Substantive due process

The courts have viewed the Due Process Clause and sometimes other clauses of the Constitution as embracing the fundamental rights that are "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty". The rights have not been clearly identified and the Supreme Court's authority to enforce the unenumerated rights is unclear. Some of the rights have been said to be "deeply rooted" in American history and tradition; that phrase was used for rights related to the institution of the family. The courts have largely abandoned the Lochner era approach (c. 1897–1937), when substantive due process was used to strike down minimum wage and labor laws to protect freedom of contract. Since then, the Supreme Court has decided that the Constitution protects numerous other freedoms, even if they are not in the text. If the federal courts' doctrine of substantive due process did not protect them, they could nevertheless be protected in other ways; for example, other provisions of the state or federal constitutions protect some rights. Today, the Supreme Court provides special protection for three types of rights under substantive due process in the Fourteenth Amendment – an approach which originated in United States v. Carolene Products Co., , footnote 4: • Rights enumerated in and derived from the first eight amendments to the Constitution • The right to participate in the political process, such as the rights of voting, association, and free speech • The rights of "discrete and insular minorities" The Supreme Court usually looks first to see whether the right is a fundamental right by examining whether it is deeply rooted in American history and traditions. If the right is not a fundamental right, the court applies a rational basis test: if the violation of the right can be rationally related to a legitimate government purpose, the law is then held valid. If the court establishes that the right being violated is a fundamental right, it applies strict scrutiny and asks whether the law is necessary to achieve a compelling state interest and whether the law is narrowly tailored to address that interest. ==History of jurisprudence==

Early in American judicial history, various jurists attempted to form theories of natural rights and natural justice to limit the power of government, especially on property and the rights of persons. Opposing "vested rights" were other jurists, who argued that the written constitution was the supreme law of the State and that judicial review could look only to that document, not to the "unwritten law" of "natural rights". Opponents also argued that the "police power" of government allowed legislatures to regulate the holding of property in the public interest, subject only to specific prohibitions of the written constitution. Early origins The phrase substantive due process was not used until the 20th century, but the concept arguably existed in the 19th century. The idea was a way to import natural law norms into the Constitution; prior to the American Civil War, the state courts were the site of the struggle. Critics of substantive due process claim that the doctrine began, at the federal level, with the infamous 1857 slavery case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Advocates of substantive due process acknowledge that the doctrine was employed in Dred Scott but claim that it was employed incorrectly. Indeed, abolitionists and others argued that both before and after Dred Scott, the Due Process Clause actually prohibited the federal government from recognizing slavery. The "vested rights" jurists saw the "law of the land" and "due process" clauses of state constitutions as restrictions on the substantive content of legislation. They were sometimes successful in arguing that certain government infringements were prohibited, regardless of procedure. For example, in 1856, the New York Court of Appeals held in Wynehamer v. New York that "without 'due process of law', no act of legislation can deprive a man of his property, and that in civil cases an act of the legislature alone is wholly inoperative to take from a man his property". However, in 1887 the U.S. Supreme Court subsequently rejected the rationale of Wynehamer. Other antebellum cases on due process include ''Murray's Lessee v. Hoboken Land & Improvement Co., which dealt with procedural due process, but the Supreme Court subsequently characterized the rationale of Murray, in the case of Hurtado v. California'', as not providing "an indispensable test" of due process. Another important pre-Civil War milestone in the history of due process was Daniel Webster's argument to the Supreme Court as counsel in Dartmouth College v. Woodward that the Due Process Clause forbids bills of attainder and various other types of depriving legislation. