Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1923

Meyer v. Nebraska

262 U.S. 390 | 43 S. Ct. 625 | 67 L. Ed. 1042 | 1923 U.S. LEXIS 2655 | 29 A.L.R. 1446

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Takeaway

In short, Meyer held that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the liberty of teachers, parents, and children in education, and that a State may not suppress the early teaching of modern foreign languages merely to compel cultural and linguistic conformity.

Background

Robert Meyer, an instructor at Zion Parochial School in Hamilton County, Nebraska, was convicted of teaching a ten-year-old student to read in German. The student had not completed the eighth grade. Meyer used a collection of Biblical stories in German while teaching the language.

Nebraska’s 1919 foreign-language law prohibited teaching any subject in a language other than English in public, private, denominational, and parochial schools. It allowed a language other than English to be taught only as a language, and only after the pupil had passed the eighth grade. The Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed Meyer’s conviction, construing the statute to prohibit teaching German as a distinct subject to a child below that grade level and holding the law a valid exercise of the State’s police power.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of liberty includes a teacher’s right to teach a modern foreign language and parents’ right to direct their children’s education.

Holding

Yes. The liberty protected by the Due Process Clause encompasses Meyer’s occupation as a language teacher, parents’ ability to hire him, and children’s opportunity to acquire useful knowledge.

Reasoning

The Court read “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment broadly. It protects more than freedom from physical restraint; it includes such established aspects of individual life as pursuing common occupations, acquiring useful knowledge, establishing a home, raising children, and worshipping according to conscience.

Education is a matter of exceptional public and private importance. Although parents have the natural duty to provide suitable education for their children, education ordinarily requires schools and qualified teachers. Teaching is therefore a useful and honorable occupation closely connected to both the public welfare and parental control over a child’s upbringing.

Meyer’s instruction in German fell within these protected interests. His right to teach the language as part of his occupation, the parents’ right to employ him to instruct their children, and the children’s opportunity to learn the language all came within the liberty safeguarded by the Fourteenth Amendment. Mere knowledge of German, the Court explained, could not reasonably be treated as inherently harmful.

Issue #2

Whether Nebraska’s prohibition on teaching modern foreign languages to children who had not completed the eighth grade was a valid exercise of the State’s police power.

Holding

No. As construed and applied, the statute was arbitrary and lacked a reasonable relation to an end that Nebraska was constitutionally competent to pursue.

Reasoning

A State may regulate in the public interest, but its police-power judgment is subject to judicial review. The legislature cannot, under the guise of protecting the public welfare, arbitrarily interfere with constitutionally protected liberty or use means that bear no reasonable relation to a legitimate governmental objective.

Nebraska defended the law as a measure to promote civic development, assimilation, and English-language fluency. The Court acknowledged that the State could require school attendance, regulate schools reasonably, and require instruction in English. It also could prescribe the curriculum of schools it supported. But those valid powers did not justify the much broader prohibition at issue.

The statute materially burdened modern-language teachers, restricted pupils’ ability to acquire knowledge, and displaced parental control over education. Its operative distinction was especially difficult to justify because Nebraska, as construed by its courts, did not prohibit instruction in ancient or “dead” languages such as Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, while it barred German, French, Spanish, Italian, and other living foreign languages.

The State showed no emergency or concrete harm sufficient to establish that learning a foreign language before the eighth grade endangered a child’s health, morals, understanding, or civic fitness. To the contrary, the Court noted that early instruction is often necessary to gain proficiency and that experience did not show such instruction to be harmful. A desire to foster a homogeneous population with American ideals, however understandable in the aftermath of World War I, could not be pursued by means that violated constitutional liberty.

Concurrences

Justice Holmes

Reasoning

Justice Holmes concurred in the judgment in a separate opinion joined by Justice Sutherland. He accepted the result reached in Meyer and relied on the reasons supporting the Court’s conclusion that the State’s restriction could not stand under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The separate concurrence did not supply a competing holding or a distinct doctrinal test. Its significance is that Holmes and Sutherland joined the judgment invalidating the foreign-language restriction, even though the majority’s broad discussion of protected liberty reflected an approach to substantive due process that Holmes often viewed cautiously.