Seven justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by Justice William O. Douglas. The Court began by finding that the U.S. Constitution protects "marital privacy" as a fundamental constitutional right, but struggled to identify a particular source for it in the Constitution's text. The Court rejected the Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution as the source of the marital privacy right, because at the time the Court still formally rejected the doctrine of substantive due process due to its association with the 1905 decision "Lochner v. New York".