This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 27, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Forced sterilization has a troubling history in the United States.

And now that one state is considering payments to those affected decades ago,

perhaps it's time to reconsider the legacy of a legal icon, Oliver Wendell Holmes.

So says Trevor Burris, a legal associate

at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies.

North Carolina is discussing paying restitution

to the still living 3,000 victims of forced sterilization of the 7600 total people that North Carolina

forcibly sterilized between roughly 1924 and 1974.

Okay now most people think of forced sterilization as this ridiculous product of Nazi Germany

and before, but the United States actually has a pretty troubling history with that procedure

Yes, if only were actually a joke in 1927 the Supreme Court decided a case called Buck versus Bell.

And in that case, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

wrote one of the upheld the sterilization law

of a forcefully sterilizing a feeble-minded woman

named Carrie Buck in Virginia. As he upheld the law he wrote perhaps the most

heartless line is a pre-court history three generations of imbeciles are enough.

When you say feeble-minded, you did some air quotes that I want to make note of, but what was Oliver

Wendell Holmes doing and saying, I mean, what constitutional principle was he expressing in saying three generations

of imbeciles are enough?

Well, that's a good question because the case is actually devoid of citations except for one case to a

...