Griswold v. Connecticut

Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court holding that the Constitution protects the right of married couples to use contraceptives without government restriction. By a vote of 7 to 2 the Court struck down a Connecticut law banning the use of any drug or device for preventing conception, with Justice William O. Douglas writing for the majority that the law violated a right to marital privacy and Justice Arthur Goldberg's concurrence grounding the same conclusion in the Ninth Amendment. The decision, though the Bill of Rights nowhere explicitly mentions privacy, established the constitutional basis for a right to privacy over intimate practices that later decisions built upon.