Craig v. Boren
The Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law that let young women buy 3.2% beer at age 18 but forced young men to wait until 21, ruling that the gender-based age gap violated the Constitution's promise of equal treatment.
The decision set a new, tougher legal test for laws that treat men and women differently, requiring the government to show the law serves an important goal and is closely tied to achieving it -- a standard that would shape sex-discrimination cases for decades.
“classifications by gender must serve important governmental objectives and must be substantially related to achievement of those objectives”
The Court's new heightened standard for evaluating laws that treat men and women differently.
How it got here: A three-judge federal district court in Oklahoma upheld the law and dismissed the suit; the challengers appealed directly to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Oklahoma law barred selling 3.2% beer to men under 21 but allowed sales to women as young as 18. A young man named Craig and a licensed beer vendor named Whitener sued, arguing the law discriminated against young men without adequate justification. The state defended the law using statistics about drunk-driving arrests and traffic accidents, claiming it promoted highway safety.
The question before the Court
Could Oklahoma let women buy low-alcohol beer at 18 while making men wait until they turned 21?
Why it matters
The ruling meant states could no longer justify different treatment of men and women with loose statistics or outdated stereotypes about typical behavior. Businesses like the beer vendor in this case gained the right to challenge discriminatory sales rules, and lawmakers nationwide had to rewrite age- and gender-based restrictions to survive tighter judicial review.
What changes now
The ruling is a final decision on the merits, so Oklahoma's gender-based drinking age could no longer be enforced. States across the country with similar age-differentiated alcohol laws faced pressure to make their rules gender-neutral. The case's new heightened-scrutiny standard for sex discrimination became a lasting framework courts would apply in future gender-discrimination cases.
What this does not decide
The Court did not declare sex a "suspect classification" subject to the strictest constitutional scrutiny, the way race is. It also left states free to regulate alcohol sales and to set a new, gender-neutral cutoff age for buying 3.2% beer if they chose to.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Blackmun
Justice Blackmun joined the entire opinion except the section addressing the Twenty-first Amendment. He agreed with the ultimate conclusion that the Twenty-first Amendment does not save Oklahoma's law from an equal protection challenge, but apparently wanted to reach that result on different reasoning.
Concurrence — Justice Stewart
Justice Stewart agreed the vendor had standing and agreed with the outcome, but wrote separately rather than joining the majority opinion. He argued the law was simply irrational because the state's statistics never showed that beer was more dangerous in the hands of young men than young women, making the disparity invidious discrimination without needing a new heightened standard.
Concurrence — Justice Powell
Justice Powell joined the Court's opinion but wrote separately to express reservations about how broadly the majority framed the new equal protection standard and about its heavy reliance on the statistical evidence. He viewed the case as an easy one: the three-year age gap between sexes was too weakly tied to traffic safety and too easily evaded to be constitutional.
Concurrence — Justice Stevens
Justice Stevens joined the Court's opinion but argued there is really only one Equal Protection Clause and one underlying standard, with the multi-tiered framework mainly serving to explain outcomes. He found the law objectionable because it rested on an accident of birth and outdated stereotypes, and considered the traffic-safety justification insufficient to excuse punishing all young men for the conduct of a small percentage.
Dissent — Justice Burger
Chief Justice Burger, largely agreeing with Justice Rehnquist, argued the vendor lacked standing to assert her customers' constitutional rights because her relationship to them was merely that of a seller to buyers, unlike prior cases permitting third-party standing. On the merits, he would have upheld the law under ordinary rational-basis review, since eight Justices did not view the law's means as irrational.
Dissent — Justice Rehnquist
“The Court's conclusion that a law which treats males less favorably than females "must serve important governmental objectives and must be substantially related to achievement of those objectives" apparently comes out of thin air.”Rehnquist's objection that the majority's new legal test lacked any grounding in prior case law.
Justice Rehnquist objected that the Court invented a new, ungrounded heightened standard for gender classifications benefiting men, who have not suffered the kind of historic discrimination that justifies special judicial protection. He argued the law easily passed ordinary rational-basis review given real statistical differences in drinking and driving behavior between young men and women, and that the Twenty-first Amendment reinforced the state's authority to regulate alcohol this way.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first resolved a standing question, holding that the beer vendor could raise the equal protection rights of young men even though her own injury was economic, because enforcing the law directly threatened her business and the young men's rights were closely tied to hers.
- Turning to the merits, the Court held that gender-based classifications require a heightened form of review -- later called intermediate scrutiny -- under which the government must show the classification serves an important objective and is substantially related to achieving it, a tougher standard than ordinary rational-basis review.
- The Court accepted that traffic safety was an important objective but scrutinized the State's statistics closely, finding that only about 2% of young men and 0.18% of young women were arrested for drunk driving -- a gap too small to justify treating an entire class of men differently from women.
- The Court also noted the law only restricted selling beer to young men, not their drinking it once obtained, which further weakened the claimed connection between the gender line and highway safety.
- The Court rejected the argument that the Twenty-first Amendment, which gives states broad power to regulate alcohol, could excuse a law that otherwise violated equal protection, holding that the amendment's grant of power over liquor regulation does not shield states from ordinary constitutional limits like the Equal Protection Clause.
- Applying this reasoning, the Court concluded that the statistical showing was too weak and the law too loosely tied to its stated purpose to satisfy the new heightened standard for gender classifications.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Reed v. Reed (404 U.S. 71)
The Court relied on Reed's rule that gender classifications get closer scrutiny under equal protection.
Overrules Goesaert v. Cleary (335 U.S. 464)
The Court disapproved this earlier decision to the extent it conflicts with the new gender-discrimination standard.
Reaffirms Stanton v. Stanton (421 U.S. 7)
The Court treated this recent decision striking down a gender-based age law as controlling precedent.