Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote the opinion of the Court in one of the five cases below and concurred or dissented in the other four. The five run from 1969 to 1989, and they cover obscenity in the home, the death penalty, school desegregation across district lines, school funding and a city's contracting program.
What a man reads at home
Stanley v. Georgia (1969), decided April 7, 1969. Officers with a warrant to search Stanley's home for evidence of bookmaking found films in his bedroom, which were projected and judged obscene. He was convicted of possessing them. Marshall, for the Court, held that the First Amendment as made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth prohibits making mere private possession of obscene material a crime. "If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch."
The death penalty
Furman v. Georgia (1972), decided June 29, 1972. The Court, in a short unsigned opinion, took cases from Georgia and Texas to decide whether the death penalty, as imposed in them, was cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The justices wrote separately. Marshall's concurrence argued the broadest position. He wrote that capital punishment is "unconstitutional because it is excessive and unnecessary punishment," and that, "even if capital punishment is not excessive, it nonetheless violates the Eighth Amendment because it is morally unacceptable to the people of the United States at this time in their history."
Schools across district lines
Milliken v. Bradley (1974), decided July 25, 1974. The Detroit school system had been found racially segregated through official policies and actions. The Court held that an interdistrict remedy, reaching the surrounding suburban districts, was not justified on that record, in part because local control of public education is a deeply rooted tradition. Marshall dissented. "This Court recognized then that remedying decades of segregation in public education would not be an easy task," he wrote. He pointed to the record, which showed that "Negro children in Detroit had been confined by intentional acts of segregation to a growing core of Negro schools surrounded by a receding ring of white schools."
School funding
San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), decided March 21, 1973. A lower court had held that Texas's method of financing public schools denied equal protection. The Supreme Court reversed, in an opinion by Justice Powell. Marshall dissented, joined by Justice Douglas. He pointed out that the Court itself acknowledged "substantial interdistrict disparities in school expenditures" that were "largely attributable to differences in the amounts of money collected through local property taxation," and he objected that instead of closely examining the seriousness of those disparities and the invidiousness of the Texas financing scheme, the Court explored at length the efforts Texas has purportedly made to close the gap.
Race-conscious contracting
City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989), decided January 23, 1989. Richmond's Minority Business Utilization Plan required prime contractors on city construction contracts to subcontract at least 30% of the dollar amount to "Minority Business Enterprises." The Court held the Plan invalid. Marshall dissented, joined by Justices Brennan and Blackmun: "A profound difference separates governmental actions that themselves are racist, and governmental actions that seek to remedy the effects of prior racism."
What the five opinions show
Four of the five are Marshall's separate opinions: a concurrence in Furman and dissents in Milliken, Rodriguez and Croson. In Stanley he wrote for the Court. Each of the dissents turned on what the record showed or what the Court's own opinion had acknowledged.
Sources
- Stanley v. Georgia (1969), 394 U.S. 557: Library of Congress, U.S. Reports
- Furman v. Georgia (1972), 408 U.S. 238: Library of Congress, U.S. Reports
- Milliken v. Bradley (1974), 418 U.S. 717: Library of Congress, U.S. Reports
- San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), 411 U.S. 1: Library of Congress, U.S. Reports
- City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989), 488 U.S. 469: Library of Congress, U.S. Reports
Updated November 2026.
This post was rewritten with AI (Claude) and reviewed by an editor before publication.
