Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) 2

On May 25, 1920 Raymod Parpart, while an instructor at the Zion Parochial School, was convicted of violating a Nebraska law, which prohibited teaching a child in a foreign language who had not successfully completed the eighth grade. His appeals to state courts were denied but the United States Supreme Court in a ruling handed down in 1923 by Justice McReynold. The Court overturned Parparts conviction and struck down the Nebraska state. The Court ruled that while it had not attempted to define with exactness the liberty guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment 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 recognizedas essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Adding that this liberty may not be interfered with, under the guise of protecting the public interest, by legislative action It is important to note the expansion of the authority the judiciary assumes in this decision and note the unique progression of the philosophy upon which precedent is being set. A philosophy, which purports to protect liberty by establishing individual rights, not explicitly named in the constitution: extra- constitutional guaranties. Guaranties that creates protections for autonomous behavior free from government restriction that philosophically truncate the human self from the natural universe in which we all exist- in some circumstance from human self altogether. This philosophy manifests itself in various decisions through a progression of rulings during the Twentieth Century up to and including the right to gay sodomy and the murder of your child.