Saenz V. Roe - Majority Opinion

Majority Opinion

Justice Stevens, writing for the majority, found that although the "right to travel" was not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, the concept was "firmly embedded in our jurisprudence." He described three components of the right to travel:

1. The right to enter one state and leave another;
2. The right to be treated as a welcome visitor rather than a hostile stranger;
3. For those who want to become permanent residents, the right to be treated equally to native-born citizens.

Because the statute did not directly impair entry or exit from the state, Stevens declined to discuss the first aspect of the right to travel although he did mention that the right was expressly mentioned in the Articles of Confederation. He briefly described the scope of the Art. IV Privileges and Immunities Clause, but the main focus of his opinion was the application of the Fourteenth Amendment. For the proposition that this amendment protected a citizen's right to resettle in other states, Stevens cited the majority opinion in the Slaughterhouse Cases:

Justice Stevens further held in Sáenz that it was irrelevant that the statute only minimally impaired the plaintiffs' right to travel. The plaintiffs were new to the state of California, but they had the right to be treated the same as long-time residents, especially given that their need for welfare benefits was unrelated to the amount of time they had spent in the state. Furthermore, wrote Stevens, there was no reason for the state to fear that citizens of other states would take advantage of California's relatively generous welfare benefits because the proceeds of each welfare check would be consumed while the plaintiffs remained within the state. This distinguishes them from a "readily portable benefit, such as a divorce or a college education", for which durational residency requirements had been upheld in cases such as Sosna v. Iowa and Vlandis v. Kline.

California justified the statute solely on fiscal grounds, and Stevens held that this justification was insufficient. The state could have found another non-discriminatory way to reduce welfare costs, other than conditioning the welfare benefit amounts of new residents by reference to their length of stay within the state, or their state of prior residence. Moreover, the fact that PRWORA authorized states to set their own benefit levels did not assist in the determining the constitutionality of the state statute because Congress cannot authorize states to violate the Fourteenth Amendment.