762
Souter, J., concurring in judgment
(finding that a statute that all but outlawed private schools lacked any "reasonable relation to some purpose within the competency of the State"); Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U. S. 319, 327-328 (1937) ("[E]ven in the field of substantive rights and duties the legislative judgment, if oppressive and arbitrary, may be overridden by the courts." "Is that [injury] to which the statute has subjected [the appellant] a hardship so acute and shocking that our polity will not endure it? Does it violate those fundamental principles of liberty and justice which lie at the base of all our civil and political institutions?" (citation and internal quotation marks omitted)).
After Meyer and Pierce, two further opinions took the major steps that lead to the modern law. The first was not even in a due process case but one about equal protection, Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson, 316 U. S. 535 (1942), where the Court emphasized the "fundamental" nature of individual choice about procreation and so foreshad-owed not only the later prominence of procreation as a subject of liberty protection, but the corresponding standard of "strict scrutiny," in this Court's Fourteenth Amendment law. See id., at 541. Skinner, that is, added decisions regarding procreation to the list of liberties recognized in Meyer and Pierce and loosely suggested, as a gloss on their standard of arbitrariness, a judicial obligation to scrutinize any impingement on such an important interest with heightened care. In so doing, it suggested a point that Justice Harlan would develop, that the kind and degree of justification that a sensitive judge would demand of a State would depend on the importance of the interest being asserted by the individual. Poe, 367 U. S., at 543.
The second major opinion leading to the modern doctrine was Justice Harlan's Poe dissent just cited, the conclusion of which was adopted in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965), and the authority of which was acknowledged in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992). See also n. 4, supra. The dissent is important
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