Lawrence v. Texas

Lawrence v. Texas (2003) was a landmark 2003 legal case at the U.S. Supreme Court that invalidated sodomy law across the United States, making same-sex sexual activity legal by a 6–3 decision. The majority opinion was written by Justice Kennedy, and it overturned the previous ruling of the Supreme Court on the same issue in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), where it upheld a challenged Georgia statute and did not find a constitutional protection of sexual privacy. The court in Lawrence v. Texas held that intimate consensual sexual conduct is a liberty protected by the U.S. Constitution in the Fourteenth Amendment.

According to one legal paper,

"The Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas invalidat[ed] a state law criminally punishing homosexual sodomy between consenting adults in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Under this statute, armed agents of the state could and did storm into private homes and tear innocent citizens from the arms of their loved ones, merely because other people were offended at the thought that homosexual sex might be taking place somewhere. Mr. Lawrence appealed his criminal conviction and the Supreme Court held the law unconstitutional."

- Sandefur, Timothy, "Clarence Thomas's Jurisprudence Unexplained" (September 22, 2008). NYU Journal of Law & Liberty, p. 6, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1272053