Minimum Competence

This Day in Legal History: Windsor and Obergefell On two separate June 26ths, exactly two years apart, the Supreme Court made history by recognizing marriage equality as a constitutional right. These decisions fundamentally transformed American law and represented victories for millions of Americans. On June 26, 2013, in United States v. Windsor , the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Section 3 of the...

This Day in Legal History: Shelby County v. Holder On this day in legal history, June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder , a major case on the future of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In a 5–4 decision, the Court struck down Section 4(b) of the Act, which contained the formula used to decide which states and local governments were subject to federal oversight before c...

This Day in Legal History: Dobbs On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that fundamentally changed American constitutional law. The case centered on a Mississippi statute that prohibited most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In a 6–3 ruling, the Court held that the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion....

This Day in Legal History: Title IX On June 23, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the Education Amendments of 1972, a sweeping federal education law that included what became one of the most consequential civil rights provisions in American history: Title IX. Title IX stated that no person in the United States, on the basis of sex, could be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of...

This Day in Legal History: Plessy v. Ferguson On June 7, 1896, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation in the United States. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court ruled 7-1 that states could require separate facilities for Black and white people as long as those facilities were “separate but equal.” Homer Plessy, a man of mixed race, had violated a Louisiana law by sitting...

This Day in Legal History: Susan B. Anthony Fined for Voting On this day in 1873, in a federal courtroom in Canandaigua, New York, Judge Ward Hunt fined Susan B. Anthony one hundred dollars for the crime of voting. Anthony had walked into a polling place in Rochester on November 5, 1872, and cast a ballot for Ulysses S. Grant. She was arrested two weeks later under a federal statute, the Enforceme...

This Day in Legal History: The Watergate Burglary On this day in 1972, at roughly 2:30 in the morning, a security guard at the Watergate office complex on Virginia Avenue in Washington named Frank Wills noticed that the latches on a stairwell door had been taped over and called the District police. The police arrested five men inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the sixth fl...

This Day in Legal History: The End of Roosevelt’s Hundred Days On this day in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt signed three pieces of legislation that closed out what the country has been calling the Hundred Days ever since: the Banking Act of 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and the Farm Credit Act, with the Home Owners’ Loan Act having been signed three days earlier. The Banking Act of 1933 i...

This Day in Legal History: Magna Carta Sealed at Runnymede On this day in 1215, in a meadow at Runnymede on the south bank of the Thames, King John of England affixed his seal to a document the rebellious English barons had drafted, in which the king conceded a series of limits on his own royal authority. We call it Magna Carta — the Great Charter. The immediate political context was a baronial re...

This Day in Legal History: Loving v. Virginia Decided On this day in 1967, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous opinion in Loving v. Virginia striking down Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and, with it, the anti-miscegenation statutes that sixteen states still had on the books. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the Court. The case had come up from a county courthouse in Caroline Coun...

This Day in Legal History: Wallace Stands in the Schoolhouse Door On this day in 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace physically stood in the doorway of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to block the registration of Vivian Malone and James Hood, the two Black students whose enrollment had been ordered by a federal district court. Wallace’s “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” was the culm...

This Day in Legal History: Kennedy Signs the Equal Pay Act On this day in 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, the first federal statute aimed directly at sex-based wage discrimination. The law took the form of an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which meant that it slid into an existing enforcement framework run by the Wage and Hour Division of the Departmen...

This Day in Legal History: The Burning of the Gaspee On this day in 1772, a Royal Navy revenue schooner called HMS Gaspee, captained by a notably overzealous Lieutenant William Duddington, ran aground in shallow water in Narragansett Bay while chasing a Rhode Island packet boat called the Hannah. Within hours of the grounding, roughly sixty Providence merchants, sailors, and “Sons of Liberty” — le...

This Day in Legal History: Madison Introduces the Bill of Rights On this day in 1789, James Madison rose from his seat in New York’s Federal Hall — then the temporary capital of the new federal government — and gave the speech in which he introduced a list of amendments to the Constitution that we now know as the Bill of Rights. Madison had been, until quite recently, a skeptic of attaching a bill...

This Day in Legal History: Congress Repeals the Gold Clause On this day in 1933, Congress passed the Joint Resolution that voided the gold clauses written into nearly every long-term contract and bond obligation in the United States, both public and private. The resolution declared that any provision purporting to require payment “in gold or a particular kind of coin or currency” was “against publ...

This Day in Legal History: Congress Passes the Nineteenth Amendment On this day in 1919, the U.S. Senate voted 56 to 25 to approve the Nineteenth Amendment, sending to the states a one-sentence constitutional rule that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The House had already passed it two week...

This Day in Legal History: The National Defense Act of 1916 On this day in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Defense Act, the law that quietly built the legal scaffolding for how the United States deploys soldiers, both abroad and at home, for the next century-plus. The Act roughly tripled the size of the regular Army, formally created the National Guard as a federalized reserve f...

This Day in Legal History: The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 On this day in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act, also called the Snyder Act, declaring that all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States were U.S. citizens. It is one of those laws that sounds, in retrospect, like it cannot possibly have been necessary — and yet it was. Fo...

This Day in Legal History: The First Act of Congress On this day in 1789, President George Washington signed the first statute ever enacted by Congress under the new Constitution — “An Act to Regulate the Time and Manner of Administering Certain Oaths,” codified at 1 Stat. 23. The substance was modest: the law prescribed the form of the oath that members of Congress, federal judges, and executive...

This Day in Legal History: Rhode Island Ratifies the Constitution, 1790 On this day in 1790, Rhode Island became the thirteenth and final original state to ratify the United States Constitution, doing so by a margin of 34 to 32 at a convention in Newport. Rhode Island’s hesitation had been considerable: the state refused to send delegates to the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, and twice rejected...

This Day in Legal History: The Indian Removal Act of 1830 On this day May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the federal government to “negotiate” the relocation of Native American tribes east of the Mississippi to lands in what is now Oklahoma. On its face the statute framed displacement as voluntary, treaty-based, and compensated; in practice it became...

This Day in Legal History: Black Monday and the End of the NIRA On May 27, 1935 — a day quickly dubbed “Black Monday” by the press — the United States Supreme Court delivered three unanimous decisions that gutted central pieces of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in a single morning. The most consequential was A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States , in which the Court struck down the Nation...

This Day in Legal History: Andrew Johnson Impeachment Trial Ends On May 26, 1868, the United States Senate ended the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, bringing one of the most dramatic constitutional confrontations in American history to a close. Johnson had been impeached by the House of Representatives earlier that year after clashing repeatedly with Congress over Reconstruction. At...

This Day in Legal History: Truman Doctrine On May 22, 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed legislation authorizing American aid to Greece and Turkey, giving legal force to what became known as the Truman Doctrine. The law provided economic and military assistance to both countries at a moment when U.S. leaders feared that instability in the eastern Mediterranean could expand Soviet influence. Gr...

This Day in Legal History: First Speed Limit Law On May 21, 1901, Connecticut became the first U.S. state to pass a law regulating the speed of motor vehicles. The law set a speed limit of 12 miles per hour in cities and 15 miles per hour on country roads. That may sound almost comically slow now, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, the automobile was still a new and disruptive technolo...