Loving v. Virginia

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), is a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court holding that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Richard Loving, a white man, and his wife Mildred Loving, a woman of color, were convicted in 1959 of violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, and after their motion to vacate the convictions was denied and their appeal to the Supreme Court of Virginia failed, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear their case and in June 1967 issued a unanimous decision overturning their convictions and striking down the Act, finding it violated the Equal Protection Clause because it was based solely on distinctions drawn according to race. The decision ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States and, beginning in 2013, was cited as precedent in federal court decisions striking down restrictions on same-sex marriage, including Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015.