In Perez v. Sharp (1948) 32 Cal.2d 711, the California Supreme Court struck down racial restrictions on the right of a man and a woman to marry. The Court held that the California statutory provisions prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional -- the court did not characterize the constitutional right that the plaintiffs in that case sought to obtain as "a right to interracial marriage" and did not dismiss the plaintiffs' constitutional challenge on the ground that such marriages never had been permitted in California. Instead, the Perez decision focused on the substance of the constitutional right at issue -- that is, the importance to an individual of the freedom "to join in marriage with the person of one's choice" -- in determining whether the statute impinged upon the plaintiffs' fundamental constitutional right. ( 32 Cal.2d at pp. 715, 717.) The Court held unconstitutional a statute declaring void marriages between white persons with Negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race, or mulattoes. He said at page 730: "To determine that a person is a Mongolian or Malayan within the meaning of the statute because of any trace of such ancestry, however slight, would be absurd. If the classification of a person of mixed ancestry depends upon a given proportion of Mongolians or Malayans among his ancestors, how can this court, without clearly invading the province of the Legislature, determine what that decisive proportion is? [Citation.] Nor can this court assume that a predominance in number of ancestors of one race makes a person a Caucasian, Mongolian, or Malayan within the meaning of the statute, for absurd results would follow from such an assumption. Thus, a person with three-sixteenths Malay ancestry might have many so-called Malay characteristics and yet be considered a white person in terms of his preponderantly white ancestry. Such a person might easily find himself in a dilemma, for if he were regarded as a white person under section 60, he would be forbidden to marry a Malay, and yet his Malay characteristics might effectively preclude his marriage to another white person. Similarly, a person having three-eighths Mongolian ancestry might legally be classed as a white person even though he possessed Mongolian characteristics. He might have little opportunity or inclination to marry any one other than a Mongolian, yet section 60 might forbid such a marriage. Moreover, if a person were of four-eighths Mongolian or Malayan ancestry and four-eighths white ancestry, a test based on predominance in number of ancestors could not be applied. "Section 69 of the Civil Code and section 60 on which it is based are therefore too vague and uncertain to be upheld as a valid regulation of the right to marry. Enforcement of the statute would place upon the officials charged with its administration and upon the courts charged with reviewing the legality of such administration the task of determining the meaning of the statute. That task could be carried out with respect to persons of mixed ancestry only on the basis of conceptions of race classification not supplied by the Legislature. `If no judicial certainty can be settled upon as to the meaning of a statute, the courts are not at liberty to supply one.'"