Five-minute digest

Pierce v. Society of Sisters

Supreme Court of the United States

Summary

On 7 November 1922 Oregon voters adopted by initiative a Compulsory Education Act requiring every parent or guardian of a child between eight and sixteen to send the child to a public school, with narrow exceptions, beginning in September 1926. The measure was promoted by the Scottish Rite Masons and supported by the Ku Klux Klan, and Walter M. Pierce, elected governor the same day, endorsed it. Two private schools sued state and county officials to prevent enforcement: the Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, a Catholic teaching order incorporated in Oregon in 1880 that ran primary and high schools, junior colleges and orphanages, and the Hill Military Academy, a secular boys' school in Portland. Both showed that parents were already withdrawing children and refusing long-term contracts. The schools argued that the act destroyed their business and property without due process, that it violated the liberty of parents to choose schools offering appropriate mental and religious training, and that private schools were lawful and useful enterprises. The state answered that education of citizens is a public concern, that corporations cannot claim the liberty the Fourteenth Amendment protects, that a business has no vested right in its customers, and that the suits were premature because the act was not yet in force. A three-judge federal court granted preliminary injunctions, and on 1 June 1925 the Court unanimously affirmed. Justice McReynolds began by listing the powers the state undoubtedly holds: to regulate, inspect and supervise all schools, to require attendance at some school, to demand teachers of good character and patriotic disposition, and to require studies essential to citizenship. But under Meyer v. Nebraska the act unreasonably interfered with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of their children. The fundamental theory of liberty in the American Union, he wrote, excludes any general power to standardize children by requiring instruction from public teachers only, because the child is not the mere creature of the state. Though corporations cannot themselves claim that liberty, they could seek protection for their business and property from arbitrary interference with their patrons, and because the injury was present and real, the suits were not premature. The library text gives McReynolds's whole opinion, which is brief, without the original notes. Pierce has been cited ever since as the charter of private and religious schooling in the United States. Pius XI quoted its sentence about the child in the encyclical Divini Illius Magistri (1929), and the Court relied on it in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) and Troxel v. Granville (2000). It has also been invoked in modern debates over school choice and home education, while later decisions such as Runyon v. McCrary (1976) held that private schools remain subject to general laws.