United States v. Raines

In United States v. Raines, 362 U.S. 17 (1960), the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated a lawsuit for enforcement of a voting rights statute, R.S. § 2004, as amended by § 131 of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, 71 Stat. 637, 42 U. S. C. § 1971. A lower court had dismissed the case on the grounds that the statute was unconstitutionally broad. But the Court, in an opinion by Justice William Brennan, held that laws should not be invalidated by "reference to hypothetical cases." Id. at 22.

Justice Felix Frankfurter, joined by Justice John Harlan II, wrote that:

The weighty presumptive validity with which the Civil Rights Act of 1957, like every enactment of Congress, comes here is not overborne by any claim urged against it. To deal with legislation so as to find unconstitutionality is to reverse the duty of courts to apply a statute so as to save it. Here this measure is sustained under familiar principles of constitutional law. Nor is there any procedural hurdle left to be cleared to sustain the suit of the United States. Whatever may have been the original force of Barney v. New York, 193 U.S. 430, that decision has long ceased to be an obstruction, nor is any other decision in the way of our result in this case. And so I find it needless to canvass the multitude of opinions that may generally touch on, but do not govern, the issues now before us.

This decision is cited often for the proposition that courts should not declare federal laws unconstitutional based on abstract arguments beyond the facts of the case at hand.