After 40 years,  Loving v. Virginia remains an enduring subject in law schools across the nation.

“During the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, the Supreme Court was steadily dismantling the legal apparatus of Jim Crow segregation,” said Davison Douglas, a professor at the College of William and Mary’s Marshall Wythe School of Law.

Loving v. Virginia repudiated “the last bastion of segregation laws in the South,” he said.

Same-sex marriage advocates point to the decision as a precedent for same-sex unions.

By ruling against Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage, the court’s decision on June 12, 1967 also invalidated similar prohibitions in 15 other states. For the first time, it also established marriage as a constitutional right.

And, unlike other major civil-rights cases that were brought forth as class-action suits or overseen by organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Loving v. Virginia was the product of two people.

Richard and Mildred Loving said the state was violating their rights, and they went to court to demand redress.

“It’s an incredible case,” said Michael Grossberg, a professor of history and law at Indiana University.

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After being convicted in Caroline County Circuit Court of violating Virginia’s ban against interracial marriages, they were given the choice of returning to Washington, where they had been married, or spend a year in jail.

“They go back to D.C.,” Grossberg said, “but they clearly think [the ruling] is wrong, and it festers, festers and festers, and they come back to challenge it.”

“It strikes me that this is a really interesting example of how we need to remember that law changes are not because of what lawyers and judges do, but what people do,” Grossberg said. “Our legal history is full of cases where individuals decide they are going to pursue their rights.”

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The case provides another example to Grossberg “of how the past frames the present.”

“Debates regarding same-sex marriage are very reminiscent of the debates in the past about interracial marriage,” said Brian Powell, a sociology professor who teaches at Indiana University.

“People asked, what about the children of interracial couples? They said it was inconsistent with the Bible,” Powell said. “They were just uncomfortable with the subject,” Powell said, as many people are about same-sex marriage. “The point is, people’s definitions of what constitutes a family do change.”

In Caroline County, the Lovings’ names are carved in granite on a marker devoted to its black history on the courthouse green.

Clerk of the Circuit Court Ray Campbell said the original case file of the Lovings’ 1959 conviction has been removed to a Fredericksburg archive for safekeeping.

He said the file is surprisingly thin. “It’s not a thick file, at all. A file does not have to be thick to be important.”

The monument on the courthouse lawn says the Lovings “helped strike down laws prohibiting interracial marriage in the United States.”

A passage on another face of the stone says: “Mutual understanding derived from unique experiences is the strength of Caroline.”

Contact Lawrence Latané III at (804) 333-3461 or llatane@timesdispatch.com.