[3] In the context of sex-based classifications, intermediate scrutiny applies to constitutional challenges of equal protection and discrimination.
[4] In Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan in 1982, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the burden is on the proponent of the discrimination to establish an "exceedingly persuasive justification" for sex-based classification to be valid.
In Glenn v. Brumby, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that firing based on transgender status was a form of sex discrimination, and therefore subject to intermediate scrutiny.
The Court decided the state tax law was "reasonably designed" to soften the financial impact of a husband's death which "imposes a disproportionately heavy burden".
Like race or gender, the court has stressed that an illegitimate person's status of birth is a condition over which she has no control, and it has no bearing on her ability or willingness to contribute to society.
In applying increasingly exacting intermediate scrutiny, the courts have noted that illegitimate persons are a stigmatized minority, are vastly outnumbered politically, and are the target of long-standing and continuing invidious legal discrimination.
Such gender discrimination was held an additional grounds for intermediate scrutiny of statutory denial of the father-child relationship in cases such as Caban v. Mohammed, 441 U.S. 380 (1979).
[11] In Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-sodomy laws as unconstitutional, explicitly overturning its earlier Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986) decision, but did not specify the level of scrutiny it applied.
2004), the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit explicitly held that Lawrence did not apply strict scrutiny.
The court in Adderley v. Florida used the rational basis test standard of review even though the law was content neutral because a jailhouse is a non-public forum.
Ward v. Rock Against Racism, 491 U.S. 781 (1989) held that a city's restriction on loud music volume controlled by equipment and technicians is constitutional because it is narrowly tailored.
Madsen v. Women's Health Center, 512 U.S. 753 (1994) upheld part of an injunction restricting abortion protesters from entering the "buffer zone" around the abortion clinic because this was the least restrictive means and still gave protestors ample opportunity to communicate outside the buffer zone on the sidewalk, which was a public forum.
It applies to time, place, and manner restrictions on speech, for example, with the additional requirement of "adequate alternative channels of communication."
Prior to New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (2022), which rejected application of intermediate scrutiny to the right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, various federal and state laws restricting access to guns by certain people, laws that restrict or ban the acquisition or ownership of certain types of firearms by the general population, and laws that restrict the carrying of firearms by private citizens in public places had been largely upheld on the basis of intermediate scrutiny.
The United States Supreme Court in its 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision confirmed that the right to "keep and bear arms" is an individual right, but also caveated that the Second Amendment is not necessarily "a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner."
As the Obama administration chose not to appeal Witt to the Supreme Court, it is binding precedent on the Ninth Circuit and it has been cited as such in Log Cabin Republicans v. United States (LCR), another case challenging the constitutionality of DADT.