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Dred Scott, a slave in Missouri, sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had lived for a time in a "free" territory. The Court ruled against him, saying that under the Constitution, he was his master's property. At the same time, the Court also ruled that the Missouri Compromise (1821) -- under which Missouri was admitted to the union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and slavery prohibited in the territory that later became Kansas and Nebraska.
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Court ruled for the first time that a facially neutral law applied in a racially discriminatory manner violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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Court upheld a Louisiana law requiring restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and other public places to serve African Americans in separate, but ostensibly equal, accommodations. In establishing the separate but equal" doctrine, the Court said that segregation is "universally recognized as within the competency of states in the exercise of their police powers."
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Court struck down state laws which prohibited inter-racial marriage and held that marriage was a fundamental right.
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Supreme Court ruled that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits not only intentional job discrimination, but also employer practices that have a discriminatory effect on minorities and women. The Court held that tests and other employment practices that disproportionately screened out African American applicants for jobs at the Duke Power Company were prohibited when the tests were not shown to be job-related.
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the Supreme Court struck down in Frontiero v. Richardson a law that classified benefits on the basis of gender, though could not agree on whether a strict scrutiny standard or a rational basis standard should apply.
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Court ordered the state of Michigan, along with the Detroit school system, to finance a plan to address the educational deficits faced by African American children. These deficits, the Court suggested, arose out of enforced segregation and could not be cured by physical desegregation alone. This decision eased in part the impact of denying interdistrict desegregation in Milliken I.
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Court upheld Georgia's state law making sodomy a crime. The Court said that constitutional rights to privacy did not encompass what it called "homosexual sodomy," and that the law served a legitimate state interest, namely promoting what the court defined as "majority sentiments about ... morality."
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Court held that a prosecutor’s use of a preemptory challenge to dismiss a juror, based solely on the juror’s race, is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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The first Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) case to make its way to the Court, which held, among other things, that HIV-positive individuals are protected under the ADA.
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Court ruled that the Boy Scouts' First Amendment rights of free expression and association would be violated by enforcement of New Jersey's state antidiscrimination law to prohibit them from dismissing a gay Scoutmaster.
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Court struck down state bans on same-sex marriage, thereby granting the constitutional right to marry to LGBT Americans throughout the country.
