# Lawrence v. Texas (2003) Decided **June 26, 2003**, 6–3 (Kennedy joined by Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer; O'Connor concurring on equal-protection grounds only). The Supreme Court held that the **Texas "Homosexual Conduct" statute violated the Due Process Clause of the [[Fourteenth Amendment]]** — striking down sodomy laws in Texas and in the 13 other states that still had them on the books in 2003. ## What Was Overturned *Lawrence* explicitly overruled **[[Bowers v. Hardwick]] (1986)**, a 5–4 decision that had upheld a Georgia sodomy law. The 17-year reversal — engineered by [[Lambda Legal]] through years of strategic litigation — is the canonical example of how the LGBTQ-rights movement built durable legal precedent through patient case selection, plaintiff cultivation, and amicus-coordination infrastructure under hostile-Court conditions. Justice Kennedy's majority opinion, in unusually explicit terms: > *Bowers* was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today. It ought not to remain binding precedent. *Bowers v. Hardwick* should be and now is overruled. ## The Substantive-Due-Process Reasoning Kennedy's opinion grounded the right to private consensual sexual conduct between adults in the **substantive due process** doctrine — the same doctrinal line that had been built through *Griswold v. Connecticut* (1965, contraception), *[[Roe v. Wade]]* (1973, abortion), and *Casey* (1992, abortion). The opinion did not explicitly invoke fundamental-rights or strict-scrutiny analysis; instead it framed the question as whether the state had a legitimate interest in criminalizing private adult intimate conduct, and concluded it did not. This **doctrinal lineage matters** for the post-Dobbs future: when [[Justice Thomas]]'s concurrence in [[Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization]] (2022) called for the Court to "reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including *Griswold*, *Lawrence*, and *Obergefell*," he was pointing at the doctrinal chain that *Lawrence* sits in the middle of. ## Scalia's Dissent as Prophecy [[Justice Scalia]]'s furious *Lawrence* dissent predicted explicitly that the decision would lead to same-sex marriage: > If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is "no legitimate state interest" for purposes of proscribing that conduct... what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples...? He was correct — 12 years later, *Obergefell v. Hodges* (2015) used essentially the doctrinal foundation *Lawrence* laid. ## Place in the Vault *Lawrence* is the **doctrinal bridge** between the early-2000s gay-rights legal foundation and the 2015 marriage-equality breakthrough. It is also one of the named substantive-due-process precedents that the post-Dobbs Court has signaled may be in jeopardy. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Resistance Hub]] - [[Lambda Legal]]