[3] Champerty occurs when a third party (not the plaintiff nor their legal counsel) assumes the risks and financial costs of a lawsuit in return for a portion of the monetary award.

[3] Governor Thomas B. Stanley signed these legal business bills into law on September 29, 1956.

[4] The Virginia NAACP filed suit in federal court in 1956 against the Attorney General of Virginia to have the five barratry, champerty, and maintenance laws thrown out as an unconstitutional infringement of the 1st Amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote the majority opinion, joined by Associate Justices Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Tom C. Clark, Charles Evans Whittaker, and Potter Stewart.

[8] To meet this test, the Supreme Court had to determine whether the laws in question could be reasonably interpreted in more than one way.

[12] The case at hand presented unique, pressing issues regarding fundamental civil rights, he said,[13] "It seems plain to me that it was the District Court's duty to provide this remedy," he concluded.