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Belle Terre is a village on Long Island’s north shore consisting of about 220 homes inhabited by 700 people. Its total land area is less than one square mile. The village has restricted land use to one-family dwellings and excludes lodging houses, boarding houses, fraternity houses, or multiple-dwelling houses. The ordinance defines “family” as one or more persons related by blood, adoption, or marriage living and cooking together as a single housekeeping unit, exclusive of household servants. Up to two persons living and cooking together as a single housekeeping unit though not related by blood, adoption, or marriage shall be deemed to constitute a family. Appellees the Dickmans own a house in the village. In December 1971 they leased it for an 18-month term to Michael Truman. Bruce Boraas later became a co-lessee. Anne Parish then moved into the house along with three others. These six individuals are students at the nearby State University at Stony Brook, and none is related to the others by blood, adoption, or marriage. When the village served the Dickmans with an Order to Remedy Violations of the ordinance, the owners plus three tenants brought this action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 seeking an injunction and a declaratory judgment that the ordinance is unconstitutional. The District Court held the ordinance constitutional. The Court of Appeals reversed. The Supreme Court noted probable jurisdiction. During the litigation the lease expired and was extended. Anne Parish moved out. Thereafter the other five students left, and the owners now hold the home out for sale or rent, including to student groups.

In May 1930 the Van Sweringen Corporation issued $30,000,000 in notes under an indenture naming Guaranty Trust Co. of New York as trustee with power to enforce noteholders' rights. In October 1930 Guaranty and other banks advanced large sums to companies affiliated with the Corporation and controlled by the Van Sweringens. When the Corporation could not meet its obligations, Guaranty participated in an exchange plan under which noteholders could surrender their notes for cash equal to 50 percent of face value plus twenty shares of Van Sweringen stock per $1,000 note; the offer remained open until December 15, 1931. In 1934 respondent York received $6,000 of the notes as a gift from a donor who had not accepted the exchange offer. In April 1940 three accepting noteholders filed the Hackner suit in federal court charging Guaranty with fraud and misrepresentation in connection with the exchange. York's motion to intervene was denied, and summary judgment for Guaranty was affirmed on appeal. On January 22, 1942, after her exclusion from the Hackner litigation, York filed the present class action in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of non-accepting noteholders. The complaint, resting exclusively on diversity of citizenship, alleged that Guaranty had breached its trust by failing to protect noteholders' interests when it assented to the exchange offer and by failing to disclose its own self-interest. The district court granted Guaranty's motion for summary judgment on the authority of the Hackner decision. The Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, holding that a federal court sitting in equity is not required to apply the New York statute of limitations that would govern an identical suit in the New York state courts. The Supreme Court granted certiorari.

In April 1791 an action of ejectment was commenced in a Virginia district court held at Winchester for recovery of land within the Northern Neck tract. Denny Fairfax, a British subject holding under the devise of Thomas Lord Fairfax, was admitted to defend upon the usual terms of confessing lease, entry and ouster. The facts were reduced to a case agreed and treated as a special verdict. On 24 April 1794 the district court entered judgment for the defendant. The plaintiff appealed to the Court of Appeals of Virginia, the highest court of law in the state. At its April term in 1810 that court reversed the district court judgment and entered judgment for the plaintiff. The case was then removed into the Supreme Court of the United States. At February term 1813 the Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals judgment and issued a mandate directing that its judgment be carried into execution. The Court of Appeals unanimously declined to obey the mandate. It entered judgment declaring that the Supreme Court's appellate power did not extend to it under the Constitution, that section 25 of the Judiciary Act was not in pursuance of the Constitution, that the writ of error had been improvidently allowed, and that proceedings in the Supreme Court were coram non judice. A second writ of error was brought to the Supreme Court. The underlying facts agreed by the parties show that Lord Fairfax, a citizen and inhabitant of Virginia, died in December 1781 seized of approximately 300,000 acres in the Northern Neck. By his will he devised the lands in fee to his nephew Denny Martin, later Denny Fairfax, a native-born British subject who resided in England until his death between 1796 and 1803 and who never became a citizen of the United States. In 1789 the Governor of Virginia issued a patent granting a portion of the land, described as waste and ungranted and never escheated, to David Hunter, a Virginia citizen, pursuant to a treasury warrant dated 23 January 1788. The case agreed also incorporates the definitive treaty of peace of 1783, the treaty of amity of 1794, and the several Virginia statutes concerning land grants and escheats.

In 1971 Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation applied to the Village of Arlington Heights, Illinois, for rezoning of a 15-acre parcel from single-family to multiple-family classification. Using federal financial assistance under section 236 of the National Housing Act, MHDC planned to build 190 clustered townhouse units for low- and moderate-income tenants. The Village denied the rezoning request. MHDC, joined by other plaintiffs, brought suit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois alleging that the denial was racially discriminatory and violated the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Arlington Heights is a suburb of Chicago located about 26 miles northwest of the downtown Loop. Most land in the Village is zoned for detached single-family homes. The Clerics of St. Viator own an 80-acre parcel just east of the center of Arlington Heights that includes a high school, a novitiate building, and vacant land. Since 1959 all land surrounding the Viatorian property has been zoned R-3 for single-family use with relatively small minimum lot-size requirements. In 1970 MHDC entered into a 99-year lease and accompanying agreement of sale covering a 15-acre site in the southeast corner of the Viatorian property. The agreement set a bargain purchase price of $300,000 with the sale contingent upon securing zoning clearances and section 236 housing assistance. MHDC's plans for the Lincoln Green project called for 20 two-story buildings containing 190 units with a mix of one-, two-, three-, and four-bedroom configurations and a large portion of the site left open. The development did not conform to the Village zoning ordinance and required rezoning to the R-5 multiple-family classification. MHDC filed a petition for rezoning with the Village Plan Commission accompanied by supporting materials that included an affirmative marketing plan designed to assure racial integration. MHDC consulted with Village staff and incorporated every recommended change into the plans. During the spring of 1971 the Plan Commission considered the proposal at three public meetings that drew large crowds. Opponents focused on the zoning aspects. They argued that the area had always been single-family. They also argued that the buffer policy adopted in 1962 called for R-5 zoning primarily to serve as a buffer between single-family development and commercial or manufacturing districts. At the close of the third meeting the Plan Commission recommended denial. On September 28, 1971, the Village Board denied the rezoning by a 6-1 vote. In June 1972 MHDC and three Black individuals filed suit against the Village. A second nonprofit corporation and an individual of Mexican-American descent intervened. After a bench trial the District Court entered judgment for the Village in 1974. The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed in 1975. The Supreme Court granted the Village's petition for certiorari in 1975.