Implications
This decision marked the beginning of a period of more liberal interpretation of due process; specifically, the Court recognized consciously that it had allowed the Fourteenth Amendment to apply to entities other than individuals, and had broadened the list of liberties or rights which it protected. Over the course of the next half century, that list would be extended to include the right to marry, to have children, to marital privacy, to have an abortion, and others.
Because the statute struck down by Pierce was primarily intended to eliminate parochial schools, Justice Anthony Kennedy has suggested that Pierce could have been decided on First Amendment grounds. Indeed, as mentioned, that was the primary legal argument advanced by the lawyers representing the Sisters. However, when Pierce was decided, the First Amendment had not yet been deemed applicable against the states. That event occurred a mere seven days later, in the case of Gitlow v. New York.
Read more about this topic: Pierce V. Society Of Sisters
Famous quotes containing the word implications:
“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)
“When it had long since outgrown his purely medical implications and become a world movement which penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)