Constitutional rights of 18-to-20-year-olds

[Robert Sheridan]

I don't mean to take a serious question lightly, but I think that "the  
constitutional rights of 18-to-20 year olds" before the early 1970s  
assumes a fact not very much in evidence.  What I think the question  
fails to express is how much we were capable of ignoring the alleged  
rights of people deemed on their face, sometimes quite literally, as  
not having any rights that an adult or a white person was required to  
consider.  Before what we call a constitutional right becomes one, it  
is quite common to think the idea ridiculous.  Gay rights including  
marriage come to mind.  There's a reason there was a civil rights  
revolution, and a civil war.   Consciousness of rights for disfavored  
minorities was definitely not raised, by and large, even if a lot of  
people might have heard rumblings that some things were wrong, before  
these earth-shaking occurrences.

Black people eating and sleeping in the same restaurants and hotels as  
whites?  And purchasing homes in white neighborhoods?  How silly.   
Minors having constitutional rights?   I mean there's a reason for the  
adoption of the 26th Amendment in 1971 and not before:  the idea was  
laughable.  However, what with the by then very unpopular Vietnam war  
and the draft and young men being sent overseas to die, the idea  
gained traction that if they were old enough to die, they were old  
enough to vote on such things as the war in which they were being sent  
to die in.  That made the question suddenly serious, not laughable.

I'd be astonished (and interested) to find that the courts held a  
different view than the general run of the population in this regard.   
Even today, the rights of high school students, for example, are more  
limited than the general run of the population, and grade schoolers  
even less so.  To suggest that this situation should change in favor  
of more rights for students brings out the wrath of those favoring  
academic order, discipline, respect, upholding the authority of  
teachers and administrators, and so forth.  I suppose the Bong Hits  
for Jesus case would be a recent example of showing where the lines  
are drawn these days.  Or take the flip from Gobitis to Barnette in  
the space of a year or two, illustrating that the rights of children  
(or their parents in raising them, I'm not sure which was more  
important, maybe both) went from unprotected to protected  
constitutionally in the early 1940s.  In the 1920s, Meyers and Pierce  
come to mind.  Before that, I don't know, except that child labor laws  
were declared unconstitutional during the early Lochner Era  
(1905-1937), thus, by negative implication, suggesting that children  
had little in the way of legal protection in certain areas, at least.

rs
sfls


On Dec 19, 2008, at 10:42 PM, Volokh, Eugene wrote:

>                 I’m looking for information on how courts and  
> commentators treated the constitutional rights of 18-to-20-year- 
> olds, back when the age of majority was generally 21, which is to  
> say until the early 1970s.  If you have any pointers on this, I’d be  
> very much obliged.  Many thanks,
>
>                 Eugene
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