Even Justice Holmes, one of the greatest Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, sometimes made extremely bad decisions. Eighty five years ago today, in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), Justice Holmes, joined by all other Justices except one, issued perhaps his worst ruling as a Justice. A gathering of legal scholars last year rated Buck v. Bell as one of the five worst Supreme Court of the United States decisions ever.
Carrie Buck was, as Justice Holmes put it, “a feeble-minded white woman” who had been committed to Virginia’s State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded. Her mother, also deemed “feeble-minded,” was in that same institution, and Buck also had a “feeble-minded” daughter. A 1924 Virginia statute provided that, because “the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives,” the superintendent of the State Colony could determine that an inmate under his care should be sterilized. The superintendent decided that Buck should be sterilized. Buck challenged the law as unconstitutional under the due process and equal protection clauses. Buck lost in the Virginia state courts.
When the case reached the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Holmes rejected Buck’s arguments. Procedural due process was afforded by procedures in which “the rights of the patient are most carefully considered.” But “[t]he attack is not upon the procedure but upon the substantive law.” With one of the pithy, and oft-quoted, lines for which Justice Holmes is famous, he dismissed Buck’s arguments, saying that “[t]hree generations of imbeciles are enough.” The reasoning that preceded that statement, however, chillingly foreshadowed the Nazi eugenics that surfaced only a few years later:
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”
The case was argued on April 22, 1927 and was decided just ten days later. The opinion runs only a terse five paragraphs. Evidently, Justice Holmes and the majority considered this an easy case. Justice Pierce dissented from this ruling. But he did not write an opinion.
This was the high-water mark of the eugenics movement, which had begun several decades earlier. More modern attitudes soon replaced those that underlay Buck v. Bell. Fifteen years later, Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942), another sterilization case, distinguished but did not formally overrule Buck. Several years after that, at the Nuremberg trials, Nazi defendants invoked Buck in their defense. Sterilization laws fell out of favor, and most people now view Buck with horror.
Some anniversaries celebrate the famous. This one commemorates the infamous.