Vlandis v. Kline 412 U.S. 441 (1973)
VLANDIS v. KLINE 412 U.S. 441 (1973)
A Connecticut statute gave resident students at a state university certain tuition preferences. A student who had entered the university as a nonresident was relegated to that status for his or her full student career. The Supreme Court, 6–3, held the latter provision unconstitutional. A majority of five Justices, speaking through Justice potter stewart, held that the provision created "a permanent and irrebuttable presumption of non-residence." Because this presumption was "not necessarily or universally true in fact," it denied a student procedural due process by denying a hearing on the issue of residence. Justice byron r. white concurred on equal protection grounds. The dissenters suggested that the Court had, in fact, drifted into an area of substantive due process that the Court had abandoned in the 1930s. The irrebuttable presumptions doctrine had a brief vogue, but Weinberger v. Salfi (1975) placed it in mothballs.
Kenneth L. Karst
(1986)