Griswold v. Connecticut

Summary

Because it concerns contraception and marriage, the case is best studied with a teacher's guidance. Since 1879 Connecticut law had made it a crime for any person to use a drug or device to prevent conception, and a general accessory statute allowed anyone who assisted or counseled such use to be punished as a principal. In November 1961 Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton, a Yale Medical School professor, opened a clinic in New Haven that advised married couples. They were arrested within ten days, convicted as accessories and fined one hundred dollars each, and Connecticut's appellate courts affirmed. The question was whether the Constitution forbids a state to prohibit married persons from using contraceptives. The appellants argued that the law invaded a sphere of marital privacy protected by the liberty of the Fourteenth Amendment. Connecticut argued that the legislature had acted within its police power on a question of public morals, that no provision of the Constitution mentions such a right, and that the Court should not return to the pre-1937 practice of judges striking down laws they consider unwise. On 7 June 1965 the Court reversed, seven to two. Justice Douglas first held that the doctor and director could assert the rights of the couples they served. Disclaiming any return to Lochner, he reasoned that specific guarantees of the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees, that create zones of privacy, and that marriage lies within such a zone; a law forbidding use, rather than sale, reached into the home itself. Justice Goldberg, joined by Chief Justice Warren and Justice Brennan, relied on the Ninth Amendment as evidence that fundamental rights exist beyond those enumerated. Justice Harlan concurred only in the judgment, holding that the Due Process Clause protects basic values rooted in history and tradition on its own, without depending on the Bill of Rights. Justice Black, dissenting, said he found the law as offensive as his colleagues did but could find no constitutional provision forbidding it, and warned that substituting the word privacy for the specific words of the Fourth Amendment invited judges to strike down laws by their own lights. Justice Stewart, joined by Black, called the statute an uncommonly silly law but found no general right of privacy in the Constitution and said the remedy lay with Connecticut's voters. The library text includes Douglas's opinion, Harlan's concurrence and Stewart's dissent, with parts of Goldberg's concurrence and Black's dissent; Justice White's concurrence is not included, and notes are dropped. Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) extended the holding to unmarried persons, and Roe v. Wade (1973) built on its right of privacy. When Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) overruled Roe, the majority stated that its decision did not cast doubt on precedents such as Griswold, while Justice Thomas's concurrence urged reconsideration of the Court's substantive due process cases.

Top Lessons

• Rights named and unnamed

  The central dispute is whether the Constitution protects rights that its text does not mention. Douglas finds such rights in the shadows cast by named guarantees, Goldberg in the Ninth Amendment, and Harlan in the concept of ordered liberty. Black and Stewart answer that judges have no warrant to protect what the text does not specify, and that unnamed rights belong to the political process.

• A foolish law and a constitutional law

  Both dissenters say they dislike the Connecticut statute; Stewart calls it uncommonly silly. Yet they would uphold it, because they distinguish between a law's wisdom and its constitutionality. The case invites students to consider whether that distinction can be maintained and what it requires of judges.

• The shadow of Lochner

  Douglas explicitly declines to follow Lochner v. New York, and Black and Stewart accuse the majority of reviving its method under another name. Harlan answers that restraint comes from history and tradition, not from limiting due process to the Bill of Rights. The exchange shows how the memory of an earlier era shapes later reasoning.

• Marriage and the home

  Douglas closes by describing marriage as older than the Bill of Rights and intimate to the degree of being sacred, and by asking whether police should search marital bedrooms. All the justices treated marriage as a distinct institution; they disagreed about whether the Constitution gives courts power to shield it from this statute.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Griswold matters to the history of medical ethics and law because a physician was criminally convicted for advising patients, and the Court held that a doctor could assert his patients' constitutional rights. The opinions debate the boundaries between professional medical advice protected as speech, medical conduct subject to state law, and the privacy of the patient relationship. The record contains no clinical content.

• Opinion of the Court, standing: We think that appellants have standing to raise the constitutional rights of the married people with whom they had a professional relationship.

  Douglas holds that a convicted physician and clinic director may assert the rights of the patients they served, an important link between the doctor-patient relationship and constitutional litigation.

• Dissent of Justice Black, paragraph beginning: Had the doctor defendant here, or even the nondoctor defendant, been convicted for doing nothing more than expressing opinions

  Black distinguishes a physician's protected advice from the clinic's examinations and supply of materials, which he treats as conduct the state may punish.