ABSTRACT
Government restrictions on the right of unmarried people to live together raise privacy and civil liberties issues. In Moore v. City of East Cleveland, 431 US 494 (1977), the defendant, a grandmother named Inez Moore, lived in her East Cleveland, Ohio, home with her son Dale and two grandsons, Dale Jr. and John, who were first cousins. The Supreme Court held that people related to each other had a fundamental unenumerated substantive due process right to live together in one household, as either a nuclear or extended family. The plurality in Moore distinguished it from Belle Terre, in which a majority of the Court upheld a zoning restriction prohibiting more than two unrelated people from living together. In applying substantive due process to statutes that impinge on this right, the Court will use either strict scrutiny or intermediate scrutiny based on a reluctance to uphold infringements of the right.
