Lawrence v. Texas

Majority reasoning

The majority, led by Justice Kennedy, held that liberty under the Due Process Clause extends beyond physical spaces to protect autonomy in personal decisions, including intimate sexual conduct between consenting adults. It found that Bowers had misapprehended the claim at stake by framing it narrowly as a right to engage in sodomy rather than as part of a broader liberty interest in personal relationships. The Court concluded that the historical premises Bowers relied on were overstated, since American laws did not target homosexual conduct specifically until the last third of the 20th century, and that subsequent decisions like Casey and Romer had eroded Bowers's foundations. The majority determined there was no legitimate state interest that could justify the Texas law's intrusion into private, consensual adult conduct, and that moral disapproval alone was not sufficient justification, extending Justice Stevens's Bowers dissent as controlling reasoning. The Court explicitly stated the case did not involve minors, coercion, public conduct, prostitution, or the question of formal government recognition of same-sex relationships.

Dissent reasoning

Justice Scalia, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Thomas, argued the majority applied an inconsistent standard of stare decisis, noting that the same three-factor test used to justify overruling Bowers would equally justify overruling Roe v. Wade, which the majority had no intention of touching. He contended that the majority never actually declared homosexual conduct a "fundamental right" nor applied strict scrutiny, yet still struck down the law under an unprecedented form of rational-basis review, and that Bowers's historical conclusion that sodomy was long criminalized was correct and unrebutted. Scalia argued that if moral disapproval alone cannot justify a law, then laws against bigamy, adult incest, prostitution, and similar conduct are all called into question, and he rejected Justice O'Connor's equal-protection approach as offering no coherent limiting principle, warning it would jeopardize laws restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples. He concluded the Court had taken a side in a cultural debate that should be left to democratic processes rather than resolved by judicial invention of new constitutional rights. Justice Thomas separately wrote that while he personally viewed the Texas law as "uncommonly silly" and would vote to repeal it as a legislator, he found no general right of privacy in the Constitution's text and therefore dissented from the Court's holding.