Regan v. Wald

Regan v. Wald, 468 U.S. 222 (1984), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held by a 5–4 majority that restrictions upon travel to Cuba established as part of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations in 1963 did not violate the freedom to travel protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Ruth Wald, a professor of biology at Harvard University and the wife of former Nobel Prize winner George Wald, planned a trip to Cuba in August 1982 with a group of American women to meet with Cuban women she had met during a previous trip before she was naturalized.

The majority argued that a critical issue was how travel to Cuba could provide revenue to advance interests inherently hostile to the United States.

Justice Blackmun also argued that the Trading With the Enemy Act lacked necessary provision to reduce the President's authority to its normal scope when the emergency subsidedand that the grandfather clause was not designed to provide the president with the authority to increase restrictions applicable to an individual country without following the rules of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Following the issue of Regan v. Wald, the Albany Law Review argued that the case demonstrated a reduced standard of review of presidential authority compared to previous Court decisions in the field,[6] whilst Marcia Weisman argued that the case marked a more radical change from previous jurisprudence, to the point of creating carte blanche for presidential power.