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court declined in the case to address that aspect of Webster's argument, the New Hampshire Supreme Court having already rejected it. Roger Taney, in his Dred Scott opinion, pronounced without elaboration that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional because an "act of Congress that deprived a citizen of his liberty or property merely because he came himself or brought his property into a particular territory of the United States, and who had committed no offence against the laws, could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law". In the case, neither Taney nor the dissenting Benjamin Robbins Curtis mentioned or relied upon the Court's previous discussion of due process in Murray, and Curtis disagreed with Taney about what "due process" meant. Lochner era Following the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause prompted substantive due process interpretations to be urged on the Supreme Court as a limitation on state legislation. Initially, however, the Supreme Court rejected substantive due process as it came to be understood, including in the seminal Slaughter-House Cases. Beginning in the 1870s through the late 1880s, the Supreme Court hinted in dicta that various state statutes challenged under a different constitutional provision may have been invalidated under the due process clause. The penumbra-based rationale of Griswold has since been discarded; the Supreme Court now uses the Due Process Clause as a basis for various unenumerated privacy rights, as John Marshall Harlan II had argued in his concurring Griswold opinion, instead of relying on the "penumbras" and "emanations" of the Bill of Rights, as the majority opinion did in Griswold. Although it has never been the majority view, some have argued that the Ninth Amendment, on unenumerated rights, could be used as a source of fundamental judicially enforceable rights, including a general right to privacy, as discussed by Arthur Goldberg in concurring in Griswold. The Supreme Court also recognized a substantive due process right "to control the education of one's children", thus voiding state laws mandating for all students to attend public school. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Supreme Court said in 1925: Some justices have argued, however, that a substantive due process claim may not be necessary in cases of this type, as it is possible for those laws to be deemed to violate "First Amendment principles" as well. Justice Anthony Kennedy speculated in the 2000 case of Troxel v. Granville that current Supreme Court doctrine prohibits the judiciary from using the Due Process Clause instead of an applicable specific constitutional provision if one is available. The right to marry a person of a different race was addressed in Loving v. Virginia, in which the Court said, in 1967, that its decision striking down anti-miscegenation laws could be justified either by substantive due process, or by the Equal Protection Clause. The unconstitutionality of bans on and refusals to recognize same-sex marriage was decided partly on substantive due process grounds by Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. A right to have children was addressed in Skinner v. Oklahoma, but the Court in Skinner, in 1942, explicitly declined to base its decision on due process but instead cited the Equal Protection Clause since the Oklahoma law required sterilization of some three-time felons but not others. A substantive due process right of a parent to educate a young child (before ninth grade) in a foreign language was recognized in Meyer v. Nebraska, in 1923, with two justices dissenting, and Justice Kennedy has mentioned that Meyer might be decided on different grounds in modern times. The Court, in ''O'Connor v. Donaldson'', in 1975, said that due process is violated by confining a nondangerous mentally ill person who is capable of surviving safely in freedom. Chief Justice Burger's concurring opinion was that such confinement may also amount to "punishment" for being mentally ill, violating the Court's interpretation of the Eighth Amendment in Robinson v. California. Freedom from excessive punitive damages was deemed to be a due process right in BMW v. Gore, in 1996, but four justices disagreed. The Court, in Cruzan v. Missouri, decided, in 1990, that due process is not violated if a state applies "a clear and convincing evidence standard in proceedings where a guardian seeks to discontinue nutrition and hydration of a person diagnosed to be in a persistent vegetative state". Roberts Court In 2022, the Roberts Court declared in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that the right to an abortion is not deeply rooted in the nation’s history, and therefore is not among unenumerated rights in the constitution by virtue of the Due Process clause. In March 2026, in Mirabelli v. Bonta, the court embraced substantive due process. ==Criticisms==

Critics argue that judges are making determinations of policy and morality that properly belong with legislators ("legislating from the bench"), that they are reading doctrines and principles into the Constitution that are not expressed in or implied by the document, or that they are claiming power to expand the liberty of some people at the expense of other people's liberty (such as in Dred Scott v. Sandford). Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a proponent of legal realism, worried that the Court was overstepping its boundaries and wrote, in 1930, in one of his last dissents: Originalists, such as Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, who rejects the substantive due process doctrine, and Antonin Scalia, who also questioned the legitimacy of the doctrine, have called substantive due process a "judicial usurpation" or an "oxymoron". Both Scalia and Thomas occasionally joined Court opinions that mention the doctrine and, in their dissents, often argued over how substantive due process should be employed based on Court precedent. Many non-originalists, like Justice Byron White, have also been critical of substantive due process. As propounded in his dissents in Moore v. East Cleveland and Roe v. Wade, as well as his majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, White argued that the doctrine of substantive due process gives the judiciary too much power over the governance of the nation and takes away such power from the elected branches of government. He argued that the fact that the Court has created new substantive rights in the past should not lead it to "repeat the process at will". In his book Democracy and Distrust, non-originalist John Hart Ely criticized "substantive due process" as a glaring non sequitur. Ely argued the phrase was both a contradiction in terms, like the phrase green pastel redness, and radically undemocratic by allowing judges to impose substantive values on the political process. Ely argued that the courts should serve to reinforce the democratic process, not to displace the substantive value choices of the people's elected representatives. An alternative to strict originalist theory is advocated by former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the Court's supporters of substantive due process rights. Breyer believes the justices need to look at cases in light of how their decisions will promote what he calls "active liberty", the Constitution's aim of promoting participation by citizens in the processes of government. That is an approach that ostensibly emphasizes "the document's underlying values" and a broad look at a law's purpose and consequences. Critics charge that such an approach would also give judges the ability to look very broadly at the consequences and unwritten purpose of constitutional provisions, such as the Due Process Clause, thus removing issues from the democratic process. Originalism is usually linked to opposition against substantive due process rights, and the reasons can be found in the following explanation that was endorsed unanimously by the Supreme Court in the 1985 case University of Michigan v. Ewing: "we must always bear in mind that the substantive content of the [Due Process] Clause is suggested neither by its language nor by preconstitutional history; that content is nothing more than the accumulated product of judicial interpretation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments." Originalists do not necessarily oppose protection of rights protected by substantive due process. Most originalists believe that such rights should be identified and protected legislatively or by further constitutional amendments or other existing provisions of the Constitution. For example, some substantive due process liberties may be protectable according to the original meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Most originalists believe that rights should be identified and protected by the majority legislatively or, if legislatures lack the power, by constitutional amendments. The original perceived scope of the Due Process Clause was different from the one in use today. For instance, even though many of the Framers of the Bill of Rights believed that slavery violated the fundamental natural rights of African Americans, legal scholar Robert Cover argued in 1975 that a "theory that declared slavery to be a violation of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment ... requires nothing more than a suspension of reason concerning the origin, intent, and past interpretation of the clause". The Thirteenth Amendment ultimately abolished slavery and removed the federal judiciary from the business of returning fugitive slaves. Until then, it was "scarcely questioned" (as Abraham Lincoln put it) that the Constitution "was intended by those who made it, for the reclaiming of what we call fugitive slaves; and the intention of the law-giver is the law". ==Judicial review==

When a law or other act of government is challenged as a violation of individual liberty under the Due Process Clause, courts now use two forms of scrutiny or judicial review. The inquiry balances the importance of the governmental interest being served and the appropriateness of the method of implementation against the resulting infringement of individual rights. If the governmental action infringes upon a fundamental right, the highest level of review, strict scrutiny, is used. To pass strict scrutiny, the law or the act must be both narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest. If the governmental restriction restricts liberty in a manner that does not implicate a fundamental right, rational basis review is used, which determines whether a law or act is rationally related to a legitimate government interest. The government's goal must be something that it is acceptable for the government to pursue. The legislation must use reasonable means to the government's goals but not necessarily the best. Under a rational basis test, the burden of proof is on the challenger so laws are rarely overturned by a rational basis test. There is also a middle level of scrutiny, called intermediate scrutiny, but it is used primarily in Equal Protection cases, rather than in Due Process cases: "The standards of intermediate scrutiny have yet to make an appearance in a due process case." To pass intermediate scrutiny, the challenged law must further an important government interest by means that are substantially related to that interest. ==See also==