UCLA law professor Stuart Banner writes in this 2024 book:
* The Court likewise upheld a considerable amount of regulation that was alleged to infringe liberty in a more personal sense. Just two months before Lochner, for example, the Court sounded positively collectivist in rejecting the claim of anti-vaccine activists that the Constitution barred the states from enacting compulsory vaccination laws. “There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good. On any other basis organized society could not exist with safety to its members,” the Court declared in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905).
* the Court held in Buck v. Bell (1927) that the Due Process Clause did not prevent the state from forcibly sterilizing people determined to be “feeble – minded.” Like many states at the time, Virginia had a eugenic program providing for the sterilization of the mentally disabled. “Carrie Buck is a feeble – minded white woman” who had been committed to a state institution, Holmes explained in his opinion. “She is the daughter of a feeble – minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble – minded child.” It took him just a few sentences to dismiss the argument that the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause included a right not to be sterilized against one’s will. “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives,” Holmes declared, a few years after the First World War. “It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.” Holmes himself supported measures like the one at issue in Buck . As his biographer remarks, eugenics was the rare “legislative ‘reform’ about which Holmes did not have his customary skepticism.” This view came through clearly in his short opinion for the Court. “It is better for all the world,” he insisted, “if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.” He concluded with what has become one of the most infamous lines in any Supreme Court opinion: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”