Quotations From United States v. Virginia (1996)

The State must show “that the [challenged] classification serves ‘important governmental objectives and that the discriminatory means employed’ are ‘substantially related to the achievement of those objectives.’ ” The justification must be genuine, not hypothesized or invented post hoc in response to litigation. And it must not rely on overbroad generalizations about the different talents, capacities, or preferences of males and females.
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The notion that admission of women would downgrade VMI’s stature, destroy the adversative system and, with it, even the school, is a judgment hardly proved, a prediction  hardly different from other “self-fulfilling prophec[ies]” once routinely used to deny rights or opportunities. When women first sought admission to the bar and access to legal education, concerns of the same order were expressed. Medical faculties similarly resisted men and women as partners in the study of medicine. Women’s successful entry into the federal military academies, and their participation in the Nation’s military forces, indicate that Virginia’s fears for the future of VMI may not be solidly grounded. The State’s justification for excluding all women from “citizen soldier” training for which some are qualified cannot rank as “exceedingly persuasive,” as we have explained and applied that standard.

Justice Scalia's Dissent

But in my view the function of this Court is to preserve our society’s values regarding (among other things) equal protection, not to revise them; to prevent backsliding from the degree of restriction the Constitution imposed upon democratic government, not to prescribe progressively higher degrees. For that reason it is my view that, whatever abstract tests we may choose to devise, they cannot supersede— and indeed ought to be crafted so as to reflect—those constant and unbroken national traditions that embody the people’s understanding of ambiguous constitutional texts. More specifically, it is my view that “when a practice not expressly prohibited by the text of the Bill of Rights bears the endorsement of a long tradition of open, widespread, and unchallenged use that dates back to the beginning of the Republic, we have no proper basis for striking it down.”