"Exceedingly Persuasive Justification" Test

 According to text in FindLaw.com, word for word , the Text states, "to have a violation of the Equal Protection Laws, due to General or race, you complaint must meet the burden of justification and have substantive findings otherwise; you must prove the law deviated from the presumption that extension, rather than nullification of the denied benefit is generally the proper course." (FindLaw.com). 

In a 1996 case, the Court required that a state demonstrate exceedingly persuasive justification for gender discrimination. When a female applicant challenged the exclusion of women from the historically male-only Virginia Military Institute (VMI), the State of Virginia defended the exclusion of females as essential to the nature of training at the military school.24 The state argued that the VMI program, which included rigorous physical training, deprivation of personal privacy, and an adversative model that featured minute regulation of behavior, would need to be unacceptably modified to facilitate the admission of women. While recognizing that women's admission would require accommodation such as different housing assignments and physical training programs, the Court found that the reasons set forth by the state were not exceedingly persuasive, and thus the state did not meet its burden of justification. The Court also rejected the argument that a parallel program established by the state at a private women's college served as an adequate substitute, finding that the program lacked the military-style structure found at VMI, and that it did not equal VMI in faculty, facilities, prestige or alumni network.

The Court in Sessions v. Morales-Santana applied the exceedingly persuasive justification test to strike down a gender-based classification found in a statute that allowed for the acquisition of U.S. citizenship by a child born abroad to an unwed couple if one of the parents was a U.S. citizen.25 The law at issue in Morales-Santana, which had been enacted many decades earlier, conditioned the grant of citizenship on the U.S. citizen parent's physical presence in the United States prior to the child's birth, providing a shorter presence requirement for an unwed U.S. citizen mother relative to the unwed U.S. citizen father.261`````````````````````````````````````qqq

According to the majority, such a classification must substantially serve an important government interest today,27 and the law in question was based on two once habitual, but now untenable, assumptions: (1) that marriage presupposes that the husband is dominant and the wife is subordinate; (2) an unwed mother is the natural and sole-meet burden of justification guardian of a non-marital child.28 Having found that the law was an overboard generalization about males and females and was based on the obsolescing view about unwed fathers,29 the Court concluded that the citizenship provision's discrete duration-of-residency requirements for unwed mothers and fathers who have accepted parental responsibility [was] stunningly anachronistic.30

In response to what the lower court had described as the most vexing problem in the case,31 the Morales-Santana Court, in crafting a remedy for the equal protection violation, deviated from the presumption that extension, rather than nullification of the denied benefit is generally the proper course.32 The Court observed that Congress had established derivative citizenship rules that varied depending upon whether one or both parents were U.S. citizens and whether the child was born in or outside marriage.33 Justice Ginsburg writing for the majority concluded that extending the much-shorter physical presence requirement applicable to unwed U.S. citizen mothers to unwed U.S. citizen fathers would run significantly counter to Congress's intentions when it established this statutory scheme because such a remedy would result in a longer physical presence requirement for a married U.S. citizen who had a child abroad than for a similarly situated unmarried U.S. citizen.34 As a result, the Court held that the longer physical presence requirement for unwed U.S. citizen fathers governed, as that is the remedy that Congress likely would have chosen had it been apprised of the constitutional infirmity.35" (Find law.com, )

Cite

FindLaw Staff. (2022, July 27). Find Law. Retrieved August 19, 2023, from https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment14/annotation06.html