United States v. Virginia

Facts

Virginia Military Institute (VMI), founded in 1839, was the only single-sex school among Virginia's 15 public institutions of higher learning. Its mission was to produce "citizen-soldiers," men prepared for leadership in civilian life and in military service. VMI used an adversative method: physical rigor, mental stress, absence of privacy, and minute regulation of behavior. New cadets went through the rat line, a 7-month ordeal, and cadets lived in spartan barracks. Virginia reserved this education for men. The Court of Appeals was later satisfied that neither the goal of producing citizen-soldiers nor VMI's methodology was inherently unsuitable to women. In 1990, prompted by a complaint from a female high-school student who wanted to attend VMI, the United States sued Virginia and VMI. It alleged that the male-only admission policy violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. After a six-day trial, the District Court noted that VMI had received inquiries from 347 women in the two years before the suit and had answered none. The court said that some women, at least, would want to attend, and it was established that some women are capable of all the individual activities required of VMI cadets. Virginia defended the policy as serving diversity in education and as needed to protect the adversative method.

Issues

1. Does Virginia's exclusion of women from the educational opportunities VMI provides deny women who are capable of all of VMI's individual activities the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment?
2. If VMI's exclusion of women violates equal protection, does Virginia's separate VWIL program at Mary Baldwin College cure the violation?

Holding

Virginia showed no exceedingly persuasive justification for excluding all women from VMI's citizen-soldier training, so the exclusion violated the Equal Protection Clause. The VWIL program did not cure the violation because it did not give women equal opportunity. The Court addressed specifically and only this unique opportunity at the Commonwealth's sole single-sex public college.