Opinion ID: 1957359
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Fundamental Constitutional Parental Right to Raise One's Children

Text: One of the earlier United States Supreme Court cases [8] in respect to parental rights, and one that has been described in subsequent cases as seminal, is the case of Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 43 S.Ct. 625, 67 L.Ed. 1042 (1923), albeit it does not concern the rights of third parties. It is important primarily for its language, which stressed the importance of family in our society. Nebraska, apparently as a reaction to World War I war, enacted a statute that forbade the teaching of the German language to children who had not yet reached the eighth grade. In the process of holding the statute unconstitutional, the Court said: The problem for our determination is whether the statute as construed and applied unreasonably infringes the liberty guaranteed to the plaintiff in error by the Fourteenth Amendment: `No state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.' While this court has not attempted to define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed, the term has received much consideration and some of the included things have been definitely stated. 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. ... For the welfare of his Ideal Commonwealth, Plato suggested a law which should provide: `That the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent.... The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be.' In order to submerge the individual and develop ideal citizens, Sparta assembled the males at seven into barracks and intrusted their subsequent education and training to official guardians. Although such measures have been deliberately approved by men of great genius their ideas touching the relation between individual and state were wholly different from those upon which our institutions rest; and it hardly will be affirmed that any Legislature could impose such restrictions upon the people of a state without doing violence to both letter and spirit of the Constitution.  Meyer, 262 U.S. at 399-402, 43 S.Ct. at 626-28 (citations omitted) (emphasis added). One of the early cases citing to Meyer, supra, was Pierce v. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, 268 U.S. 510, 530, 45 S.Ct. 571, 572-73, 69 L.Ed. 1070 (1925), involving the Oregon Compulsory Education Act. The Court opined: After setting out the above facts, the Society's bill alleges that the enactment conflicts with the right of parents to choose schools where their children will receive appropriate mental and religious training, the right of the child to influence the parents' choice of a school ... and is accordingly repugnant to the Constitution and void. ... Under the doctrine of Meyer v. Nebraska , we think it entirely plain that the Act of 1922 unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.... The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations. [Citation omitted.] In a case not exactly on point in a dispute between natural parents that involved competing state jurisdictions, i.e., whether one state had the power to modify the custody determination of another state, the Court in New York v. Halvey, 330 U.S. 610, 613, 67 S.Ct. 903, 905, 91 L.Ed. 1133 (1947), opined: Under Florida law the `welfare of the child' is the `chief consideration' in [cases between natural parents] shaping the custody decree or in subsequently modifying or changing it. But `the inherent rights of parents to enjoy the society and association of their offspring, with reasonable opportunity to impress upon them a father's or a mother's love and affection in their upbringing, must be regarded as being of an equally important, if not controlling, consideration in adjusting the right of custody as between parents in ordinary cases.' [Citation omitted.] In the 1970's the United States Supreme Court wrestled with a series of cases that, although not always directly concerning custody issues, continued to recognize the importance of the rights of parents. In Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645, 651-58, 92 S.Ct. 1208, 1210-16, 31 L.Ed.2d 551 (1972), the Court was considering an Illinois statute that mandated that, upon the death of a mother, the unmarried [to that mother] natural father had no right to a hearing on custody. The statute mandated that in such cases the children of the deceased mother automatically became dependents of the state. The Court said: Stanley presses his equal protection claim here. The State continues to respond that unwed fathers are presumed unfit to raise their children and that it is unnecessary to hold individualized hearings to determine whether particular fathers are in fact unfit parents before they are separated from their children. We granted certiorari, to determine whether this method of procedure by presumption could be allowed to stand in light of the fact that Illinois allows married fathers  whether divorced, widowed, or separated  and mothers  even if unwed  the benefit of the presumption that they are fit to raise their children. ... The private interest here, that of a man in the children he has sired and raised, undeniably warrants deference and, absent a powerful countervailing interest, protection. It is plain that the interest of a parent in the companionship, care, custody, and management of his or her children `come[s] to this Court with a momentum for respect lacking when appeal is made to liberties which derive merely from shifting economic arrangements.' The Court has frequently emphasized the importance of family. The rights to conceive and raise one's children have been deemed `essential,' Meyer v. Nebraska , `basic civil rights of man,' Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541, 62 S.Ct. 1110, 1113, 86 L.Ed. 1655 (1942), and `[r]ights far more precious ... than property rights,' May v. Anderson, 345 U.S. 528, 533, 73 S.Ct. 840, 843, 97 L.Ed. 1221 (1953). `It is cardinal with us that the custody, care and nurture of the child reside first in the parents, whose primary function and freedom include preparation for obligations the state can neither supply nor hinder.' Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 166, 64 S.Ct. 438, 442, 88 L.Ed. 645 (1944). The integrity of the family unit has found protection in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Ninth Amendment, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 496, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965) (Goldberg, J., concurring). ... Despite Bell and Carrington, [9] it may be argued that unmarried fathers are so seldom fit that Illinois need not undergo the administrative inconvenience of inquiry in any case, including Stanley's. The establishment of prompt efficacious procedures to achieve legitimate state ends is a proper state interest worthy of cognizance in constitutional adjudication. But the Constitution recognizes higher values than speed and efficiency. Indeed, one might fairly say of the Bill of Rights in general, and the Due Process Clause in particular, that they were designed to protect the fragile values of a vulnerable citizenry from the overbearing concern for efficiency and efficacy that may characterize praiseworthy government officials no less, and perhaps more, than mediocre ones. ... We have concluded that all Illinois parents are constitutionally entitled to a hearing on their fitness before their children are removed from their custody. [Footnote added.] [Footnoted omitted.] [Some citations omitted.] Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, 214-32, 92 S.Ct. 1526, 1532-42, 32 L.Ed.2d 15 (1972) while primarily concerning religious issues (Amish parents challenging a state requirement that their children go to school until they were sixteen), was also based in part on the fundamental rights of parents to raise their children. The Court stated: Thus, a State's interest in universal education, however highly we rank it, is not totally free from a balancing process when it impinges on fundamental rights and interests and the traditional interest of parents with respect to the religious upbringing of their children so long as they, in the words of Pierce [ v. Society of the Sisters ], `prepare [them] for additional obligations.' ... Our holding in no way determines the proper resolution of possible competing interests of parents, children, and the State in an appropriate state court proceeding in which the power of the State is asserted on the theory that Amish parents are preventing their minor children from attending high school despite their expressed desires to the contrary. Recognition of the claim of the State in such a proceeding would, of course, call into question traditional concepts of parental control over the religious upbringing and education of their minor children recognized in this Court's past decisions.... The State's argument proceeds without reliance on any actual conflict between the wishes of parents and children. It appears to rest on the potential that exemption of Amish parents from the requirements of the compulsory-education law might allow some parents to act contrary to the best interests of their children by foreclosing their opportunity to make an intelligent choice between the Amish way of life and that of the outside world. ... Indeed it seems clear that if the State is empowered, as parens patriae, to `save' a child from himself or his Amish parents by requiring an additional two years of compulsory formal high school education, the State will in large measure influence, if not determine, the religious future of the child.... [T]his case involves the fundamental interest of parents, as contrasted with that of the State, to guide the religious future and education of their children. The history and culture of Western civilization reflect a strong tradition of parental concern for the nurture and upbringing of their children. This primary role of the parents in the upbringing of their children is now established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition. [The Court then cited to Pierce and Meyer ]. [Emphasis added.] [Some alteration added.] In the exclusionary zoning case of Moore v. City of East Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494, 499-508, 97 S.Ct. 1932, 1935-40, 52 L.Ed.2d 531 (1977), a case involving an attempt to restrict residency requirements to immediate family as opposed to extended family, the Court noted: When a city undertakes such intrusive regulation of the family, neither Belle Terre[ v. Boraas, 416 U.S. 1, 94 S.Ct. 1536, 39 L.Ed.2d 797 (1974)] nor Euclid[ v. Ambler Realty, 272 U.S. 365, 47 S.Ct. 114, 71 L.Ed. 303 (1926)] [seminal zoning cases] governs; the usual judicial deference to the legislature is inappropriate. `This Court has long recognized that freedom of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.' A host of cases, tracing their lineage to Meyer ... have consistently acknowledged a `private realm of family life which the state cannot enter.' Of course, the family is not beyond regulation. But when the government intrudes on choices concerning family living arrangements, this Court must examine carefully the importance of the governmental interests advanced and the extent to which they are served by the challenged regulation. ... Our decisions establish that the Constitution protects the sanctity of the family precisely because the institution of the family is deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition. It is through the family that we inculcate and pass down many of our most cherished values, moral and cultural.