4 17 Opinion of the Court. 180. This Court, as is the case with all federal courts, "has no jurisdiction to pronounce any statute, either of a State or of the United States, void, because irreconcilable with the Constitution, except as it is called upon to adjudge the legal rights of litigants in actual controversies. In the exercise of that jurisdiction, it is bound by two rules, to which it has rigidly adhered, one, never to anticipate a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it; the other never to formulate a rule of constitutional law broader than is required by the precise facts to which it is to be applied." Liverpool, New York & Philadelphia S. S. Co. v. Commissioners of Emigration, 113 U. S. 33, 39. Kindred to these rules is the rule that one to whom application of a statute is constitutional will not be heard to attack the statute on the ground that impliedly it might also be taken as applying to other persons or other situations in which its application might be unconstitutional. United States v. Wurzbach, 280 U. S. 396; Heald v. District of Columbia, 259 U. S. 114, 123; Yazoo & Mississippi Valley R. Co. v. Jackson Vinegar Co., 226 U. S. 217; Collins v. Texas, 223 U. S. 288, 295-296; New York ex rel. Hatch v. Reardon, 204 U. S. 152, 160-161. Cf. Voeller v. Neilston Warehouse Co., 311 U. S. 531, 537; Carmichael v. Southern Coal & Coke Co., 301 U. S. 495, 513; Virginian R. Co. v. System Federation, 300 U. S. 515, 558; Blackmer v. United States, 284 U. S. 421, 442; Roberts & Schaefer Co. v. Emmerson, 271 U. S. 50, 54–55; Jeffrey Mfg. Co. v. Blagg, 235 U. S. 571, 576; Tyler v. Judges of the Court of Registration, 179 U. S. 405; Ashwander v. TVA, 297 U. S. 288, 347-348 (concurring opinion). In Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U. S. 249, this Court developed various reasons for this rule. Very significant is the incontrovertible proposition that it "would indeed be undesirable for this Court to consider every conceivable situation which might possibly arise in the application of complex and comprehensive legislation." Id., at 256. The delicate power of pronouncing an Act of Congress unconstitutional is not to be exercised with reference to hypothetical cases thus imagined. The Court further pointed to the fact that a limiting construction could be given to the statute by the court responsible for its construction if an application of doubtful constitutionality were in fact concretely presented. We might add that application of this rule frees the Court not only from unnecessary pronouncement on constitutional issues, but also from premature interpretations of statutes in areas where their constitutional application might be cloudy. The District Court relied on, and appellees urge here, certain cases which are said to be inconsistent with this rule and with its closely related corollary that a litigant may only assert his own constitutional rights or immunities. In many of their applications, these are not principles ordained by the Constitution, but constitute rather "rule[s] of practice," Barrows v. Jackson, supra, at 257, albeit weighty ones; hence some exceptions to them where there are weighty countervailing policies have been and are recognized. For example, where, as a result of the very litigation in question, the constitutional rights of one not a party would be impaired, and where he has no effective way to preserve them himself, the Court may consider those rights as before it. N. A. A. C. P. v. Alabama, 357 U. S. 449, 459-460; Barrows v. Jackson, supra. This Court has indicated that where the application of these rules would itself have an inhibitory effect on freedom of speech, they may not be applied. See Smith v. California, 361 U. S. 147, 151; Thornhill v. Alabama, 310 U. S. 88, 97-98. Perhaps cases can be put where their application to a criminal statute would necessitate such a revision of its text as to create a situation in which the statute no longer gave an intelligible warning of the conduct it prohibited. See United States v. Reese, 92 U. S. 17 Opinion of the Court. 214, 219-220; cf. Winters v. New York, 333 U. S. 507, 518-520. And the rules' rationale may disappear where the statute in question has already been declared unconstitutional in the vast majority of its intended applications, and it can fairly be said that it was not intended to stand as valid, on the basis of fortuitous circumstances, only in a fraction of the cases it was originally designed to cover. See Butts v. Merchants & Miners Transportation Co., 230 U. S. 126. The same situation is presented when a state statute comes conclusively pronounced by a state court as having an otherwise valid provision or application inextricably tied up with an invalid one, see Dorchy v. Kansas, 264 U. S. 286, 290; or possibly in that rarest of cases where this Court can justifiably think itself able confidently to discern that Congress would not have desired its legislation to stand at all unless it could validly stand in its every application. Cf. The TradeMark Cases, 100 U. S. 82, 97-98; The Employers' Liability