Trimble v. Gordon (1977)

Trimble v. Gordon (1977)

430 U.S. 762

According to Section 12 of the Illinois Probate Act, illegitimate children could inherit by intestate succession only from their mothers, whereas legitimate children could inherit by intestate succession from both their mothers and their fathers. When Sherman Gordon died intestate, an Illinois probate court, acting under the authority of Section 12, rejected the claim to heirship of Deta Trimble, Gordon’s illegitimate daughter. After the Illinois Supreme Court dismissed her challenge to the constitutionality of Section 12, she appealed to the United States Supreme Court.

Opinion of the Court: Powell, Brennan, White, Marshall, Stevens.

Dissenting opinions: Burger, Stewart, Blackmun, Rehnquist; Rehnquist.

MR. JUSTICE POWELL delivered the opinion of the Court.

… In weighing the constitutional sufficiency of these justifications, we are guided by our previous decisions involving equal protection challenges to laws discriminating on the basis of illegitimacy. “[T]his Court requires, at a minimum, that a statutory classification bear some rational relationship to a legitimate state purpose.” Weber v. Aetna Casualty & Surety Co[.] (1972). In this context, the standard just stated is a minimum; the Court sometimes requires more. “Though the latitude given state economic and social regulation is necessarily broad, when state statutory classifications approach sensitive and fundamental personal rights, this Court exercises a stricter scrutiny…” 

Appellants urge us to hold that classifications based on illegitimacy are “suspect,” so that any justifications must survive “strict scrutiny.” We considered and rejected a similar argument last Term in Mathews v. Lucas … (1976). As we recognized in Lucas, illegitimacy is analogous in many respects to the personal characteristics that have been held to be suspect when used as the basis of statutory differentiations.… We nevertheless concluded that the analogy was not sufficient to require “our most exacting scrutiny.” … Despite the conclusion that classifications based on illegitimacy fall in a “realm of less than strictest scrutiny,” Lucas also establishes that the scrutiny “is not a toothless one,” … a proposition clearly demonstrated by our previous decisions in this area.…  

The Illinois Supreme Court relied in part on the State’s purported interest in “the promotion of legitimate family relationships.” …  

In a case like this, the Equal Protection Clause requires more than the mere incantation of a proper state purpose. No one disputes the appropriateness of Illinois’ concern with the family unit, perhaps the most fundamental social institution of our society. The flaw in the analysis lies     elsewhere. As we said in Lucas, the constitutionality of this law “depends upon the character of the discrimination and its relation to legitimate legislative aims.” … We have expressly considered and [reject] the argument that a State may attempt to influence the actions of men and women by imposing sanctions on the children born of their illegitimate relationships.… 

The Illinois Supreme Court also noted that the decedents whose estates were involved in the consolidated appeals could have left substantial parts of their estates to their illegitimate children by writing a will.… 

By focusing on the steps that an intestate might have taken to assure some inheritance for his illegitimate children, the analysis loses sight of the essential question: the constitutionality of discrimination against illegitimates in a state intestate succession law. If the decedent had written a will devising property to his illegitimate child, the case no longer would involve intestate succession law at all.…  

Finally, appellees urge us to affirm the decision below on the theory that the Illinois Probate Act, including § 12, mirrors the presumed intentions of the citizens of the State regarding the disposition of their property at death. Individualizing this theory, appellees argue that we must assume that Sherman Gordon knew the disposition of his estate under the Illinois Probate Act and that his failure to make a will shows his approval of that disposition. We need not resolve the question whether presumed intent alone can ever justify discrimination against illegitimates, for we do not think that §12 was enacted for this purpose.… We find in § 12 a primary purpose to provide a system of intestate succession more just to illegitimate children than the prior law, a purpose tempered by a secondary interest in protecting against spurious claims of paternity. In the absence of a more convincing demonstration, we will not hypothesize an additional state purpose that has been ignored by the Illinois Supreme Court.…

For the reasons stated above, we conclude that § 12 of the Illinois Probate Act cannot be squared with the command of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the Illinois Supreme Court and remand the case for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.…

MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST dissenting. 

The Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition against “any State … denying to any person … the equal protection of the laws” is undoubtedly one of the majestic generalities of the Constitution. If, during the period of more than a century since its adoption, this Court had developed a consistent body of doctrine which could reasonably be said to expound the intent of those who drafted and adopted the Clause of the Amendment, there would be no cause for judicial complaint, however unwise or incapable of effective administration one might find those intentions. If, on the other hand, recognizing that those who drafted and adopted this language had rather imprecise notions about what it meant, the Court had evolved a body of doctrine which both was consistent and served some arguable useful purpose, there would likewise be little cause for great dissatisfaction with the existing state of the law. 

Unfortunately, more than a century of decisions under this Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment have produced neither of these results. They have instead produced a syndrome wherein this Court seems to regard the Equal Protection Clause as a cat-o’-nine-tails to be kept in the judicial closet as a threat to legislatures which may, in the view of the judiciary, get out of hand and pass “arbitrary,” “illogical,” or “unreasonable” laws. Except in the area of the law in which the Framers obviously meant it to apply—classifications based on race or on national origin, the first cousin of race—the Court’s decisions can fairly be described as an endless tinkering with legislative judgments, a series of conclusions unsupported by any central guiding principle. 

… In providing the Court with the duty of enforcing such generalities as the Equal Protection Clause, the Framers of the Civil War Amendments placed it in the position of Adam in the Garden of Eden. As members of a tripartite institution of government which is responsible to no constituency, and which is held back only by its own sense of self-restraint, … we are constantly subjected to the human temptation to hold that any law containing a number of imperfections denies equal protection simply because those who drafted it could have made it a fairer or a better law. The Court’s opinion in the instant case is no better and no worse than the long series of cases in this line, a line which unfortunately proclaims that the Court has indeed succumbed to the temptation implicit in the Amendment. 

The Equal Protection Clause is itself a classic paradox, and makes sense only in the context of a recently fought Civil War. It creates a requirement of equal treatment to be applied to the process of legislation—legislation whose very purpose is to draw lines in such a way that different people are treated differently. The problem presented is one of sorting the legislative distinctions which are acceptable from those which involve invidiously unequal treatment.

All constitutional provisions for protection of individuals involve difficult questions of line drawing. But most others have implicit within them an understandable value judgment that certain types of conduct have a favored place and are to be protected to a greater or lesser degree. Obvious examples are free speech, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and the right to a fair trial. The remaining judicial task in applying those guarantees is to determine whether, on given facts, the constitutional value judgment embodied in such a provision has been offended in a particular case. 

In the case of equality and equal protection, the constitutional principle—the thing to be protected to a greater or lesser degree—is not even identifiable from within the four corners of the Constitution. For equal protection does not mean that all persons must be treated alike. Rather, its general principle is that persons similarly situated should be treated similarly. But that statement of the rule does little to determine whether or not a question of equality is even involved in a given case. For the crux of the problem is whether persons are similarly situated for the purposes of the state action in issue. Nothing in the words of the Fourteenth Amendment specifically addresses this question in any way. 

The essential problem of the Equal Protection Clause is therefore the one of determining where the courts are to look for guidance in defining “equality” as that word is used in the Fourteenth Amendment. Since the Amendment grew out of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves, the core prohibition was early held to be aimed at the protection of blacks.… If race was an invalid sorting tool where blacks were concerned, it followed logically that it should not be valid where other races were concerned either.… A logical, though not inexorable, next step, was the extension of the projection to prohibit classifications resting on national origin.…  

The presumptive invalidity of all of these classifications has made decisions involving them, for the most part, relatively easy. But when the Court has been required to adjudicate equal protection claims not based on race or national origin, it has faced a much more difficult task.…

