World War II was still raging when Andrea Perez and Sylvester Davis applied to the Los Angeles County clerk's office for a marriage license and were turned down because a state law prohibited "all marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race or mulattoes. … " In 1948, the California Supreme Court ruled in their favor, albeit by a 4-3 margin, striking down the state's 1872-vintage anti-miscegenation law. Roger Traynor, later to become the court's chief justice, rejected defense arguments that nonwhites were mentally or socially inferior and declared in the majority opinion that marriage is...