Cases, 207 U. S. 463, 501. But we see none of the countervailing considerations suggested by these examples, or any other countervailing consideration, as warranting the District Court's action here in considering the constitutionality of the Act in applications not before it.' 3 3 Cf. Mountain Timber Co. v. Washington, 243 U. S. 219, 234. But a State's determination of the class of persons who can invoke the protection of provisions of the Federal Constitution has been held not conclusive here. Tileston v. Ullman, 318 U. S. 44. Certainly it cannot be said that the sort of action proceeded against here, and validly reachable under the Constitution (see pp. 25-26, infra), was so small and inessential a part of the evil Congress was concerned about in the statute that these defendants should be permitted to make an attack on the statute generally. Subsection (d) and innumerable items in the legislative history show Congress' particular concern with the sort of action charged here. See, e. g., Hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, on Proposals to Opinion of the Court. 362 U.S. This case is rather the most typical one for application of the rules we have discussed. There are, to be sure, cases where this Court has not applied with perfect consistency these rules for avoiding unnecessary constitutional determinations, and we do not mean to say that every case we have cited for various exceptions to their application was considered to turn on the exception stated, or is perfectly justified by it. The District Court relied primarily on United States v. Reese, supra. As we have indicated, that decision may have drawn support from the assumption that if the Court had not passed on the statute's validity in toto it would have left standing a criminal statute incapable of giving fair warning of its prohibitions. But to the extent Reese did depend on an approach inconsistent with what we think the better one and the one established by the weightiest of the subsequent cases, we cannot follow it here. Accordingly, if the complaint here called for an application of the statute clearly constitutional under the Secure, Protect, and Strengthen Civil Rights of Persons under the Constitution and Laws of the United States, 85th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 4-7, 36-37, 77, 81, 189, 205, 293, 300; Hearings before Subcommittee No. 5 of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, on Miscellaneous Bills Regarding the Civil Rights of Persons within the Jurisdiction of the United States, 85th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 656, 1220; 103 Cong. Rec. 8705, 12149, 12898, 13126, 13732. Nor can there be any serious contention that the statute, as a civil enactment, would fail to give adequate notice of the conduct it validly proscribed, even if certain applications of it were to be deemed unconstitutional. Criminal proceedings under the statute must depend on violation of a restraining order embracing the party charged. 5 Cf., e. g., Illinois Central R. Co. v. McKendree, 203 U. S. 514; United States v. Ju Toy, 198 U. S. 253, 262-263. 17 Opinion of the Court. Fifteenth Amendment, that should have been an end to the question of constitutionality. And as to the application of the statute called for by the complaint, whatever precisely may be the reach of the Fifteenth Amendment, it is enough to say that the conduct charged-discrimination by state officials, within the course of their official duties, against the voting rights of United States citizens, on grounds of race or color-is certainly, as "state action" and the clearest form of it, subject to the ban of that Amendment, and that legislation designed to deal with such discrimination is "appropriate legislation" under it. It makes no difference that the discrimination in question, if state action, is also violative of state law. Snowden v. Hughes, 321 U. S. 1, 11. The appellees contend that since Congress has provided in subsection (d) of the statutory provision in question here that the District Courts shall exercise their jurisdiction "without regard to whether the party aggrieved shall have exhausted any administrative or other remedies that may be provided by law," and since such remedies were not exhausted here, appellees' action cannot be ascribed to the State. The argument is that the ultimate voice of the State has not spoken, since higher echelons of authority in the State might revise the appellees' action. It is, however, established as a fundamental proposition that every state official, high and low, is bound by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. See Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U. S. 1, 16-19. We think this Court has already made it clear that it follows from this that Congress has the power to provide for the correction of the constitutional violations of every such official without regard to the presence of other authority in the State that might possibly revise their actions. The appellees can draw no support from the expressions in Barney v. City of New |