Griswold v. Connecticut

Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), is a United States Supreme Court decision holding that a Connecticut statute criminalizing the use of contraceptives by married couples violated a constitutional right of marital privacy. Writing for the majority, Justice William O. Douglas found that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance, and that a right of privacy sufficient to invalidate the statute could be found within those penumbras rather than in any single enumerated provision. The decision supplied the doctrinal foundation later relied upon and extended in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), Roe v. Wade (1973), Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).