When the Supreme Court invalidated Virginia's miscegenation law in Loving v. Virginia, the justices did not scrutinize James Madison's diaries to see whether he would have approved of interracial marriage. (If they had, interracial marriage would probably still be illegal in some places.) Nor did they confine themselves to the parts of the Constitution that Madison and the other framers wrote, reaching instead to the 14th amendment, adopted in 1868. Virginia's law, the justices determined, violated the 14th amendment's due process clause because it interfered with "the fundamental freedom" of marriage.