Dandridge v. Williams (1970)

    During his time as a Supreme Court Justice, Marshall tried to expand the rights given to poor people. Dandridge v. Williams was a case brought before the Court in 1970 which asked the Court to decide whether the state could put a cap on how much money a family under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program could receive every month regardless of the number of children in the family or the actual need of the family. Maryland limited this money to $250 a month. Under such a system, a family with fewer children received more money per child, whereas the families with more children, and therefore most likely more need, received less money per child.

    The Supreme Court upheld Maryland’s welfare policy, saying that the federal courts have “no power to impose upon the States their views of what constitutes wise economic or social policy.”¹ Marshall disagreed strongly with this ruling. His dissent expressed his view that regardless of the size of the family the $250 a month was not enough for most if not all the families, and that Maryland’s system did not provide equal treatment to all families. He said that “The only distinction between those children with respect to whom assistance is granted and those children denied such assistance is the size of the family into which the child permits himself to be born.”¹ He also implied that there was a constitutional right to subsistence under the Fourteenth Amendment, and that the Maryland plan violated that fundamental right. In Marshall’s opinion, the Court needed to be much more scrutinizing in its determinations of whether a group of individuals was experiencing discrimination.

1 Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench (p314)