1. Virginia argued to the Supreme Court that its miscegenation statute did not constitute an invidious classification scheme based on race. What was the basis for this position?
2. What response did the Supreme Court make to Virginia’s restrictions on an individual’s right to decide whether to marry a person of another race?
3. When Loving v. Virginia arrived at the U.S. Supreme Court, Virginia and fifteen other states had statutes on the books that made it a crime for blacks and whites to intermarry. These statutes, called antimiscegenation laws, were common in former slave states, and had existed in Virginia since Colonial times. The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court declared. “There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification.” Which ethical tradition is most reflected in the Court’s opinion in this case?

Mr. Chief Justice Warren delivered the opinion of the Court
This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment.