Olff v. East Side Union High School District
Citation | 404 U.S. 1042,92 S.Ct. 703,30 L.Ed.2d 736 |
Decision Date | 17 January 1972 |
Docket Number | No. 71-498,71-498 |
Parties | Robert OLFF, a minor, by and through his guardian ad litem, Mrs. Sonny Olff v. EAST SIDE UNION HIGH SCHOOL DISTRICT |
Court | United States Supreme Court |
On petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.
It seems incredible that under our federalism a State can deny a student education in its public school system unless his hair style comports with the standards of the school board.
Some institutions in Asia require their enrollees to shave their heads. Would we sustain that regulation if imposed by a public school?
Would we sustain a public school regulation requiring male students to have crew cuts?
The present regulation—to some at least—seems as extreme as the examples given. It provides:
Robert Olff, a 15-year-old boy speaking through his mother, has a full panoply of constitutional rights, though he is a minor. We said in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503, 511, 89 S.Ct. 733, 739, 21 L.Ed.2d 731:
'Students in school as well as out of school are
Moreover, a parent's control over the child, though not absolute as witness our decisions placing sanctions against child labor, is pervasive. We said in Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 166, 64 S.Ct. 438, 442, 88 L.Ed. 645:
Hair style is highly personal,1 an idiosyncracy which I had assumed was left to family or individual control and was of no legitimate concern to the State. It seems to me to be as much a purely private choice as was the family-student decision, sustained against a State's prohibition, to study the German language in a public school. Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 43 S.Ct. 625, 67 L.Ed. 1042. That family-student right, the Court held, was included within 'liberty' as the word is used in the Fourteenth Amendment. Id., at 400, 43 S.Ct., at 627. Opposed there as in the present case—is the authoritarian philosophy favoring regimentation. The Court said:
Id., at 402, 43 S.Ct., at 627.
The word 'liberty' is not defined in the Constitution. But as we held in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510, it includes at least the fundamental rights 'retained by the people' under the Ninth Amendment. Id., at 484, 85 S.Ct., at 1681. One's hair style, like one's taste for food, or one's liking for certain kinds of music, art, reading, recreation, is certainly fundamental in our constitutional scheme—a scheme designed to keep government off the backs of people.2 That is not to say that the police power of the state is powerless to deal with known evils. An epidemic of lice might conceivably authorize a shearing of locks. Other like crises might be imagined. But I see no way of allowing a State to set hair styles for patrons of its schools, any more than it could establish a welfare system only for men with crew cuts and women with bobbed hair.3 Once these lines are drawn, a serious question of equal protection of the law is raised.4
The federal courts are in conflict and the decisions in disarray.5 We have denied certiorari where the lower court has sustained the school board6 and also where it has overruled them.7 The question tendered is of great personal concern to many and of unusual constitutional importance which we should resolve. I would grant this petition and set the case for argument.
1 Feelings run high among people concerning hair styles. Yet as Professor Chaffee said:
2 beard furnished the model for the frieze over the portico of the Supreme Court of the United States proclaiming 'equal justice under law.' Today many of both the younger and older generations have avoided the increased cost of barbering by allowing their locks or burnsides to grow to greater lengths than when a haircut cost a quarter of a dollar.
3 In the 1920's the fad turned to short hair:
'To conservatives, short-haired women were as much 'radicals and freaks of society' as long-haired musicians, artists, and anarchists. Some saw in bobbed hair a symbol of all the ills of the age, ranging from jazz, short skirts, sexy movies, the automobile, and prohibition to such threats as 'Freudian psychology' and the 'growing cult of the so-called free woman.' The boyish bob, followed by the shingle and bingle which shaved the nape of the neck, and then by the curly bob and spit curls, were all part of what the older generation denounced as 'Flaming Youth.'
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