Washington, DC, Nov. 11, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The New Civil Liberties Alliance has filed briefs opposing government motions to dismiss its Jacobsen v. Spellerberg lawsuit against the Nebraska K-12 education system’s unconstitutional abridgement of parents’ free-speech rights. Nebraska requires parents to educate their school-aged children under threat of criminal penalties. Yet the state violates the First Amendment by supplying a cost-free education only if parents enroll children in public schools and accept the government’s messaging, even when such messages contradict the parents’ values. Representing two Nebraska families who once enrolled children in Lincoln Public Schools and now pay the inevitable penalty of withdrawing to educate them according to their own values, NCLA urges the District Court of Lancaster County to let the lawsuit proceed.
Education is speech. The curriculum taught, the books assigned, and the values reinforced inside (and outside) of the classroom all convey a message. The Constitution has long recognized that parents—not the government—hold the paramount right to direct that message for their own children. Nebraska parents who choose to provide their own educational speech, whether by homeschooling or private school, must forgo tens of thousands of dollars in benefits that other families receive. That is viewpoint discrimination and an unconstitutional condition on a public benefit. It is also a particular problem in Nebraska, ranked one of the worst states in the nation for school choice.
Rather than answer that argument, the government Defendants’ motions recast it. Defendants attempt to break their conduct into individually acceptable acts and ignore the big picture. They treat the lawsuit as simply a demand that taxpayers fund private schools. The State, Lancaster County, and the school district also argue that the case raises a policy question that belongs to the Legislature, not the courts.
None of those arguments addresses what NCLA’s clients actually allege. The two families do not ask the Court to make policy, to fund or defund any school, or to dictate any curriculum. The lawsuit leaves the Nebraska Legislature (or the municipal Defendants) the job of adopting an educational system that eliminates the constitutional violation. Plaintiffs ask only that the government stop conditioning educational benefits on parents’ surrender of their own educational speech.
Local governments are not bystanders; they exercise discretion often to provide additional benefits only to government schools and sometimes to aggressively enforce compulsory attendance laws. The lawsuit alleges that those policies are a moving force behind the violation of Plaintiffs’ rights.
NCLA released the following statements:
“The arguments in the government motions essentially claim that they are immune from suit, that as the government they can do what they want, or that the court can’t make them fix the problem. All of these arguments grossly oversimplify the issue and the possible solutions. We look forward to advancing this case in discovery.”
— Zhonette Brown, General Counsel and Senior Litigation Counsel, NCLA
“An education mandate, coupled with funding for education and additional services that flows only to government-schooled children, places outsized pressure on families to choose a government school for their children. Generations of children have been indoctrinated with government speech as a result.”
— Caitlin M. Moyna, Senior Litigation Counsel, NCLA
“Nebraska’s education mandate without any funded alternative violates our clients’ rights to free speech and imposes an unconstitutional condition on their right to educational speech. Nothing the Defendants say in their respective Motions to Dismiss refutes these well-established constitutional principles.”
— Margot Cleveland, Of Counsel, NCLA
Read the briefs here, here, here, and here. For more information visit the case page here.
ABOUT NCLA
NCLA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group founded by prominent legal scholar Philip Hamburger to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State. NCLA’s public-interest litigation and other pro bono advocacy strive to tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies and to foster a new civil liberties movement that will help restore Americans’ fundamental rights.
Joe Martyak New Civil Liberties Alliance 703-403-1111 joe.martyak@ncla.legal