The Amish parents won. In Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Wisconsin could not force Old Order Amish and Conservative Amish Mennonite families to send their children to school past the eighth grade. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote the majority opinion, joined by six justices, holding that the state’s compulsory attendance law violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment as applied to these families. Justice William O. Douglas filed a partial dissent. Justices Powell and Rehnquist did not participate.
The Parents Who Brought the Case
Jonas Yoder and Wallace Miller, both Old Order Amish, and Adin Yutzy, a member of the Conservative Amish Mennonite Church, refused to send their children to school after eighth grade. Wisconsin law required attendance until age sixteen. Each parent was convicted and fined five dollars.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with the families. The state appealed, the U.S. Supreme Court heard argument in December 1971, and the decision came down on May 15, 1972. The convictions were reversed. Wisconsin could no longer fine or prosecute these families for pulling their children out of school after the eighth grade.
Why the Parents Won
The Court weighed the burden on the Amish families’ religious practice against Wisconsin’s justification for imposing it. Under that balancing test, a law that substantially burdens religious exercise survives only if the state shows an interest of the highest order that cannot be served another way. The opinion put it directly: “only those interests of the highest order and those not otherwise served can overbalance legitimate claims to the free exercise of religion.”
Wisconsin argued that schooling through age sixteen was necessary to produce informed citizens capable of supporting themselves. The Court accepted those as legitimate goals but found the state had not shown the last two years of formal school were actually needed to reach them for Amish children. The Amish already provided informal vocational training in farming, domestic skills, and community life, and their communities had existed as productive, self-sufficient members of American society for roughly three centuries. Wisconsin offered no evidence that Amish children who left school after eighth grade failed at citizenship or self-support.
The gap between what the state demanded and what the Amish provided was small. The state needed to show, with specificity, how closing that gap served an interest strong enough to override a sincere religious practice. It couldn’t. The families’ evidence that one or two more years of schooling would not measurably affect their children’s health, self-sufficiency, or civic capacity went essentially unrebutted.
Justice Douglas’s Partial Dissent
Justice Douglas agreed with the outcome for the Yoder family because one of the Yoder children had testified in support of the parents’ position. He dissented as to the Miller and Yutzy children, whose own views were never heard in court.
Douglas argued that a child old enough to have views about their future should have the chance to voice them before a court granted a religious exemption on the parents’ behalf. He warned that if “a parent keeps his child out of school beyond the grade school, then the child will be forever barred from entry into the new and amazing world of diversity that we have today.” The majority did not take up that concern. The opinion protected the parents’ religious liberty and created no independent right for children to override their parents’ educational choices.
How Narrow the Win Was
Chief Justice Burger worked to keep the ruling tightly bounded. The opinion emphasized that the Amish were not a group that had “recently discovered some ‘progressive’ or more enlightened process for rearing children for modern life.” The exemption rested on the specific character of the Amish community: a centuries-old religious tradition, a demonstrated record of self-sufficiency, and a coherent alternative for preparing children for adult life inside that community.
The Court drew a hard line between religious conviction and personal preference. A parent objecting to school on secular or philosophical grounds could not claim this exemption. The beliefs had to be sincere, rooted in a long-standing tradition, and so bound up with daily life that enforcing the school law would “gravely endanger if not destroy” free exercise of those beliefs.
Courts in the decades since have read Yoder narrowly. Parents from other religious backgrounds and homeschooling advocates who tried to build on the decision have mostly lost, with federal and state courts finding that Yoder’s protections did not extend to groups lacking the Amish combination of historical depth, self-sufficiency, and a comprehensive alternative education system.
What Happened to Yoder After 1990
The legal foundation under Yoder shifted in 1990 with Employment Division v. Smith. Justice Scalia’s majority opinion held that the Free Exercise Clause does not excuse compliance with a neutral, generally applicable law that happens to burden religious practice. The compelling interest test that drove Yoder no longer applied to most free exercise challenges.
Smith did not overrule Yoder. It recharacterized it as a “hybrid rights” case, one that succeeded because it combined free exercise with the separate constitutional right of parents to direct their children’s education. On that reading, a pure free exercise claim standing alone would not trigger the demanding standard Wisconsin had faced. After Smith, strict scrutiny survived only for laws that specifically targeted religious conduct or contained mechanisms for individualized exemptions.
Congress responded in 1993 with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which stated its purpose was “to restore the compelling interest test as set forth in Sherbert v. Verner … and Wisconsin v. Yoder.”1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 2000bb – Congressional Findings and Declaration of Purposes Under RFRA, the federal government cannot substantially burden religious exercise unless it shows a compelling interest and uses the least restrictive means to advance it. The Supreme Court later held in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997) that RFRA could not be applied against state and local governments, though many states passed their own versions.
The bottom line for the original question has not changed. The Amish parents won in 1972, and the Court’s reasoning still defines what a successful free exercise claim looks like, even as the doctrinal path to raising one has narrowed and split between federal and state law.