Loving v. Virginia

Loving v. Virginia
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued April 10, 1967 Decided June 12, 1967
Full case name	Richard Perry Loving, Mildred (Jeter) Loving v. Virginia
Citations	388 U.S. 1 (more) 87 S. Ct. 1817; 18 L. Ed. 2d 1010; 1967 U.S. LEXIS 1082
Argument	Oral argument
Case history
Prior	Defendants convicted, Caroline County Circuit Court (January 6, 1959); motion to vacate judgment denied, Caroline County Circuit Court (January 22, 1959); affirmed in part, reversed and remanded, 147 S.E.2d 78 (Va. 1966); cert. granted, 385 U.S. 986 (1966).
Holding
Virginia's statutory scheme to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications held to violate the Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Court membership
Chief Justice Earl Warren Associate Justices Hugo Black · William O. Douglas Tom C. Clark · John M. Harlan II William J. Brennan Jr. · Potter Stewart Byron White · Abe Fortas
Case opinions
Majority	Warren, joined by unanimous
Concurrence	Stewart
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV; Va. Code §§ 20–58, 20–59
This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings
Pace v. Alabama (1883)

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.^[1][2] Beginning in 2013, the decision was cited as precedent in U.S. federal court decisions ruling that restrictions on same-sex marriage in the United States were unconstitutional, including in the Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).^[3]

The case involved Richard Loving, a white man, and his wife Mildred Loving, a Black woman.^[a] In 1959, the Lovings were sentenced to prison for violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored". After unsuccessfully appealing their conviction to the Supreme Court of Virginia, they appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the Racial Integrity Act was unconstitutional.

In June 1967, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in the Lovings' favor which overturned their convictions and struck down Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. Virginia had argued before the Court that its law was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because the punishment was the same regardless of the offender's race, and therefore it "equally burdened" both whites and non-whites.^[4] The Court found that the law nonetheless violated the Equal Protection Clause because it was based solely on "distinctions drawn according to race" and outlawed conduct—namely, that of getting married—that was otherwise generally accepted and which citizens were free to do.^[4] The Court's decision ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.

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