262 U.S. 390 (1923)
Robert Meyer served as an instructor at Zion Parochial School, which was maintained by Zion Evangelical Lutheran Congregation in Hamilton County, Nebraska. In May 1920, he taught the subject of reading in the German language to Raymond Parpart, a ten-year-old child who had not yet attained and passed the eighth grade. Meyer used a collection of Biblical stories in providing this instruction.1
The information against Meyer rested on a Nebraska statute enacted in 1919. That law prohibited any person from teaching any subject in a private, denominational, parochial, or public school in any language other than English.2 It permitted instruction in foreign languages only after a pupil had successfully passed the eighth grade.3 The statute imposed misdemeanor penalties of fines between twenty-five and one hundred dollars or confinement in jail for up to thirty days.4
Meyer was tried and convicted in the District Court for Hamilton County. On appeal, the Supreme Court of Nebraska affirmed the conviction. It characterized the offense as the direct and intentional teaching of German as a distinct subject to a child below the eighth grade. It upheld the statute as a valid exercise of the state's police power aimed at making English the mother tongue of all children reared in the state.5
Whether the Nebraska statute as construed and applied unreasonably infringes the liberty guaranteed to the plaintiff in error by the Fourteenth Amendment?6
Without doubt, it denotes 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.7 The established doctrine is that this liberty may not be interfered with, under the guise of protecting the public interest, by legislative action which is arbitrary or without reasonable relation to some purpose within the competency of the State to effect.8
Yes. The Nebraska statute as construed and applied unreasonably infringes the liberty guaranteed to the plaintiff in error by the Fourteenth Amendment.9
Plaintiff in error taught this language in school as part of his occupation.10 His right thus to teach and the right of parents to engage him so to instruct their children, we think, are within the liberty of the Amendment.11
The challenged statute forbids the teaching in school of any subject except in English; also the teaching of any other language until the pupil has attained and successfully passed the eighth grade.12 No emergency has arisen which renders knowledge by a child of some language other than English so clearly harmful as to justify its inhibition with the consequent infringement of rights long freely enjoyed.13
The Supreme Court reversed the judgment below and remanded the cause for further proceedings not inconsistent with its opinion.14