United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996), is a landmark case in which the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the long-standing male-only admission policy of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in a 7–1 decision. Justice Clarence Thomas, whose son was enrolled at the university at the time, recused himself. In an attempt to satisfy equal protection requirements, the state of Virginia had proposed a parallel program for women, called the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership (VWIL), located at Mary Baldwin College, a private liberal arts women's college.
Justice Ginsburg found, however, that the VWIL would not provide women with the same type of rigorous military training, facilities, courses, faculty, financial opportunities, and alumni reputation and connections that VMI affords male cadets, a decision evocative of Sweatt v. Painter (1950), in which the Court ruled that segregated law schools in Texas were unconstitutional, since a newly formed black law school clearly did not provide the same benefits to its students as the state's prestigious and long-maintained white law school. However, he declined to join the majority opinion's basis for using the Fourteenth Amendment, writing: "Had Virginia made a genuine effort to devote comparable public resources to a facility for women, and followed through on such a plan, it might well have avoided an equal protection violation." Ginsburg later recalled that Scalia "absolutely ruined my weekend, but my opinion is ever so much better because of his stinging dissent".
Aftermath
The senior justice in the majority, John Paul Stevens, had assigned Sandra Day O'Connor to write the opinion, but in an act of generosity, she demurred, saying, "This should be Ruth's." Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center Steve Vladeck was highly positive of the Ginsburg decision: "The majority opinion in the VMI case is perhaps the best-known and most important majority opinion Justice Ginsburg has penned in her 24 years on the Supreme Court. That case, more than any other, epitomized the justices’ effort to establish true sex equality as a fundamental constitutional norm, and its effects are continuing to reverberate today."
Following the ruling, VMI contemplated going private to exempt itself from the 14th Amendment, and thus this ruling. The Department of Defense warned the school that it would withdraw all ROTC programs from the school if this privatization took place. As a result of the DOD action, Congress amended , to prohibit the military from withdrawing or diminishing any ROTC program at one of the six senior military colleges, including VMI. However, VMI's Board of Visitors had already voted 9–8 to admit women and did not revisit the issue after the law was amended. Justice Ginsburg told cadets of the Virginia Military Institute in 2018 that she knew her opinion “would make VMI a better place”.