Meyer v. Nebraska
Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that held that the "Siman Act", a 1919 Nebraska law prohibiting the use of minority languages as the medium of instruction in the schools, violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[1] The Siman Act had been passed during World War I, as part of the English only movement and during a time of pervasive anti-German sentiment, atrocity propaganda, and spy scare paranoia promoted by the news media in the United States. The Supreme Court invalidated the Siman Act and stated that that the liberties granted by the Fourteenth Amendment apply just as much to minority language speakers.
Meyer v. Nebraska
Robert T. Meyer v. State of Nebraska
Judgment for respondent, Meyer v. State, 107 Neb. 657, 187 N.W. 100 (1922).
McReynolds, joined by Taft, McKenna, Van Devanter, Brandeis, Butler, Sanford
Holmes, joined by Sutherland
This decision has been described by legal scholars as "the case that defined personal liberties"[2] and "America's First Privacy Case"[3] since the Court noted that it falls under constitutionally protected liberty to be free from bodily restraints, free to contract, and to have the ability to "establish a home and bring up children" with minimal government intrusion.
Context and legislation[edit]
World War I witnessed an extensive campaign against all things German, such as the performance of German music at symphony concerts and the meetings of German-American civic associations. Language was a principal focus of legislation at the state and local level. It took many forms, from requiring associations to have charters written in English to a ban on the use of German within the town limits. Some states banned foreign language instruction, while a few banned only German. Some extended their bans into private instruction and even to religious education. A bill to create a Department of Education at the federal level was introduced in October 1918, designed to restrict federal funds to states that enforced English-only education. An internal battle over conducting services and religious instruction in German divided the Lutheran churches.[4]
On April 9, 1919, Nebraska enacted a statute called "An act relating to the teaching of foreign languages in the state of Nebraska", commonly known as the Siman Act. It imposed restrictions on both the use of a foreign language as a medium of instruction and on foreign languages as a subject of study. With respect to the use of a foreign language while teaching, it provided that "No person, individually or as a teacher, shall, in any private, denominational, parochial or public school, teach any subject to any person in any language other than the English language." With respect to foreign-language education, it prohibited instruction of children who had yet to successfully complete the eighth grade.
Facts and arguments[edit]
On May 25, 1920, Robert T. Meyer, while an instructor in Zion Lutheran School, a one-room schoolhouse in Hampton, Nebraska, taught the subject of reading in the German language to 10-year-old Raymond Parpart, a fourth-grader. The Hamilton County Attorney entered the classroom and discovered Parpart reading from the Bible in German. He charged Meyer with violating the Siman Act.[5]
Meyer was tried and convicted in the district court for Hamilton County, and was fined $25 (about $380 in 2023 dollars). The Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed his conviction by a vote of 4 to 2. The majority thought the law a proper response to "the baneful effects" of allowing immigrants to educate their children in their mother tongue, with results "inimical to our own safety". The dissent called the Siman Act the work of "crowd psychology".[5]
Meyer appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. His lead attorney was Arthur Mullen, an Irish-Catholic and a prominent Democrat who had earlier failed in his attempt to obtain an injunction against enforcement of the Siman Act from the Nebraska State Supreme Court. Oral arguments expressed conflicting interpretations of the World War I experience. Mullen attributed the law to "hatred, national bigotry and racial prejudice engendered by the World War". Opposing counsel countered that "it is the ambition of the State to have its entire population 100 percent American".[6]
Dissent[edit]
Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and George Sutherland dissented. Their dissenting opinion, written by Holmes, is found in the companion case of Bartels v. State of Iowa.[7] Holmes wrote that he differed with the majority "with hesitation and unwillingness" because he thought the law did not impose an undue restriction on the liberty of the teacher since it was not arbitrary, was limited in its application to the teaching of children, and the State had areas where many children might hear only a language other than English spoken at home. "I think I appreciate the objection to the law, but it appears to me to present a question upon which men reasonably might differ and therefore I am unable to say the Constitution of the United States prevents the experiment being tried."
In later jurisprudence[edit]
Meyer, along with Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), is often cited as one of the first instances in which the U.S. Supreme Court engaged in substantive due process in the area of civil liberties. Laurence Tribe has called them "the two sturdiest pillars of the substantive due process temple". He noted that the decisions in these cases did not describe specific acts as constitutionally protected but a broader area of liberty: "[they] described what they were protecting from the standardizing hand of the state in language that spoke of the family as a center of value-formation and value-transmission ... the authority of parents to make basic choices" and not just controlling the subjects one's child is taught.[8] The doctrine of substantive due process provided the basis for future civil rights decisions of the Court, including Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Lawrence v. Texas.
Justice Kennedy speculated in 2000 that both of those cases might have been written differently nowadays: "Pierce and Meyer, had they been decided in recent times, may well have been grounded upon First Amendment principles protecting freedom of speech, belief, and religion."[9]