Griswold v. Connecticut: Privacy Right's Milestone

In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) the United States Supreme Court affirmed that the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments, and the liberty interest in the Constitution—protected the privacy of married couples. As a result, the Court struck down the Connecticut birth control ban, and forbade the government from making laws that interfere with the contraceptive practices of married couples. More importantly, the Supreme Court’s decision asserted that the Bill of Rights gave Americans and implied right to privacy. Although the Griswold v. Connecticut decision has protected Americans from unreasonable government intrusion, the Court’s decision depended on unlike adjudged cases that dealt with the personal decisions of parents regarding

In reference to the freedom of association and privacy of one’s associations, Douglas goes on to write, “the First Amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion. In like context, we have protected forms of ‘association’ that are not political in the customary sense, but pertain to the social, legal, and economic benefit of the members”(198). The Oxford Dictionary defines a penumbra as “the partially shaded outer region of the shadow cast by an opaque object.” This being the case, Douglas is saying that the First Amendment has a “shaded outer region” or an obscure set of rights regarding privacy that is not explicitly mentioned in the fine print of the Bill of Rights. However, it is this obscurity about what freedoms the Bill of Rights actually guarantees that weakens the Court’s claim to the right of privacy. Though Douglas attempts to solidify the claim that the First Amendment grants more freedoms than it states by referring to a previous in which they “protected forms of ‘association’ that are not political in the customary sense,” his argument fails to mention that the freedom of association that he is referring to is also not mentioned in the Constitution. Thus, the both the right to privacy, and the case that served as a precedent for the right to privacy has no evident footing in the

While Douglas acknowledges that this freedom is not “expressly included” in the Bill of Rights, he believes that the existence of the freedom of association makes the First Amendment “fully meaningful.” In other words, the Bill of Rights is only as powerful and symbolic as it is because the American people and the Court believe that certain freedoms are implied by the Constitution. Though, it is the job of justices to make assumptions about what certain laws mean by using their prospective judicial ideologies to interpret laws, in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, this was not the case. In order to defend the argument that freedom of association and the right to privacy are implied by the Constitution, Douglas writes that these guarantees are necessary to give the obscurities of the Bill of Rights “substance.” This demonstrated the Court’s weak grounding in the Constitution because since it was evident that the Bill of Rights did not guarantee privacy to married couples, the Court had to essentially create their own guarantees and add more substance or meaning to the original freedoms of the First