Eugenics

I came across this Supreme Court case while researching privacy cases. In 1927 the US Supreme Court ruled that Carrie Buck could be sterialized because, as Oliver Wendall Holmes said, she came from "...three generations of imbeciles...". A lower court described the family as "...shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites in the south". The case was Buck v. Bell (1927). The wider significance of this case is that after the ruling and Carrie Buck's sterialization "...numerous states passed similiar laws and Nazi Germany gave the fullest sweep to the argument".

(Source: The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States 1992 edition. Page 98).