Famous cases where nobody remembers the original complaint?

June 27, 2013 7:36 PM

Windsor v. US will be remembered as a decision on gay marriage but was originally a question of estate taxes. Griswold v. Connecticut is remembered as a decision on constitutional protection of privacy, but it was filed to challenge a statute prohibiting contraception. Capone v. US is the trial that shut down a notorious gangster, smuggler, and murderer, but the specific charge was tax evasion. What other examples are there of famous cases where the actual complaint has become kind of obscure for most laymen? Is there a term for this sort of case?
posted by d. z. wang to Law & Government (19 answers total)

I get what you're saying, but Windsor was never about estate taxes, only about the discriminatory way in which Edith and her late wife were treated with regard to estate taxes because of DOMA.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:43 PM on June 27, 2013 [2 favorites]

Likewise, I usually hear Griswold cited around contraception issues. Can you think of some additional examples?
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 7:54 PM on June 27, 2013 [5 favorites]

Maybe the real question is whether all Supreme Court cases technically cite one issue (estate taxes), but really hinge on the larger issue (DOMA discrimination) and so the smaller issue is are chosen as the way to dispute the larger issue. Is there any case where this isn't true? [I think not, and it is why I quite enjoy constitutional law and the way that clever lawyers choose the 'small' issue so carefully so that it really slices into the bigger issue well].
posted by Tandem Affinity at 7:59 PM on June 27, 2013

I think that what you're getting at is that most people, to the extent that they know about legal cases at all, know the case's holding or the long-term results that have flowed from it, rather than about how the case came to be in court in the first place. I don't know that there's a specific term for it, but it's true of pretty much any famous case you can think of. For example:

• Ernesto Miranda, the appellant in Miranda v. Arizona, the case that gave us the Miranda warning, kidnapped and raped a 17 year old girl.
• Plessy v. Ferguson, the separate-but-equal case, was a setup. A rail company that didn't want to have to buy extra train cars got together with a New Orleans anti-Jim Crow group to create an orchestrated test by having Homer Plessy, who was 1/8 black, sit in a whites-only train care where the rail company had arranged for a private detective they hired to arrest him specifically for violating the segregation law (they were afraid that if they called the regular police, he'd be charged with vagrancy or disturbing the peace or something, and then they wouldn't be able to challenge the law). He knew and looked forward to being convicted in order to set up the appeal that challenged (unfortunately, unsuccessfully) the underlying law.
• Marbury v. Madison, the case that first recognized the Supreme Court's power to determine whether stuff is constitutional and to stop it if it isn't, was a case about whether President Jefferson could refuse to commission as a Justice of the Peace a dude named Marbury who had been lawfully appointed to that office by Jefferson's predecessor, President Adams.
• Gideon v. Wainwright, the case that gives you the right to the assistance of a court-appointed attorney in a criminal case if you can't afford to hire your own, was about a guy who was accused of breaking into a bar and smashing their cigarette machine. At the second trial, granted to him by the Supreme Court, he was acquitted.

So, in my opinion, the answer to your question, "What other examples are there of famous cases where the actual complaint has become kind of obscure for most laymen?" would be, almost all of them.
posted by decathecting at 8:08 PM on June 27, 2013 [18 favorites]

Arkell v Pressdram?

Although that one never made it to court.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 8:16 PM on June 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

Yeah I think the general principle here is "Supreme Court cases", because the Supreme Court chooses the hear them when they raise questions about fundamental legal principles.

The Capone thing is different. There are tons of criminal cases where The People bring whatever they can bring to shut down a bad guy. This happens so often as to be beneath notice: it's a staple of TV police dramas. "They got the witness's testimony thrown out, so it's going to be tough to make murder one, but we can still send him up on blah blah blah." It's also a standard plot element in shows where a young hothead at the FBI is trying to take down the Boss of the Crime Syndicate. The mob boss kills people, or has them killed, but he's convicted of racketeering.

But if the Supreme Court decides to hear a case, I think it's because they think that something Large is at stake: penumbras and emanations, enumerated vs. unenumerated rights, Federalism vs. ...errr...not-Federalism, whether separate can be equal, what is a protected class, the limits on free speech, balancing the rights of individuals against the greater will of society, etc.

There's always a specific thing: Citizens United wanted to air one film about Hillary Clinton, Kelo was about one specific parcel in Connecticut, but the cases get accepted because they are Big Questions I think, otherwise they stay with the lower courts' rulings.

Of course, there's tons of pivotal law that comes out of the lower courts. I don't know why I am posting this answer like I know anything about this when there are like 1,000 lawyers on this site.

