Minimum Competence

This Day in Legal History: The Scopes “Monkey Trial” Opens On July 10, 1925, the trial of John T. Scopes opened in the sweltering courthouse of Dayton, Tennessee. Scopes, a young high school teacher, stood accused of violating the state’s Butler Act, which made it a crime to teach human evolution in public schools. The case became one of the most famous trials in American history—less because of w...

This Day in Legal History: The Fourteenth Amendment Is Ratified On July 9, 1868, South Carolina and Louisiana became the final two states needed to push the Fourteenth Amendment over the three-quarters threshold, and with their votes the amendment was ratified into the Constitution. It is, by almost any measure, the most consequential of the Reconstruction amendments and arguably the most importan...

This Day in Legal History: Vermont Bans Slavery On July 8, 1777, delegates meeting in Windsor adopted the Constitution of the Vermont Republic—and in doing so, Vermont became the first place in North America to write the prohibition of slavery into its founding law. At a moment when the newly declared United States tolerated and protected human bondage, a small, unrecognized republic on the fronti...

This Day in Legal History: Sandra Day O’Connor Nominated to the Supreme Court On July 7, 1981, President Ronald Reagan announced that he was nominating Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court of the United States. If confirmed, she would become the first woman ever to serve on the Court in its then-191-year history. The Senate confirmed her later that summer by a vote of 99 to 0, and she took her...

This Day in Legal History: The Execution of Sir Thomas More On July 6, 1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded at Tower Hill in London, convicted of high treason against King Henry VIII. More had been one of the most powerful men in England—a lawyer, a scholar, a former Lord Chancellor, the King’s own friend—and he went to the scaffold because he would not say the words the King demanded. The dispute w...

This Day in Legal History: Civil Rights Act of 1964 On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. It was one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history, and it fundamentally transformed the legal landscape by banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public accommodations, employment, educatio...

This Day in Legal History: Revenue Act of 1862 On this day in legal history, July 1, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Revenue Act of 1862, one of the most important financing measures of the Civil War. The Union war effort required enormous amounts of money, and Congress could no longer rely only on tariffs, loans, and traditional sources of federal revenue. The act created the Office of...

This Day in Legal History: Ada Kepley Graduates On June 30, 1870, Ada H. Kepley became the first woman in the United States to graduate from law school. She earned her degree from Union College of Law in Chicago, an institution later associated with Northwestern University School of Law. Kepley’s achievement came at a time when women were largely excluded from the legal profession, not only by cus...

This Day in Legal History: Furman v. Georgia On June 29, 1972, in a narrow 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court delivered what many thought was a death blow to capital punishment in America. In Furman v. Georgia, the Court held that the death penalty, as it was then being administered, violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment because it was imposed arbitrarily and inc...

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...