Instructions: Match each case description below with the scrutiny classification.
Submission Instructions: Complete and submit the assignment by 11:59 CST on Day 7
Grading rubric: One point for each correct answer.
Strict Scrutiny
Intermediate Scrutiny
Rational Basis
a. In Lyng v. Northwest Cemetery Protective Association the Court concluded that the road and timbering were internal government affairs that only incidentally affected the free exercise of religion. It upheld the government’s action as a rational means of accomplishing a legitimate end. The Court in Lyng deferred to the government’s use of National Forest property.
b. In Craig v. Boren (1976) the Court held that the statute made unconstitutional gender classifications. The statistics relied on by the state of Oklahoma were insufficient to show a substantial relationship between the law and the maintenance of traffic safety. Generalities about the drinking habits of aggregate groups did not suffice. The Court also found that the Twenty-first Amendment did not alter the application of the Equal Protection Clause in the case.
c. In Plyer v. Doe (1982) the Court reasoned those illegal aliens and their children, though not citizens of the United States or Texas are people “in any ordinary sense of the term” and, therefore, is afforded Fourteenth Amendment protections. Since the state law severely disadvantaged the children of illegal aliens, by denying them the right to an education, and because Texas could not prove that the regulation was needed to serve a “compelling state interest,” the Court struck down the law.
d. In Romer v. Evans (1996) the Court held that Amendment 2 of the Colorado State Constitution violated the equal protection clause. Amendment 2 singled out homosexual and bisexual persons, imposing on them a broad disability by denying them the right to seek and receive specific legal protection from discrimination. In his opinion for the Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that oftentimes a law will be sustained under the equal protection clause, even if it seems to disadvantage a specific group, so long as it can be shown to “advance a legitimate government interest.”
e. In Miss. Univ. for Women v. Hogan (1982) Joe Hogan, a registered nurse and qualified applicant, was denied admission to the Mississippi University for Women School of Nursing’s baccalaureate program on the basis of sex. Created by a state statute in 1884, MUW was the oldest state-supported all-female college in the United States. The Court held that the state did not provide an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for the gender-based distinction.
f. In Loving v. Virginia (1967) the Court held that distinctions drawn according to race were generally “odious to a free people.” The Virginia law, the Court found, had no legitimate purpose “independent of invidious racial discrimination.” The Court rejected the state’s argument that the statute was legitimate because it applied equally to both blacks and whites.
g. In Renton v. Playtime Theatres Inc. (1986) the Court held that the zoning ordinance did not violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court held that the ordinance was a form of time, place, and manner regulation, not a ban on adult theaters altogether. The Court found that the ordinance was designed to serve a substantial governmental interest in preserving the quality of life and allowed for “reasonable alternative avenues of communication.”
h. In Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942) the Oklahoma’s Criminal Sterilization Act allowed the state to sterilize a person who had been convicted three or more times of crimes “amounting to felonies involving moral turpitude.” A unanimous Court held that the Act violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Since some crimes such as embezzlement, punishable as felonies in Oklahoma, were excluded from the Act’s jurisdiction, Justice Douglas reasoned that the law had laid “an unequal hand on those who have committed intrinsically the same quality of offense.”
