Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.

The Lovings filed a motion to vacate their convictions on the ground that the Racial Integrity Act was unconstitutional, but Bazile denied it.

In June 1967, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in the Lovings' favor that overturned their convictions and struck down Virginia's Racial Integrity Act.

[4] The Court found that the law nonetheless violated the Equal Protection Clause because it was based solely on "distinctions drawn according to race" and outlawed conduct—namely, that of getting married—that was otherwise generally accepted and that citizens were free to do.

Their families both lived in Caroline County, Virginia, which adhered to strict Jim Crow segregation laws, but their town of Central Point had been a visible mixed-race community since the 19th century.

[13] Mildred became pregnant, and in June 1958, the couple traveled to Washington, D.C. to marry, thereby evading Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made marriage between whites and non-whites a crime.

[18] In 1963,[19] frustrated by their inability to travel together to visit their families in Virginia, as well as their social isolation and financial difficulties in Washington, Mildred Loving wrote in protest to Attorney General Robert F.

[21] The ACLU assigned volunteer cooperating attorneys Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop, who filed a motion on behalf of the Lovings in Virginia's Caroline County Circuit Court, that requested the court to vacate the criminal judgments and set aside the Lovings' sentences on the grounds that the Virginia miscegenation statutes ran counter to the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

This prompted the county court judge in the case, Leon M. Bazile (1890–1967), to issue a ruling on the long-pending motion to vacate.

[24] Carrico cited as authority the Virginia Supreme Court's decision in Naim v. Naim (1955) and ruled that criminalization of the Lovings' marriage was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, because both the white and the non-white spouse were punished equally for miscegenation, a line of reasoning that echoed that of the United States Supreme Court in 1883 in Pace v.

After Pace v. Alabama, the constitutionality of anti-miscegenation laws banning marriage and sex between whites and non-whites remained unchallenged until the 1920s.

267, 18 P.2d 706, was a 1930s court case in California confirming that the state's anti-miscegenation laws at the time did not bar the marriage of a Filipino and a white person.

Despite conflicting testimony by various expert witnesses, the judge defined Marie Antoinette Monks' race by relying on the anatomical "expertise" of a surgeon.

[35] Monks then challenged the Arizona anti-miscegenation law itself, taking her case to the California Court of Appeals, Fourth District.

[39] [W]e reject the notion that the mere "equal application" of a statute containing racial classifications is enough to remove the classifications from the Fourteenth Amendment's proscription of all invidious racial discriminations .... ... We have rejected the proposition that the debates in the Thirty-ninth Congress or in the state legislatures which ratified the Fourteenth Amendment supported the theory advanced by [Virginia], that the requirement of equal protection of the laws is satisfied by penal laws defining offenses based on racial classifications so long as white and Negro participants in the offense were similarly punished.

However, as recently as the 1964 Term, in rejecting the reasoning of that case, we stated "Pace represents a limited view of the Equal Protection Clause which has not withstood analysis in the subsequent decisions of this Court.

"The Court said that because Virginia's Racial Integrity Act used race as a basis to impose criminal culpability, the Equal Protection Clause required the Court to scrutinize strictly whether the Act was constitutional: There can be no question but that Virginia's miscegenation statutes rest solely upon distinctions drawn according to race.

Over the years, this Court has consistently repudiated "[d]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry" as being "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality."

At the very least, the Equal Protection Clause demands that racial classifications, especially suspect in criminal statutes, be subjected to the "most rigid scrutiny.

The Court therefore ruled that the Act violated the Equal Protection Clause:[41] There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification.

The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.The Court ended by ordering that the Lovings' convictions be reversed.

"[53] In the 2010 federal district court decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, overturning California's Proposition 8 which restricted marriage to opposite-sex couples, Judge Vaughn R. Walker cited Loving v. Virginia to conclude that "the [constitutional] right to marry protects an individual's choice of marital partner regardless of gender".

[3] The court's decision in Obergefell cited Loving nearly a dozen times, and was based on the same principles – equality and an unenumerated right to marriage.

Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court upheld the right to have an abortion as established by the "essential holding" of Roe v. Wade (1973) and issued as its "key judgment" the restoration of the undue burden standard when evaluating state-imposed restrictions on that right.

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturns Roe and Casey, the dissenting opinion holds that the same reasoning would have led Loving to be decided differently as well.

[74] In the United States, June 12, the date of the decision, has become known as Loving Day, an annual unofficial celebration of interracial marriages.