But if you read books about the history of this or that legal principle in the US, they will always follow a line of cases, often from a particular court or jurist who's developing a legal theory. Like, everyone always talks about United States vs. Carroll Towing when talking about how the torts system ended up the way it is because Learned Hand lays out the theory for determining negligence. Prior to the 1960s, there was no notion of "unconscionability" with regard to contracts in the United States, and a series of cases including Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture and Jones v. Star Credit. These cases established tests like inequality of bargaining power that meant that courts could rip up contracts. Previously if you signed a contract you were stuck, no matter how ridiculous it was. So these cases get cited, even though they are about one person buying one refrigerator or some rent-to-own furniture.
posted by jeb at 8:23 PM on June 27, 2013

I'd disagree with the Miranda v Arizona and Gideon v Wainwright examples. Isn't the reason for the appeal precisely the thing those cases are famous for? The details of the charges seem rather secondary. (Though I think I would have told you Miranda was convicted of rape if you made me guess.)

I would have told you Griswold was about contraception.

I couldn't have told you what Marbury v Madison was about. I could tell you that it established judicial review, but also would have told you that was the result, not what the particular issue was. I could, though, have told you that Gibbons v Ogden was something about a ferry.

This is kind of a non-example, but Schenk v US was about the Espionage Act and promoting draft resistance. It's the origin of the "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" example of limits of the First Amendment. It's a non-example because I doubt most people could connect the case to the example (or have heard of the case).

Gitlow v New York was another left wing free speech case, where the upshot was the incorporation of the First Amendment. Gitlow actually lost because the court decided that, while the First Amendment did apply to states, the law in question was constitutional. Exactly how famous it is is debatable, I suppose. I have vague memories of it coming up in school, but I wouldn't expect people to recognise the name.
posted by hoyland at 9:42 PM on June 27, 2013

Not exactly what you're asking for, but the Lawrence v Texas case, which overthrew sodomy laws, was covered in Flagrant Conduct, with a lot of fascinating background. The couple at the center of the case were not a couple, weren't dating, never had sex, and were actually in different rooms when the police busted in and arrested them for sodomy. The original people in the center of the case were not involved in the case after the first stages.
posted by gingerbeer at 9:50 PM on June 27, 2013

You never specified whether the case could be fictional or not, so I'm going to go ahead and mention Jarndyce v Jarndyce, a lawsuit somehow central to the the lives of some 50-odd characters in Dickens' Bleak House. From the first chapter: "This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises."
posted by ltisz at 10:04 PM on June 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'd disagree with the Miranda v Arizona and Gideon v Wainwright examples. Isn't the reason for the appeal precisely the thing those cases are famous for? The details of the charges seem rather secondary. (Though I think I would have told you Miranda was convicted of rape if you made me guess.)

Yeah, those cases are famous for their procedural rules. So of course most people don't remember the charges, which are merely substantive.

Also, I don't see how Plessy is an example. OK, so it was a "setup." But it's standard practice to create contrived situations for the purpose of getting a constitutional claim to the Supreme Court.

I also think the whole question is unclear. Anyone who brings up Griswold even in passing says it's about contraception. Yes, it may be even more interesting that the principle underlying the case led to Roe v. Wade, but contraception is the whole issue of Griswold itself.

Windsor is too new to declare that it's not "remembered" as being about estate taxes. It was literally decided yesterday! I assume that any law-school casebook will set forth the estate tax issue.

The best example that's been mentioned is Marbury, since the sweeping proposition for which it's always cited seems so far removed from the humdrum facts of that case.
posted by John Cohen at 10:49 PM on June 27, 2013

The Tasmanian Dams Case centred around a hydroelectric project in a World Heritage area. It came at the end of a huge political controversy and campaigns around the conservation of a set of rivers and valleys. It's quite famous here as being about stopping the Franklin Dam and was formative in the environmental movement in Australia.

The actual court case, though, was brought on by the Tasmanian Government, not the opponents to the project, and centred around the Commonwealth's external affairs power. It had to do with the question of whether the Commonwealth had the ability, based on its ability to negotiate treaties and international agreements, to regulate things that were 'traditionally' State areas.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:33 PM on June 27, 2013

The investigation of Bill Clinton began with the completely-imagined-by-Republicans Whitewater "scandal" but will be remembered for the only charge they could come up with out of their witch-hunt, his perjury re: "sexual relations" with "that woman" Monica Lewinsky.
posted by drjimmy11 at 12:35 AM on June 28, 2013

will be remembered for the only charge they could come up with

There were 15 people convicted of 40 criminal charges, actually. The Lewinsky scandal was also brought directly to the Office of the Independent Counsel by Linda Tripp, who secretly recorded Lewinsky at the behest of Lucianne Goldberg. They were both under the purview of the OIC but were not that directly related.

