Page "Meyer v. Nebraska" Paragraph 11

Meyer, along with Pierce v. Society of Sisters ( 1925 ), is often cited as one of the first instances in which the U. S. Supreme Court engaged in substantive due process in the area of civil liberties.

Lawrence Tribe has called them " the two sturdiest pillars of the substantive due process temple ".

He noted that the decisions in these cases did not describe specific acts as constitutionally protected but a broader area of liberty: " described what they were protecting from the standardizing hand of the state in language that spoke of the family as a center of value-formation and value-transmission ... the authority of parents to make basic choices " and not just controlling the subjects one's child is taught.

Substantive due process has since been used as the basis for many far-reaching decisions of the Court, including Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Lawrence v. Texas.

Justice Kennedy speculated in 2000 that both of those cases might have been written differently nowadays: " Pierce and Meyer, had they been decided in recent times, may well have been grounded upon First Amendment principles protecting freedom of speech, belief, and religion.

" In another instance of a slightly more narrow modern view, Justice Rehnquist, an opponent of substantive due process analysis, wrote in the decision of the 1989 case Graham v. Connor that " because the Fourth Amendment provides an explicit textual source of constitutional protection against this sort of physically intrusive governmental conduct, that Amendment, not the more generalized notion of ' substantive due process ,' must be the guide for analyzing these claims.