Griswold v. Connecticut

Majority reasoning

Justice Douglas wrote that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have 'penumbras'—implied zones of protection—formed by emanations that give those guarantees life and substance, citing examples like the First Amendment's protection of association even though association is not mentioned in its text. He identified privacy zones created by the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments and concluded that marriage falls within a zone of privacy older than the Bill of Rights itself. The Court reasoned that a law banning the use of contraceptives, rather than regulating their manufacture or sale, sweeps too broadly and has a 'maximum destructive impact' on the marital relationship, asking rhetorically whether the state could search marital bedrooms for evidence of contraceptive use. The Court also held that the clinic operators had standing to raise the constitutional rights of the married couples they served, since the criminal conviction directly threatened those rights.

Dissent reasoning

Justice Black, joined by Justice Stewart, argued there is no general constitutional 'right of privacy' written into the Constitution, and that treating the Fourth Amendment or any other provision as merely protecting 'privacy' gives it a narrower reading than it deserves. He rejected the due process and Ninth Amendment arguments together, contending both simply let judges strike down any law they personally find unwise, unreasonable, or offensive, without any textual basis. Black also warned that this approach revives the discredited 'natural law due process' reasoning of Lochner-era cases and represents a court usurping the legislature's role, since the proper way to change an unpopular law is through elected representatives, not judicial invalidation. Separately, Justice Stewart, joined by Justice Black, called the Connecticut law 'uncommonly silly' but found no provision in the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, or Fourteenth Amendments that this law actually violates, arguing the Ninth Amendment was designed to protect state and federal power balance, not to authorize courts to void state laws, and that the remedy for a bad law is repeal by the legislature, not a court ruling.