Either way, I don't believe this is a good example of the phenomenon ("original complaint forgotten"), unless you count Jones v. Clinton, which was not under the OIC but did have links both to Tripp/Lewinsky and to Whitewater.
posted by dhartung at 2:00 AM on June 28, 2013

Griswold started out about and was always about contraception. The finding of a "right to privacy" was the means by which the Supreme Court overturned the conviction.
posted by yclipse at 6:58 AM on June 28, 2013

The Wednesbury test of unreasonableness was for many years the bar universally used by the UK High Court to decide whether a decision made by a public body should be quashed by the judicary. The original case concerned whether children under 15 should be allowed into a particular cinema on Sundays.

Also, see Pepper v Hart.
posted by wilko at 12:44 PM on June 28, 2013

Daniel M'Naghten, who shot the Prime Minister's private secretary in 1843, gave his name to the standard test for insanity in UK criminal law.

McKenzie v McKenzie, an otherwise routine divorce case in 1970, established the principle that litigants in person are entitled to assistance in court.

Wikipedia's Lists of landmark court decisions is a good shortcut to other cases that have acquired an unexpected 'afterlife', like the famous case of the Carbolic Smoke Ball.
posted by verstegan at 4:13 PM on June 28, 2013

Verstegan, they still use the M'naghten test in some states in the US as well; it's required knowledge for the bar exam in at least 49 of 50 states (although we need to know other standards as well).

Nth'ing Marbury v. Madison. Here's a summary: Congress wanted to increase the scope of the Supreme Court's powers to review certain cases, beyond what the Constitution provided. The Supreme Court said no, you don't have the right to give us that power. And in rejecting that grant of power, the Supreme Court established the position that it has the ability to strike down an act of Congress that exceeds its constitutional power. Brilliant.

The Supreme Court gets the big glamorous ones for Constitutional issues, but there are many state-level decisions that set standards for other areas of law. In tort law, for instance, there are a few that every law student knows well:

Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad--proximate cause and foreseeability of injury in a negligence claim
Garatt v. Dailey--formation of intent for intentional torts
Katko v. Briney--scope of privilege to protect property from trespass/theft
Charbonneau v. MacRury--standard of care owed by children engaged in adult activities
U.S. v. Carroll Towing: standard of care owed in a given situation as a function of scope of possible damage occurring * likelihood of that damaging event coming to pass.

In some of these cases, the facts are unique and memorable enough that people will recall them as clearly as they do the legal principles emanating therefrom (Palsgraf and Katko, especially) , but in others, people only remember the legal principle.

There are tons of these for each area of law, each illustrating (usually for the first time) the application of the majority rule. Legal education in the US is mostly reading these landmark cases and coddling together a general understanding of those rules. This site will has a bunch of law school outlines that should give you a good list of these cases.
posted by holterbarbour at 8:31 PM on June 28, 2013

The Supreme Court case U.S. v. Carolene Products is famous for a single footnote! Footnote Four first suggested that there might be different levels or tiers of judicial scrutiny in different circumstances, particularly when the law under scrutiny is directed at a "discrete and insular minority." This idea is now the basis of a large amount of constitutional law.

No one (myself included!) tends to remember what the rest of the case was about.
posted by Carmelita Spats at 10:01 PM on June 28, 2013

No one (myself included!) tends to remember what the rest of the case was about.

Ooh, I know this one! The answer is filled milk!

Filled milk, which is basically skim milk mixed with vegetable oil, was a really popular product in the early 20th century, because it had the same calories and fats and nutrients as real milk, but cost a lot less. Congress, under pressure from the dairy industry, which was losing money because we were becoming dependent on foreign (vegetable) oil, banned its shipment in interstate commerce in 1923. Carolene Products sued, claiming that the Congress had overstepped its commerce clause powers and had failed to give them due process. The Court found the law constitutional and held that legislation passed lawfully by Congress were presumptively constitutional, and that the Court should be deferential to legislative judgments, holding them only to rational basis review (the lowest level of scrutiny given to constitutional questions). Footnote Four then proposed that some kinds of legislative judgments might require a closer look because they're blatantly against the text of the Constitution, or because they threaten to corrupt the political process, or because they discriminate against the "discrete and insular minorities" mentioned above.

But the cause of action was whether Congress can ban sales of skim milk mixed with vegetable oil. Which the Court said they could. However, those laws have been repealed, and you can buy filled milk today. It's called Milnot.

Yeah, I'm in the middle of studying for the bar exam right now. It's awful, but I'm learning a lot of weird stuff.
posted by decathecting at 10:39 PM on June 28, 2013 [1 favorite]