Massachusetts Board of Retirement v. Murgia, 427 U.S. 307 (1976), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held a Massachusetts law setting a mandatory retirement age of 50 for police officers was Constitutionally permissible.

[1][2] Robert Murgia was forcibly retired from his career as a Massachusetts police officer, based on that state's Gen. Laws Ann.

Today the Court holds that it is permissible for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to declare that members of its state police force who have been proved medically fit for service are nonetheless legislatively unfit to be policemen and must be terminated involuntarily "retired" because they have reached the age of 50.

Although we have called the right to work "of the very essence of the personal freedom and opportunity that it was the purpose of the (Fourteenth) Amendment to secure," Truax v. Raich, 239 U.S. 33, 41, 36 S.Ct.

And, while agreeing that "the treatment of the aged in this Nation has not been wholly free of discrimination," Ante, at 313, the Court holds that the elderly are not a suspect class.