The U.S. Supreme Court case Connecticut Department of Public Safety, et al. v. John Doe, Individually and on Behalf of All Others Similarly Situated (2002) revolved around the constitutionality of a state statute requiring sex offenders to register with the state and have their information publicly available in a database without individual risk assessment hearings for each offender. The plaintiff argued that this violated his due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment because he was not given an opportunity to prove he wasn't dangerous before being labeled as such by inclusion in the registry. However, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 against him stating that due process does not require states to provide individuals with pre-deprivation hearings prior to including them in public sex offender registries since it is based on conviction records which already afford procedural safeguards.

In the dissenting opinion for Connecticut Department of Public Safety v. Doe, Justice Ginsburg argued that the majority's decision failed to adequately consider whether Connecticut's sex offender registry law was punitive in effect and thus violated due process rights. She contended that a proper examination would have revealed it as excessively punitive because it did not distinguish between dangerous offenders who posed a real threat to society and those who were unlikely to reoffend. The law, she asserted, should be narrowly tailored to serve its purpose of protecting public safety without unnecessarily infringing on individual liberties. Furthermore, she criticized the majority for assuming all convicted sex offenders pose a high risk of recidivism without empirical evidence supporting this assumption.