In the 1970 case of Griffin et al. v. Breckenridge et al., the U.S Supreme Court ruled that federal law could be used to combat private conspiracies aimed at depriving individuals of their civil rights, overturning its previous decision in Collins v. Hardyman (1951). The plaintiffs were black men who had been assaulted by white men while traveling on a Mississippi highway; they claimed this was part of an ongoing conspiracy to deny them equal protection under the laws due to their race. The defendants argued that since they were not state actors but private citizens, federal law did not apply to them and thus, the suit should be dismissed based on precedent set by Collins v. Hardyman which held that only state actions could violate civil rights statutes. However, Justice Thurgood Marshall writing for a unanimous court disagreed with this interpretation and concluded that Congress intended these laws also cover private conspiracies when it passed legislation enforcing Fourteenth Amendment protections against racial discrimination.

In the dissenting opinion for Griffin et al. v. Breckenridge et al., Justice Harlan argued that the majority's interpretation of 42 U.S.C § 1985(3) was too broad and not in line with its original intent, which he believed was to combat racial discrimination rather than private conspiracies infringing on civil rights more generally. He contended that this expansive reading could potentially federalize a vast range of ordinary crimes, thus upsetting the balance between state and federal jurisdiction over criminal law enforcement. Furthermore, he expressed concern about potential misuse or abuse of such an interpretation by politically motivated groups seeking to exploit it for their own ends. In his view, Congress did not intend for this statute to apply so broadly when they enacted it during Reconstruction as part of efforts to protect newly freed African Americans from violence and intimidation by white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.