Aggregated News
A century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that legal scholars generally consider to be among the worst in its history. In the landmark case, Buck v. Bell, the court affirmed that states had the right to forcibly sterilize “feebleminded and socially inadequate” people to prevent them from having children. The decision bolstered America’s burgeoning eugenics movement, which proclaimed to improve humanity through selective breeding. In ruling against Carrie Buck, a young woman residing in a Virginia state mental institution, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously wrote “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
That phrase is echoed in the title of Georgia State legal historian Paul Lombardo’s 2008 book, “Three Generations, No Imbeciles,” the first fully documented account of the Buck case. The work revealed how Buck was misrepresented in court and detailed how the decision influenced public attitudes and the law.
“Most people think that eugenics is something from the distant past, but it has come back into the public conversation in a big way in the last 30 years,” says Lombardo...