May 3, 1948

1948Denis Cosgrove, British-American academic and geographer (died 2008)^[†]

Denis Edmund Cosgrove was a British cultural geographer. He taught at Oxford Polytechnic, Loughborough University, Royal Holloway, University of London, where he rose to become dean of the graduate school, and finally at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1998, he received the prestigious Back Award from the Royal Geographical Society.

1948Ernst Tandefelt, Finnish assassin of Heikki Ritavuori (born 1876)^[†]

Knut Ernst Robert Tandefelt was a Swedish-speaking Finnish nobleman.

1948The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Shelley v. Kraemer that covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities are legally unenforceable.^[†]

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on questions of U.S. constitutional or federal law. It also has original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, specifically "all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party." In 1803, the court asserted itself the power of judicial review, the ability to invalidate a statute for violating a provision of the Constitution via the landmark case Marbury v. Madison. It is also able to strike down presidential directives for violating either the Constitution or statutory law.