Lau v. Nichols
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| Lau v. Nichols | |||||||||||
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| Argued December 10, 1973 Decided January 21, 1974 |
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| Holding | |||||||||||
| Court membership | |||||||||||
| Chief Justice: Warren E. Burger Associate Justices: William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan, Potter Stewart, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr., William Rehnquist |
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| Case opinions | |||||||||||
| Majority by: Douglas Joined by: Brennan, Marshall, Powell, Rehnquist Concurrence by: Stewart Joined by: Burger, Blackmun Concurrence by: White Concurrence by: Blackmun Joined by: Burger |
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| Laws applied | |||||||||||
| Civil Rights Act of 1964 | |||||||||||
Lau v. Nichols, 414 U.S. 563 (1974), was a civil rights case brought by Chinese-American students living in San Francisco, California who had limited English proficiency. The students claimed that they were not receiving special help in school due to their inability to speak English, help which they argued they were entitled to under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because of its ban on educational discrimination on the basis of national origin. Finding that the lack of linguistically-appropriate accommodations (e.g., educational services in Chinese) effectively denied the Chinese students equal educational opportunities on the basis of their ethnicity, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974 ruled in favor of the students, thus expanding the rights of limited English proficient students around the nation. Among other things, Lau reflects the now-widely accepted view that one's language is so closely intertwined with one's national origin (the country someone or her ancestors came from) that language-based discrimination is effectively a proxy for national origin discrimination.
Lau remains an important decision in the areas of civil rights and language rights, and is frequently relied upon as authority in many cases. (The San Francisco Unified School District remains covered by the consent decree that was ultimately entered into in the Lau case, and civil rights groups continue to monitor SFUSD's compliance with that decree.)
[Lau v. Nichols, 414 U.S. 563 (1974); Lau v. Hopp, U.S.D.C., N.D. Cal., No. C 70-627 LHB.]
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