Fundamental Rights Under Privacy in the USA

Introduction
This essay is an annotated list of U.S. Supreme Court cases involving privacy.
The U.S. Supreme Court uses the concept of privacy to designate a zone surrounding individuals,
the family, and the home, into which the government may not intrude without a compelling
interest.
There are only a few fundamental rights that have been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court
under the classification of privacy. Each of these fundamental rights is summarized below. Given
the large number of cases on, for example, search and seizure, obscenity, gender discrimination,
racial discrimination, and affirmative action, it is surprising that there have been so few cases on
privacy rights.


Rearing Children
• Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).
Meyer struck state law that required schools to teach only in English to children who had not
passed the eighth grade. In dicta, the Court said:
While this court has not attempted to define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed
[by the Fourteenth Amendment], 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. [citations to 14 cases omitted] 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. Determination by the Legislature of what constitutes proper
exercise of police power is not final or conclusive but is subject to supervision by the courts.
[citation omitted]
Meyer, 262 U.S. at 399-400.

• Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925).
The U.S. Supreme Court struck state law that required all children to attend public schools.
Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158 (1944).
The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed conviction of guardian, a member of Jehovah's Witnesses, for
allowing girl to sell religious magazines, in violation of Massachusetts state statute that prohibited
child labor.
The rights of children to exercise their religion, and of parents to give them religious
training and to encourage them in the practice of religious belief, as against preponderant
sentiment and assertion of state power voicing it, have had recognition here, most recently in
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 63 S.Ct. 1178. Previously
in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 45 S.Ct. 571, 69 L.Ed. 1070, 39 A.L.R. 468, this
Court had sustained the parent's authority to provide religious with secular schooling, and the
child's right to receive it, as against the state's requirement of attendance at public schools.
And in Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 43 S.Ct. 625, 67 L.Ed. 1042, 29 A.L.R. 1446,
children's rights to receive teaching in languages other than the nation's common tongue were
guarded against the state's encroachment. 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. Pierce v. Society of Sisters,
supra. And it is in recognition of this that these decisions have respected the private realm of
family life which the state cannot enter.
Prince, 268 U.S. at 165-166.
Nonetheless, Mrs. Prince lost her case, because the child labor law was held to be a valid exercise
of the state’s authority.

• Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645 (1972).
Mother of Stanley’s children had died and Stanley sought custody of the children. Because
Stanley had never married the children’s mother (despite living together for 18 years), Illinois
statute made the children wards of the state and put them in foster homes. Illinois presumed that
Stanley was an unfit parent, without any showing of his individual circumstances, and denied him
custody of his children. U.S. Supreme Court held that this statute denied due process.

• Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972).
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld right of Amish to withdraw their children from public school
after the eighth grade. Yoder struck state law that required twelve years of attendance at school.