When the cases in volume 262 were decided the Court comprised the following nine members: In Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), the Supreme Court held that a 1919 Nebraska law restricting foreign-language education violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Nebraska law had been passed during World War I, during a period of heightened anti-German sentiment in the United States.

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.

Harvard Law Professor Laurence 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: "[they] 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.