the Eastern District of Virginia issued its decision in NAACP v. Harrison, the panel agreed that three of the laws were unconstitutional, but reserved judgment on the other two laws pending interpretation by state courts (which had not yet ruled on the laws' legality). The state appealed, and the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari. Thurgood Marshall argued for the NAACP; David J. Mays and J. Segar Gravatt argued for the state (attorney general Harrison having delegated the responsibility of defending the statute to private attorney Mays). Opinion of the Court Majority Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote the majority opinion, joined by Associate Justices Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Tom C. Clark, Charles Evans Whittaker, and Potter Stewart. The Supreme Court had, 18 years earlier, confronted the issue of how to avoid constitutional rulings where a resolution in state court might make such decisions unnecessary. This rule had been laid down in Railroad Comm'n of Tex. v. Pullman Co., 312 U. S. 496 (1941). Under this rule, Harlan concluded that the issue was not yet ripe for federal action. Federal courts, he wrote, should not address the constitutionality of state laws, especially those laws which were new or open to reasonable interpretation, until state courts had a reasonable period of time to interpret them. To meet this test, the Supreme Court had to determine whether the laws in question could be reasonably interpreted in more than one way. Harlan said that there was reasonable room for alternative legal construction by state courts. State courts, he said, needed to generate a complete record (which included the possibility of limiting interpretation) so that federal courts could more accurately rule on the issues raised. The judgment was vacated and the case remanded back of the district court, with instructions that the federal court should retain jurisdiction over the cases until such time as Virginia courts had construed them. Dissent Associate Justice William O. Douglas dissented, joined by Chief Justice Earl Warren and Associate Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. Douglas did not dispute that Railroad Comm'n was an appropriate precedent. However, he argued that in certain cases, the precedent could be used as a tactic to delay justice. The case at hand presented unique, pressing issues regarding fundamental civil rights, he said, "It seems plain to me that it was the District Court's duty to provide this remedy," he concluded. "Where state laws made