Gender: U'S' v' Virginia

1
Gender U.S. v. Virginia

• Professor Garcia
• Office half-hour 2-230 today
• Rjgarcia_at_ucsd.edu
• Monday Rodriguez (Marshall Dissent Optional)
• Wednesday Plyler Cleburne Dissent
• Friday Boumedienne

2
U.S. v. Virginia (1996)

• VMI is a public single sex military school that
  uses the adversative method of constantly
  challenging and doubting method of training. The
  adversative method features physical rigor,
  mental stress, absolute equality of treatment,
  absence of privacy
• VMI was started in 1839 as a college to train
  men prepared for civilian and military service.

3
U.S. v. Virginia

• In response, Virginia established the Virginia
  Womens Institute for Leadership, where a
  cooperative method that emphasizes self esteem
  was used. The U.S. Justice Dept. Civil Rights
  Division sued Virginia to integrate VMI.
• Court below found the womens VMI program was
  substantially comparable

4
Questions Presented

• 1. Whether a State that provides a rigorous
  military-style public educational program for men
  can remedy the unconstitutional denial of the
  same opportunity to women by offering them a
  different type of single-sex educational program
  deemed more suited to the average woman 
• 2. Whether coeducation is the required remedy in
  the context of this case.

5
U.S. v. VA Standard of Review, Ginsburg, J.

• The court must determine whether the states
  justification is exceedingly persuasive. . . .
  The State must show at least the challenged
  justification serves important governmental
  objectives and that the discriminatory means
  employed are substantially related to the
  achievement of those objectives. The
  justification must be genuine, not hypothesized
  or invented post hoc in response to litigation.
  And it must not rely on overbroad generalizations
  about the different talents, capacities or
  preferences of males and females. Reader 277

6
U.S. v. VA Majority Opinion

• Justice Ginsburg agreed that providing a
  diversity of educational benefits was a benign
  goal, but not the one that motivated the policy.
  Instead, public higher education in VA was
  intended from the start for men.
• The States goal of preserving the adversative
  method is not important. It is based on
  stereotypes, even through expert testimony on the
  notion that men develop differently than women.

7
U.S. v. VA C.J. Rehnquist

• Concurring in the Judgment desegregating VMI, but
  asserting that the court should not allow gender
  classifications to be judged under strict
  scrutiny. Even under intermediate scrutiny, the
  remedy should be desegregation.

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US v. VA Scalia, J. Dissenting

• The Court is implicitly making the standard
  strict, such as in applying the least
  restrictive means test from race cases.
• Women are not a discrete and insular minority.
• The court has inscribed one after another of the
  current preferences of the society . . Into our
  Basic Law. The Constitution of the United
  Statesthe old onetakes no sides in this
  educational debate . . . .