The U.S. Supreme Court case Nordlinger v. Hahn, 1991, revolved around a challenge to California's Proposition 13 tax law which limited property taxes based on the purchase price of a home rather than its current market value. Stephanie Nordlinger, who had recently purchased a house in Los Angeles County and was therefore subject to higher property taxes compared to her long-term resident neighbors with similar properties, argued that this system violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as it created disparities between new and old homeowners. The court ruled in favor of Kenneth Hahn (the Tax Assessor for LA County) by upholding Proposition 13 with a vote of 8-1. They concluded that there were legitimate state interests at stake including neighborhood preservation, continuity, predictability for budget planning purposes and protection against unmanageable increases in property taxation.

In the dissenting opinion for Nordlinger v. Hahn, Justice Blackmun argued that California's property tax system violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. He contended that this system created significant disparities in taxation between new and long-term homeowners without a rational basis. The majority had justified these disparities as promoting neighborhood stability, but Blackmun dismissed this reasoning as speculative and unsupported by evidence. Furthermore, he pointed out that many other states achieved neighborhood stability without such drastic tax differences. He also rejected the argument that protecting citizens' reliance interests was a legitimate state interest because it unfairly favored those who purchased their homes before 1978 at others' expense.