In commemoration of Justice Ruth Ginsburg’s death, today, we are going to look at the landmark 1996 Supreme Court case of United States v. Virginia, a landmark case regarding women’s rights, of which Justice Ginsburg wrote the majority statement and played a huge role in deciding.
The Virginia Military Institute (VMI) is a premier public military college located in Lexington, Virginia. For the longest of times, it had only accepted male applicants and boasted this as the state’s only exclusively male public higher learning institution well into late last century.
In the 1990s, the United States decided to sue Virginia and the VMI, claiming that its male-only admissions policy violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The lawsuit was brought about in 1990 when a female high school student from Northern Virginia filed a complaint to the Attorney General of the United States, citing the Fourteenth Amendment. The Department of Justice (DOJ) then helped her file a suit in a district court under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The district court disagreed with the U.S. Government and ruled in favor of the VMI, citing the 1982 Supreme Court case of Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, where a state nursing school refused to admit men. The court also cited that requiring the VMI to admit women would “fundamentally alter” the “key elements of the adversative VMI educational system.” The case was appealed to an appeals court, where a panel agreed that providing single-sex education was a worthy goal, but had to find a way to provide equal options for women as well. The state tried to open an institution for women, but the DOJ said this was insufficient due to the major differences between the VMI and the proposed institute, the Virginia Women’s Institute of Leadership (VWIL). After a long scuffle between the belligerents, it was appealed to the Supreme Court in 1995.
The court had to consider whether or not a creation of a women’s-only academy as a comparable program to a male-only academy satisfy the Equal Protection Clause.
The court said no. In a 7-1 decision (Justice Antonin Scalia was the only dissenter, while Justice Clarence Thomas recused himself as his son was enrolled in the VMI), the court struck down VMI’s male-only admissions policy, declaring it to be in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
Writing the majority opinion, Justice Ginsburg said that the VMI failed to show “exceedingly persuasive justification” for its single-sex admissions policy. The state failed to show the policy was created or maintained to promote educational diversity. In addition, the VMI and the VWIL differed substantially, as the VWIL could not provide students with the same military training or facilities at the VMI.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote a concurrence, saying that if the state had made a genuine effort to make an institute equal to the VMI, it would have been acceptable as long as the institutes provided the same quality of education and caliber.
Justice Scalia wrote the only dissent. In his dissent, he wrote that the court chose to apply strict scrutiny, rather than intermediate scrutiny as is generally used to previous cases involving equal protection. He also said that the standards the court held the state to were too high, arguing against the use of strict scrutiny.
With the decision of U.S. v. Virginia, laws that “denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature—equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in, and contribute to society” were struck down. The case is now the standard used when discussing issues related to gender equality, and is also a seminal case discussed in Constitutional Law classes, a class typically taken in a student’s first year of law school.
Though Justice Ginsburg is no longer with us, her legacy, through cases such as U.S. v. Virginia, still remains. In future posts, we will also be taking a look at other cases through which Justice Ginsburg’s legacy remains.