A VICTORY FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM

The Nebraska Ban on Language Instruction

In April 1919 the Nebraska General Assembly enacted a law that forbade the instruction of any modern foreign language to elementary-school pupils in that state. On 25 May 1920 Robert T. Meyer, an ordained Lutheran minister, taught a German class to some students of the Zion Parochial Grammar School. The children were Lutherans and mostly of German ancestry. After Meyer was brought before Hamilton County District Court and fined $200, his lawyers appealed the conviction on the grounds that he and the students had been denied due process as stipulated in the Fourteenth Amendment. The case of Meyer v. State of Nebraska was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on 3 February 1924.

The Supreme Court Ruling

Four months later the usually conservative Taft Court handed down a notably liberal decision. A majority of eight justices, with George Sunderland reading the opinion, declared that Americans had always viewed "an acquisition of knowledge as beneficial." The justices also noted that it was difficult to discern how the teaching of a foreign language was harmful to the "health, morals, or understanding of the ordinary child." They therefore found the law to be arbitrary and unconstitutional.

Sources:

Max Lerner, ed., The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943);

Meyer v. State of Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1924).