United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515, 46 (1996)

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560

UNITED STATES v. VIRGINIA

Rehnquist, C. J., concurring in judgment

wealth has not carried the day with this justification, I disagree with the Court's method of analyzing the issue.

VMI was founded in 1839, and, as the Court notes, ante, at 536-537, admission was limited to men because under the then-prevailing view men, not women, were destined for higher education. However misguided this point of view may be by present-day standards, it surely was not unconstitutional in 1839. The adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, with its Equal Protection Clause, was nearly 30 years in the future. The interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause to require heightened scrutiny for gender discrimination was yet another century away.

Long after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, and well into this century, legal distinctions between men and women were thought to raise no question under the Equal Protection Clause. The Court refers to our decision in Goesaert v. Cleary, 335 U. S. 464 (1948). Likewise representing that now abandoned view was Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U. S. 57 (1961), where the Court upheld a Florida system of jury selection in which men were automatically placed on jury lists, but women were placed there only if they expressed an affirmative desire to serve. The Court noted that despite advances in women's opportunities, the "woman is still regarded as the center of home and family life." Id., at 62.

Then, in 1971, we decided Reed v. Reed, 404 U. S. 71, which the Court correctly refers to as a seminal case. But its facts have nothing to do with admissions to any sort of educational institution. An Idaho statute governing the administration of estates and probate preferred men to women if the other statutory qualifications were equal. The statute's purpose, according to the Idaho Supreme Court, was to avoid hearings to determine who was better qualified as between a man and a woman both applying for letters of administration. This Court held that such a rule violated the Fourteenth Amendment because "a mandatory preference to members of either

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