## Facts

- Three Army draftees inducted in late 1965 were ordered to report for shipment to Vietnam about six months later.
- The soldiers opposed participating in the Vietnam conflict and sued federal defense officials to prevent their deployment.
- They sought declaratory and injunctive relief, alleging that ongoing U.S. military operations in Vietnam were unlawful.
- Their claims invoked domestic constitutional war-powers limits and asserted that the conflict violated U.S. treaty commitments and international-law restraints on aggressive war.
- Lower federal courts dismissed the action, effectively declining to adjudicate the legality of the war or the lawfulness of the deployment orders.

## Issues

1. Whether large-scale U.S. military operations in Vietnam constituted a “war” within Article I, § 8, cl. 11.
2. If so, whether the Executive could constitutionally order servicemembers to participate absent a formal congressional declaration of war.
3. What role, if any, U.S. treaty obligations played in evaluating the lawfulness of the military operations and deployment orders.
4. Whether the 1964 congressional authorization regarding Vietnam covered the operations at issue and, if read broadly, amounted to an impermissible delegation of Congress’s war power.
5. Whether such claims were justiciable or barred as nonreviewable political questions.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court denied the petition for a writ of certiorari, leaving the lower-court dismissal in place.
- The Court later denied rehearing.
- Two Justices dissented from the denial of certiorari, stating that the petition raised questions of exceptional public importance and should have been set for argument.
- Because certiorari was denied, the Supreme Court issued no merits ruling on the constitutionality or legality of the Vietnam conflict or on the soldiers’ deployment.

## Legal Principles

- Denial of certiorari does not decide the merits and carries no precedential holding on the substantive constitutional or international-law questions presented.
- The disposition nonetheless left undisturbed lower-court rulings that declined to adjudicate challenges to the legality of ongoing hostilities and related deployment orders.
- The dissents identified unresolved separation-of-powers questions concerning the constitutional meaning of “war,” the extent of executive authority to conduct sustained hostilities without a declaration, and the relevance of treaties and congressional authorizations.
- The dissents also flagged threshold barriers of justiciability that could determine whether federal courts may reach war-powers disputes brought by servicemembers.

## Conclusion

The Supreme Court’s refusal to review the case left intact the dismissal of drafted soldiers’ effort to block Vietnam deployment and, by issuing no merits opinion, left unanswered the constitutional and treaty-based challenges to the legality of the conflict while reflecting the judiciary’s limited role in contemporaneous war-powers litigation.


Mora v. McNamara, 389 U.S. 934 (1967)