June 12th marks the anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in the civil rights case Loving v. Virginia. The case involved Virginia’s so-called Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which banned inter-racial marriages. In a unanimous decision, the Court held that distinctions drawn according to race were generally “odious to a free people” and were subject to “the most rigid scrutiny” under the Equal Protection Clause. The Court rejected the state’s argument that the statute was legitimate because it applied equally to both blacks and whites and found that racial classifications were not subject to a “rational purpose” test under the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.

Most Americans consider privacy one of their most prized rights, yet the word isn’t even mentioned in the United States Constitution. It wasn’t until June 7, 1965 that the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that the Constitution protected a right to privacy. The case involved a Connecticut law that prohibited the use of contraceptives. By a vote of 7-2, the Supreme Court invalidated the law, reasoning that certain guarantees within the Bill of Rights create penumbras, or zones, that establish a right to privacy. According to the Court, the First, Third, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments together create a new constitutional right, the right to privacy in marital relations. The case remains one of the Court’s most hotly debated rulings and led directly to an even more controversial decision in Roe v. Wade (1973).