Road Trip! Take a Summer Drive Through ‘Landmarks’ in Law in D.C. and Virginia

Stop 2: Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Prince Edward County

The Robert Russa Moton Museum tells the story of the civil rights movement in Prince Edward County, where several of the Brown v. Board of Education plaintiffs hailed from.

In 1964, I was at the helm of history. I was a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black when the court decided Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County. 

In response to Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Virginia had embarked on a policy of Massive Resistance to school desegregation. In 1959, Prince Edward County took the extreme step of closing its schools entirely. While private schools were opened for white students, black students had no formal education for the next five years. 

In 1964, Justice Black’s majority opinion in the case ordered the county to reopen and fund the public schools. Where earlier opinions were essentially negative – telling the states and localities what they could not do (that is, operate segregated schools) – Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County represented the first time the court had told the states what they must do (operate and fund integrated schools). A bold step, this case marked the first time the court had ordered a unit of government to exercise its taxing power.

– Professor A.E. Dick Howard

Stop 3: Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Norfolk

Yaser Hamdi was born in Louisiana in 1980, making him a U.S. citizen at birth under the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause. Hamdi was living in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, when the United States invaded that country in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. 

Hamdi was captured by the military and sent to the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the government concluded he was an “enemy combatant.” A few months later, upon learning that Hamdi was a U.S. citizen, the military transferred him to a naval brig in Norfolk. While in Virginia, Hamdi filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus challenging the government’s claim that it could detain him indefinitely without formal charges or a hearing. 

The government responded that national security and military necessity made providing Hamdi with the procedural protection of a criminal trial dangerous and impractical, outweighing Hamdi’s liberty interest.

In its 2004 decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, namely then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court held that the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause gave Hamdi a right to see the evidence against him and an opportunity to be heard, but rejected Hamdi’s argument that as a U.S. citizen, he was entitled to the full panoply of procedural protections guaranteed to criminal defendants under the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. 

The government then chose to release Hamdi rather than produce any evidence it had against him, but conditioned that release on Hamdi’s agreement to give up his U.S. citizenship and leave the country. Hamdi is an important case, typically taught in the Law School’s Civil Procedure class as well as in some constitutional law courses, because it establishes the due process clause as a restriction on government power to detain citizens, even under extraordinary circumstances involving national security and military operations.

– Professor Amanda Frost

Stop 4: Loving v. Virginia, Central Point

Though they grew up in Central Point, Richard and Mildred Loving also have a historical marker 11 miles away on Route 16.

Mildred and Richard Loving. (From Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

Loving v. Virginia, decided June 12, 1967, was the concluding bookend to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

The first bookend was Brown v. Board of Education which, on May 17, 1954, repudiated racial segregation in public education. Over the 13 years between Brown and Loving, the Supreme Court invalidated segregation beyond schools, including in public buses, beaches, bathhouses, parks and golf courses. 

The case then hammered the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, striking down the last of the segregation laws and the one most important to segregationists: bans on interracial marriage. In so doing, Loving v. Virginia boldly declared “white supremacy” is an impermissible justification for law. It also affirmed the fundamental right to marry, a holding that later inspired successful litigation for legal recognition of intimate relationships and marriage for gay and lesbian people. 

The case established the constitutional right to love regardless of race and, ultimately, regardless of sexual orientation.

– Professor Kim Forde-Mazrui

Read on for additional tour stops centered on blockbuster cases involving the Pentagon Papers; Marbury v. Madison, the most famous of constitutional law cases; and a controversial sterilization case.