ABSTRACT
In Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 US 390, the US Supreme Court decided that a state law infringed on the "liberty" interest guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution and protected against state infringement. Robert T. Meyer, a parochial school teacher, used Bible stories written in German to teach reading to his ten- year-old students. The US Supreme Court in Meyer applied the doctrine of substantive due process, an approach the Court under Chief Justice William H. Taft in the 1920s was more inclined to use to protect property rights than to expand constitutional protection of civil liberties. By contrast, the Meyer case presented the Court with an issue in which property rights and state censorship were intertwined. The Court set aside Meyer's conviction, concluding that the due process language of the Fourteenth Amendment protected teachers' rights to teach and parents' rights to hire them to do so-economic liberties that had long been constitutionally protected.
