Which U.S. Supreme Court case struck down state sodomy laws?

Lawrence v. Texas struck down state sodomy laws that criminalized consensual, private sexual conduct between adults of the same sex.

The 2003 decision arose after Houston police entered John Lawrence’s apartment and arrested Lawrence and Tyron Garner under Texas’s “homosexual conduct” law. By a 6–3 vote, the Court held that the law violated the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Lawrence overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 decision that had upheld Georgia’s sodomy law. A common mix-up is treating Bowers as the case that struck such laws down; it did the opposite. Lawrence also differed from Obergefell v. Hodges, which in 2015 recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Griswold v. Connecticut, decided in 1965, concerned access to contraceptives and marital privacy, not sodomy laws.

The ruling did not itself erase every obsolete sodomy statute from state codes, but it made enforcement of laws criminalizing private, consensual adult intimacy unconstitutional.