Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/22-915_8o6b.pdf
Page Number: 54

Cite as:  602 U. S. ____ (2024) 

19 

KAVANAUGH, J., concurring 

strive to do, and what this Court has actually done across
the constitutional landscape for the last two centuries.

The  balancing  tests  (heightened  scrutiny  and  the  like) 
are a relatively modern judicial innovation in constitutional 
decisionmaking.  The “tiers of scrutiny have no basis in the 
text or original meaning of the Constitution.”  J. Alicea & J. 
Ohlendorf,  Against  the  Tiers  of  Constitutional  Scrutiny, 
National Affairs 72, 73 (2019).  And before the late 1950s, 
“what  we  would  now  call  strict  judicial  scrutiny  did  not 
exist.”  R. Fallon, The Nature of Constitutional Rights: The 
Invention and Logic of Strict Judicial Scrutiny 30 (2019).   
The Court “appears to have adopted” heightened-scrutiny
tests  “by  accident”  in  the  1950s  and  1960s  in  a  series  of 
Communist  speech  cases,  “rather  than  as  the  result  of  a 
considered judgment.”  Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members 
of N. Y. State Crime Victims Bd., 502 U. S. 105, 125 (1991) 
(Kennedy,  J.,  concurring  in  judgment).    The  Court  has 
employed balancing only in discrete areas of constitutional 
law—and even in those cases, history still tends to play a 
far larger role than overt judicial policymaking.7 

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the Court overrule
cases  where  the  Court  has  applied  those  heightened-
scrutiny tests.  But I am challenging the notion that those 

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7 The Court has articulated a heightened-scrutiny test in some pockets
of  free-speech  jurisprudence.    But  even  when  invoking  heightened
scrutiny in that context, the Court still often relies directly on history. 
See, e.g., City of Austin v. Reagan Nat. Advertising of Austin, LLC, 596 
U. S.  61,  75  (2022)  (a  city’s  regulation  of  solely  off-premises  billboards 
was  within  “the  Nation’s  history  of  regulating  off-premises  signs”  as 
“federal, state, and local jurisdictions have repeatedly relied upon on-/off-
premises  distinctions”  “for  the  last  50-plus  years”);  Perry  Ed.  Assn.  v. 
Perry  Local  Educators’  Assn.,  460  U. S.  37,  45–46  (1983)  (“In  places
which by long tradition” “have been devoted to assembly and debate, the
rights  of  the  State  to 
limit  expressive  activity  are  sharply 
circumscribed”).  The Court has also used heightened scrutiny in certain
equal protection cases.  As discussed above, the Equal Protection Clause
rejected the history of racially discriminatory laws and practices.