Illegitimacy, which is involved in this case, has never been held by the Court to be a “suspect classification.” Nonetheless, in several opinions of the Court, statements are found which suggest that although illegitimates are not members of a “suspect class,” laws which treat them differently from those born in wedlock will receive a more far reaching scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause than will other laws regulating economic and social conditions.… The Court’s opinion today contains language to that effect.… In one sense this language is a source of consolation, since it suggests that parts of the Court’s analysis used in this case will not be carried over to traditional “rational basis” or “minimum scrutiny” cases. At the same time, though, it is a source of confusion, since the unanswered question remains as to the precise sort of scrutiny to which classifications based on illegitimacy will be subject.… 

The “difficulty” of the “judicial task” is, I suggest, a self-imposed one, stemming not from the Equal Protection Clause but from the Court’s insistence on reading so much into it. I do not see how it can be doubted that the purpose (in the ordinary sense of that word) of the Illinois Legislature in enacting § 12 of the Illinois Probate Act was to make the language contained in that section a part of the Illinois law. I presume even the Court will concede that this purpose was accomplished. It was this particular language which the Illinois Legislature, by the required vote of both of its houses and the signature of the Governor, enacted into law. The use of the word “purpose” in today’s opinion actually expands the normal meaning of the word into something more like motive. Indeed, the Court says that the law “must be considered in light of this motivating purpose.” … The question of what “motivated” the various individual legislators to vote for this particular section of the Probate Act, and the Governor of Illinois to sign it, is an extremely complex and difficult one to answer even if it were relevant to the constitutional question.… This Court … takes it upon itself to inquire into whether the Act in question accomplished the “purpose” which the Court first determines the legislature had in mind. It should be apparent that litigants who wish to succeed in invalidating a law under the Equal Protection Clause must have a certain schizophrenia if they are to be successful in their advocacy: They must first convince this Court that the legislature had a particular purpose in mind in enacting the law, and then convince it that the law was not at all suited to the accomplishment of that purpose. 

But a graver defect than this in the Court’s analysis is that it also requires a conscious second-guessing of legislative judgment in an area where this Court has no special expertise whatever. Even assuming that a court has properly accomplished the difficult task of identifying the “purpose” which a statute seeks to serve, it then sits in judgment to consider the so-called “fit” between that “purpose” and the statutory means adopted to achieve it. In most cases, and all but invariably if the Court insists on singling out a unitary “purpose,” the “fit” will involve a greater or lesser degree of imperfection. Then the Court asks itself: How much “imperfection” between means and ends is permissible? In making this judgment it must throw into the judicial hopper the whole range of factors which were first thrown into the legislative hopper. What alternatives were reasonably available? What reasons are there for the legislature to accomplish this “purpose” in the way it did? What obstacles stood in the way of other solutions? 

The fundamental flaw, to me, in this approach is that there is absolutely nothing to be implied from the fact that we hold judicial commissions that would enable us to answer any one of these questions better than the legislators to whose initial decision they were committed. Without any antecedent constitutional mandate, we have created on the premises of the Equal Protection Clause a school for legislators, whereby opinions of this Court are written to instruct them in a better understanding of how to accomplish their ordinary legislative tasks. 

Here the Illinois Legislature was dealing with a problem of intestate succession of illegitimates from their fathers, which as the Court concedes frequently presents difficult problems of proof. The provisions of Illinois Probate Act § 12, as most recently amended, alleviate some of the difficulties which previously stood in the way of such succession. The fact that the Act in question does not alleviate all of the difficulties, or that it might have gone further than it did, is to me wholly irrelevant under the Equal Protection Clause. The circumstances which justify the distinction between illegitimates and legitimates contained in § 12 are apparent with no great exercise of imagination; they are stated in the opinion of the Court, though they are there rejected as constitutionally insufficient. Since Illinois’ distinction is not mindless and patently irrational, I would affirm the judgment of the Supreme Court of Illinois.