Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court that held that the "Siman Act", a 1919 Nebraska law prohibiting minority languages as both the subject and medium of instruction in schools, violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court's ruling is one of the earliest articulations of substantive due process. The Siman Act had been passed after 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 U.S. news media. Nebraska was one of 22 states that had enacted laws banning or restricting foreign language instruction based on broader nativist sentiments to promote assimilation into American culture and society. The Supreme Court, while recognizing that states have significant power to "make reasonable regulations for all schools", invalidated the Siman Act as an excessive "interference" of liberties granted by the Fourteenth Amendment, such as the right of a teacher to instruct students and the right of parents to control the upbringing of their children. The Court also noted that such rights extend broadly to all Americans, including those who speak foreign languages. Meyer has been described by legal scholars as "the case that defined personal liberties" and "America's First Privacy Case", since it greatly expanded the scope of constitutionally protected liberties to include both enumerated and unenumerated "fundamental rights" such as the right "to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, [and] to marry, establish a home and bring up children...". This subsequently developed into the legal principle of substantive due process that would underpin decisions related to same-sex marriage, racial discrimination, and reproductive rights.
Background 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. 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 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. Meyer was tried and convicted in the district court for Hamilton County and fined $25 (about $400 in 2025 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". 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".
Supreme Court
Majority opinion
The Supreme Court reversed seven to two, reasoning that although the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause ostensibly mandates only that the government follow certain procedures before depriving individuals of life, liberty or property (such as a jury trial in criminal cases), the concept of "liberty thus guaranteed" is broader and includes certain spheres of life in which the government cannot intrude even if it properly applies such procedures. Writing for the majority, Justice McReynolds stated that while it was not necessary "to define with exactness" the liberties that were protected by the Due Process Clause, its protections "[w]ithout doubt" not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men".
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