Week 3

Procedural History:
Craig and Whitener challenged the statute in Oklahoma's district court against the state, and when they lost they appealed to the Supreme Court who granted certiorari.
Facts of the case: 
Oklahoma had a law where males under the age of 21 and females under the age of 18 were prohibited from buying "non-intoxicating" 3.2% beer. Whitener, a licensed vendor of the beer, and Craig, a male who at the time of the initiation of the litigation was under 21, challenged the law on an economic basis and a jus tertii basis (jus tertii, from my understanding, is a claim to a legal right based on someone else's legally recognized position to provide a service). In this case, Craig claimed to have a right to the alcohol based on Whitener’s legal license to serve it.
Issue:
Plaintiff’s claim that selling alcohol to Males over 21 and Females over 18 (by prohibiting the sale of those under said demographic) violates the equal protection clause. The District Court upheld the statutes legality because “classification by gender must substantially further important governmental objectives, and the statistical evidence pertaining to the drunk driving habits of young males proves such substantial furthering of the objective of safety". That is the issue the Supreme Court deals with; SCOTUS pays particular attention to the logical reasoning produced by the lower court to justify their ruling which is what I would identify to as the primary issue. Another legal issue lightly touched on is brought up by the arguments employed on behalf of (just) the vendors claim to injury due to lost income. 
Legal Rules Applied: 
The court makes their ruling on the basis of the 14th amendment's equal protection clause. The court also lightly touches on the 18th and 21st amendment as they pertain to the sale of alcohol in the post-prohibition era, but I couldn't identify any conclusive determinations made on the basis of these amendments.
Analysis or Rationale:
After determining the appellants do in fact have standing to claim a constitutional challenge, the court challenges the previous arguments accepted by the district court to uphold the statue. According to caselaw, a statute that distinguishes between genders are legal if a “classification by gender…substantially further[s] important governmental objectives”. The supreme court proceeds to look at how the district court concluded the law does further an important objective (the objective in this case being the public safety on the road); the court scrutinizes the statistics used in the argument accepted and finds methodological issues, then questions the accuracy of the purported discrepancy between male drunk driving statistics and female driving statistics. The court also raises issues with the application of this law in a context where the beer is supposed to be “non-intoxicating” in the first place. According to the court, the best statistic submitted in defense of the law demonstrated a correlation of just 2% in 18-20-year-old males for alcohol related driving offenses (compared to the .18% of females in the same category).
Conclusions:
Though SCOTUS accepts the finding that there is a qualifying governmental objective baked within this statute (public safety), the statistics the state used to justify and prove the efficacy of the statute in achieving that objective are not “closely tied” enough for the supreme court. In other words, the statistical correlation was unconvincing to the court; further, the statute does not sufficiently address a valid enough issue even if the motive is qualifying, and so this law does not withstand the equal protection challenge. In reviewing the District Court’s judgment, the majority opinion applied a new/stricter “intermediate” standard of scrutiny, specifically when assessing the statistics, thus shifting the burden of proof further onto in a manner similar (but not as strict) as the “strict scrutiny” the court routinely employs to issues such as race. Thus, the court changed precedent, using the new standard to ensure that gender discrimination only occurs in a manner “closely tied” to supporting a legitimate objective.
Concurrences: Must redo, 0/1
Dissents:
The first dissent by Burger addresses the weakness of the law in the first place, saying that men could get the beer from women in their age group anyways, and that economic harm is too vague of a connection to make to this standard for such reasons.
Rehnquist affirms with the district court’s decision and method, in that the supreme court should’ve stuck with a “rational basis” analysis of the law. He believes that the standard should not be raised, as though men are a suspect class.