Twenty-first Amendment

Amendment XXI · Ratified December 5, 1933

In brief

Repealed the Eighteenth Amendment, ending national Prohibition.

Amendment XXI · Ratified December 5, 1933

How often courts cite this over time

citing decisions per year

Court decisions citing this, by year.The marker is when it took effect. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.

Passed by Congress February 20, 1933. Ratified December 5, 1933.

Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.

Section 2. The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or Possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.

Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

Landmark decisions

4 total

Craig v. Boren · 429 U.S. 190 (1976)
Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that statutory or administrative sex classifications were subject to intermediate scrutiny under the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The case was argued by future Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg while she was working for the American Civil Liberties Union, who later wrote for the majority in United States v. Virginia.
South Dakota v. Dole · 483 U.S. 203 (1987)
South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court considered the limitations that the Constitution places on the authority of the United States Congress to influence state lawmaking. The Court upheld the constitutionality of a federal statute that withheld federal funds from states whose legal drinking age did not conform to federal policy.
44 Liquormart, Inc. v. Rhode Island · 517 U.S. 484 (1996)
44 Liquormart, Inc. v. Rhode Island, 517 U.S. 484 (1996), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a complete ban on the advertising of alcohol prices was unconstitutional under the First Amendment, and that the Twenty-first Amendment, empowering the states to regulate alcohol, did not lessen other constitutional restraints of state power.
Granholm v. Heald · 544 U.S. 460 (2005)
Granholm v. Heald, 544 U.S. 460 (2005), along with its companion case, Swedenburg v. Kelly, 544 U.S. 460 (2005), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that laws in New York and Michigan permitting in-state wineries to ship wine directly to consumers but prohibited out-of-state wineries from doing the same were unconstitutional. The case was notable because the arguments centered on the rarely-invoked Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1933, which ended Prohibition.