Buck v. Bell

The one act where the ranking of the stock became binding constitutional law.¹²

Documented core

On 2 May 1927, by a vote of 8 to 1, the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s compulsory-sterilization statute against a Fourteenth Amendment challenge. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote for the majority: “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes,” and — of Carrie Buck, her mother, and her daughter — “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The statute at issue was modeled on Harry Laughlin’s Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, and Laughlin had supplied an expert deposition. The lone dissent was Justice Pierce Butler, who wrote no opinion. The decision opened the way to sterilization programs in roughly thirty states.

Held-open

The ruling has never been formally overruled. It is widely regarded as weakened by Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942) and “distinguished out of existence,” but it was never expressly reversed — a status recorded precisely, rounded neither up to “overturned” nor down to “still good law.”

Role in the thesis

Enactment, at its hardest edge. Everywhere else in this rail the root is measured, scheduled, and sorted; here it is made law from the bench. It is the keystone of the eugenic theater — a co-symptom of the root in the register of the court, never routed to any ethnic or bloodline collective.

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1. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), majority opinion of Holmes J. — 'Three generations of imbeciles are enough'; the compulsory-vaccination analogy ↩︎

2. The Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, modeled on Laughlin's Model Eugenical Sterilization Law (1922); Laughlin supplied an expert deposition ↩︎

Referenced by. Where this entry is cited in the reading — hover any to read it in place.

• Improving the Stock — “Buck v. Bell is the plainest fact in this whole study.”