter, John Paul Stevens

Justices Dissenting: Antonin Scalia (Clarence Thomas did not participate)

Date of Decision: June 26, 1996

Decision: Excluding women from state-funded schools violates the Fourteenth Amendment.

Significance: America's last two state-funded all-male colleges were forced to admit women or give up state funding.

Page 655

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects citizens from discrimination by state governments. (Discrimination is unequal treatment of people in the same situation.) States and organizations that receive state funding must obey the Equal Protection Clause. Governments use the Equal Protection Clause to end discrimination based on race, religion, and sex or gender. In 1996 the U.S. Supreme Court used it to force an all-male, state-funded military college in Virginia to accept female students.

The Virginia Military Institute (VMI) is a state-funded military college that opened in Lexington, Virginia, in 1839. Around 1990 a female high school student complained to the U.S. Department of Justice that VMI would not accept female students. (The U.S. Department of Justice is the branch of the federal government that enforces federal law by prosecuting people who violate the law.) In 1990 the Justice Department filed a case accusing Virginia and VMI of violating the Equal Protection Clause by refusing to accept women at VMI. In the two years before the lawsuit, VMI ignored requests from more than 300 women about attending college there.

When the case went to trial in a federal court, VMI said that its long tradition of excluding women was important to its goal of producing citizen-soldiers. According to VMI, citizen-soldiers are men who can be military leaders during war and leaders in society during peacetime. Students at VMI receive a...