Leser v. Garnett: The Ruling That Upheld the Nineteenth Amendment

Leser v. Garnett is the 1922 Supreme Court decision that upheld the Nineteenth Amendment as a valid part of the Constitution and confirmed that women’s right to vote could not be undone by challenges to how the amendment was ratified. Justice Louis Brandeis wrote the opinion for a unanimous Court on February 27, 1922, rejecting three separate arguments aimed at knocking the amendment out of the Constitution eighteen months after it took effect.¹

How the Case Started

On October 12, 1920, Cecilia Streett Waters and Mary D. Randolph registered to vote in Baltimore City. Oscar Leser and several other men sued in the Baltimore Court of Common Pleas to have both women struck from the voter rolls. Their theory was direct. Maryland’s legislature had refused to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Maryland constitution limited suffrage to men. If the amendment itself was invalid, Maryland’s restriction still governed and the two women had no right to register.²

The Maryland courts dismissed the petition and affirmed on appeal. Leser then took the case to the Supreme Court on a writ of error.¹

The Three Challenges to the Nineteenth Amendment

Leser’s lawyers attacked the amendment on three fronts, each targeting a different stage of the constitutional process.

The first argument was that the amendment exceeded the amending power in Article V. Adding millions of women to the electorate without a state’s consent, the theory went, destroyed that state’s political identity. The change was simply too big for the amendment process to carry.²

The second argument turned on state constitutions. Several of the thirty-six ratifying states had constitutions that restricted the vote to men. Leser claimed the legislatures in those states therefore lacked authority to ratify a federal amendment doing the opposite. A state’s own charter, on this view, capped what its lawmakers could agree to at the federal level.¹

The third argument was narrower and technical. The ratifying resolutions in Tennessee and West Virginia, Leser said, were void because those legislatures had violated their own internal procedural rules when voting. Throw out even two states’ ratifications and the amendment would fall below the three-fourths threshold Article V requires.¹

What the Supreme Court Held

Brandeis rejected all three arguments in a short, tightly reasoned opinion.

The Fifteenth Amendment Settled the Article V Question

On the claim that the amendment exceeded Article V’s reach, the Court pointed to the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified more than fifty years earlier to prohibit race-based voter disenfranchisement. The two amendments used identical structural language and expanded the electorate in the same fundamental way. If the Fifteenth was valid, so was the Nineteenth. The same amending power that sustained one necessarily sustained the other.¹

Ratification Is a Federal Function

The state-constitution argument failed on a principle the Court had spelled out two years earlier in Hawke v. Smith: when a state legislature ratifies a federal amendment, it exercises power derived from the federal Constitution, not from state law. Hawke had struck down Ohio’s attempt to subject ratification to a popular referendum. Article V gives the ratification power to state legislatures specifically, and states cannot restrict or redirect that power through their own constitutions or procedures.²³

Certification Is the Final Word

The procedural attack on Tennessee and West Virginia produced the ruling’s most enduring principle. The Court declined to examine whether those legislatures had followed their own rules. Official notice from a state legislature to the Secretary of State, properly authenticated, is conclusive on the courts. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby had certified the amendment as ratified on August 26, 1920, and that proclamation bound every court.¹⁴

Brandeis grounded that holding in the enrolled bill doctrine from Field v. Clark (1892), which barred courts from looking behind an officially authenticated legislative act to question whether the body had followed its internal rules.⁵ Applied to the amendment process, the doctrine meant that once ratification is proclaimed, opponents cannot unravel it by mining state legislative minutes for parliamentary errors.

Why the Ruling Still Matters

Three principles from Leser v. Garnett continue to shape constitutional law. The amending power under Article V carries no subject-matter limit; if the Constitution can be amended to end race-based voter restrictions, it can be amended to end sex-based ones, and the same logic reaches any subject the required supermajorities support. State legislatures acting on federal amendments exercise federal authority that their own constitutions cannot cabin. And the Secretary of State’s certification of ratification is conclusive.⁶

Any post-ratification challenge to a constitutional amendment runs into these rules. Leser is the case that says the fight is over once the proclamation is signed.

Maryland’s Belated Ratification

The ruling made Maryland’s refusal to ratify legally irrelevant, since the amendment bound every state regardless of how its legislature had voted. Formal ratification still carried symbolic weight, and Maryland did not officially ratify the Nineteenth Amendment until 1941, more than two decades after it took effect.⁷

1
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Leser v. Garnett
2
FindLaw. Leser v. Garnett 258 U.S. 130 (1922)
3
Cornell Law Institute. Hawke v. Smith, Secretary of State of Ohio
4
National Archives. 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women’s Right to Vote (1920)
5
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Field v. Clark
6
Congress.gov. Amdt19.4 The Scope of the Nineteenth Amendment
7
Maryland State Archives. Maryland and the 19th Amendment: Marching Towards Women’s Suffrage