Perez v. Sharp
| Perez v. Sharp | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Court | Supreme Court of California |
| Full case name | Andrea D. Perez and Sylvester S. Davis, Jr. v. A.W. Sharp, as County Clerk of the County of Los Angeles |
| Decided | October 1 1948 |
| Citation(s) |
32 Cal |
| Case history | |
| Prior action(s) | none (original proceeding for Writ of Mandate) |
| Holding | |
| Marriage is a fundamental right in a free society; the state may not restrict this right with respect to restrictions based upon the race of the parties. | |
| Court membership | |
| Chief Judge | Phil S. Gibson |
| Associate Judges | John W. Shenk, Douglas L. Edmonds, Jesse W. Carter, Roger J. Traynor, B. Rey Schauer, Homer R. Spence |
| Case opinions | |
| Plurality | Traynor, joined by Gibson, Carter |
| Concurrence | Edmonds |
| Concur/dissent | Shenk , joined by Schauer, Spence |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const. Amend. XIV cl. 1, and Cal. Civ. Code, §§ 60, 69, 69a | |
Perez v. Sharp, also known as Perez v. Lippold or Perez v. Moroney, is a 1948 case decided by the Supreme Court of California in which the court held by a 4-3 majority that the state's ban on interracial marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the US. Constitution.
The three-justice plurality decision was authored by Associate Justice Roger J. Traynor who would later serve as the Court's Chief Justice. Justice Douglas L. Edmonds wrote his own concurrence of the judgment, leading to a four-justice majority in favor of striking down the law. The dissent was written by Associate Justice John W. Shenk, the second longest-serving member in the Court's history and a notable judicial conservative. The opinion was the first of any state to strike down an anti-miscegenation law in the United States.
Andrea Perez (a Mexican American woman) and Sylvester Davis (an African American man) met while working in the defense industry in Los Angeles.
Perez and Davis applied for a marriage license with the County Clerk of Los Angeles. On the application for a marriage license, Andrea Perez listed her race as "white," and Sylvester Davis identified himself as "Negro." Under the California law, individuals of Mexican ancestry generally were classified as white because of their Spanish heritage.
The County Clerk, named W. G. Sharp, refused to issue the license based on California Civil Code, Section 60: "All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race, or mulattoes are illegal and void" and on Section 69, which stated that "no license may be issued authorizing the marriage of a white person with a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian or member of the Malay race". At the time, California's anti-miscegenation statute had banned interracial marriage since 1850, when it first enacted a statute prohibiting whites from marrying blacks or mulattoes.
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Wikipedia