Buck v Bell was a 1927 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States upholding a Virginia statute that authorized the compulsory sterilization of people confined to state institutions and deemed unfit to reproduce. Writing for an eight to one majority upholding the sterilization of Carrie Buck, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that three generations of imbeciles are enough. The ruling gave legal cover to a wave of forced sterilizations across the United States that eventually reached an estimated 60,000 or more people, and it was cited by lawyers defending Nazi Germany's own compulsory sterilization program at the Nuremberg trials. Buck v Bell has never been formally overruled, but it is widely repudiated as one of the Supreme Court's most discredited decisions; Virginia issued a formal apology for the case in 2002.
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