rational relationship
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 394 U.S. 802 - McDonald v. Board of Election Comm'rs of Chicago · 1969Most cited · 1,731 citing opinions
The distinctions drawn by a challenged statute must bear some rational relationship to a legitimate state end and will be set aside as violative of the Equal Protection Clause only if based on reasons totally unrelated to the pursuit of that goal. Legislatures are presumed to have acted constitutionally even if source materials normally resorted to for ascertaining their grounds for action are otherwise silent, and their statutory classifications will be set aside only if no grounds can be conceived to justify them.
How often courts cite the case defining “rational relationship”
Court decisions citing the opinion that defined “rational relationship” — 1,731 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining case as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.