He attended Fairfax County, Virginia public schools and received his undergraduate and law degrees from George Washington University.

Distinguishing Brown and its progeny, Justice Carrico observed that "it must be pointed out that none of them deals with miscegenation statutes or curtails a legal truth which has always been recognized that there is an overriding state interest in the institution of marriage.

654, 657, 8 S. Ct. 723: Marriage, as creating the most important relation in life, as having more to do with the morals and civilization of a people than any other institution, has always been subject to the control of the Legislature.Justice Carrico further held that "Although the defendants were, by the terms of the suspended sentences, ordered to leave the state, their sentences did not technically constitute [illegal] banishment because they were permitted to return to the state, provided they did not return together or at the same time."

He therefore remanded the case so that the decision could be modified to prohibit Mr. and Mrs. Loving from cohabiting as husband and wife in Virginia, a less restrictive condition of the 25-year suspended sentence.

The U.S. Supreme Court concluded that anti-miscegenation laws were racist and had been enacted to perpetuate white supremacy: There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification.

The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.In Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court held that marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, a fundamental freedom which could not be denied based on race.

During Carrico's tenure as Chief Justice, which began in 1981 and lasted 22 years, he was an advocate for the admission of women and minorities to the legal profession in the Commonwealth.