Editing Hugo Black (section)

===Equal Protection Clause===
By the late 1940s, Black believed that the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause was a constitutional prohibition against any state governmental actions that discriminated on the basis of race in an invidious or capricious manner. Throughout the remainder of his time on the court, Black saw only race and the characteristics of alienage as the "suspect" categories that were addressed and protected by equal protection, along with the one-man, one-vote principle, all of which merited strict scrutiny.<ref name="Ball (2006)" />{{rp|118}} In 1948, he participated in two court decisions that struck down certain California laws that were discriminatory towards aliens: ''[[Takahashi v. Fish & Game Commission]]''<ref>{{cite web| url=https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/334/410/| title=''Takahashi v. Fish & Game Commission'' 334 U.S. 410 (1948)| access-date=October 15, 2021| archive-date=October 27, 2021| archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211027183415/https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/334/410/| url-status=live}}</ref> (he wrote the majority opinion) and ''[[Oyama v. California]]''<ref>{{cite web|url=https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/332/633/|title=''Oyama v. California'' 332 U.S. 633|access-date=October 15, 2021|archive-date=October 27, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211027183411/https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/332/633/|url-status=live}}</ref> (he wrote a concurring opinion). During his last full term on the court, he participated in a unanimous decision, ''[[Graham v. Richardson]]'', striking down statutes that restricted welfare benefits to legal aliens but not to U.S. citizens. The majority opinion stated, "[C]lassifications based on alienage, like those based on nationality or race, are inherently suspect and subject to close judicial scrutiny. Aliens as a class are a prime example of a 'discrete and insular minority' for whom such heightened judicial solicitude is appropriate."<ref>{{cite web|url=https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/403/365/|title=''Graham v. Richardson'' 403 U.S. 365 (1971)|access-date=August 7, 2020|archive-date=July 28, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200728053359/https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/403/365/|url-status=live}}</ref>

Consistent with his view that the equal protection clause had a limited meaning, Black did not believe illegitimate children were a [[suspect class]], and he applied only [[rational basis review]] to laws that were discriminatory toward such children. In 1968, he joined a dissenting opinion written by Justice [[John Marshall Harlan II|Harlan]] in the case of ''[[Levy v. Louisiana]]'', in which a majority of the court overturned a decision made by the Louisiana courts to enforce a statute that was discriminatory toward "unacknowledged" illegitimate children.<ref>{{ussc|name=Levy v. Louisiana|volume=391|page=68|pin=|year=1968}}</ref><ref>{{ussc|name=Glona v. American Guarantee & Liability Insurance Co.|volume=391|page=77|pin=|year=1968}}</ref> Three years later, he wrote a majority opinion for the case of ''Labine v. Vincent''.<ref name=Labine>{{ussc|name=Labine v. Vincent|volume=401|page=532|pin=|year=1971}}</ref> He reasoned that for a state to treat illegitimate children worse than legitimate children is scarcely any different from treating "concubines" worse than wives, or treating other relatives of a person worse than any other relatives. "It may be possible that some of these choices are more 'rational' than the choices inherent in Louisiana's categories of illegitimates. But the power to make rules to establish, protect, and strengthen family life{{nbsp}}... is committed by the Constitution of the United States and the people of Louisiana to the legislature of that State. Absent a specific constitutional guarantee, it is for that legislature, not the life-tenured judges of this Court, to select from among possible laws."<ref name=Labine />

Black apparently did not think of homosexuals as a suspect class either, voting with five other colleagues on the court to uphold the authority of the federal government to deport a gay man just because he was gay, in ''[[Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service]]''.<ref>{{ussc|name=Boutilier v. Immigrantion and Naturalization Service|volume=387|page=118|pin=|year=1967}}</ref>