As the supreme court noted in the first sentence of its opinion, Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942) “touche[d] a sensitive and important area of human rights.” The state of Oklahoma was about to sterilize Jack T. Skinner against his will. In the view of Oklahoma, Skinner was a “habitual criminal,” convicted three times of crimes involving “moral turpitude” – twice for “robbery,” once for stealing chickens. The state's “Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act” called for repeat offenders to be sterilized in order to stop people with manifest criminal tendencies from passing those tendencies to future generations.

In doctrinal terms, Skinner was not an easy case. Or, perhaps to state the same thing differently, from one perspective it seemed too easy. To Skinner and indeed to the Justices of the Supreme Court, Oklahoma's Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act may have looked cruel and offensive, jarringly similar in some respects (though not, of course, in all) to the “eugenics” then being practiced in Nazi Germany.