Lemon v Kurtzman

12 Key excerpts on "Lemon v Kurtzman"

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  To Serve God and Mammon

  Church–State Relations in American Politics, Second Edition

  • Ted G. Jelen(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Georgetown University Press

    (Publisher)

  In particular, Engel v. Vitale (the Court’s first decision banning organized school prayer) has generated a great deal of controversy and congressional reaction (see especially Dierenfield 2007). A very important (and controversial) attempt to define the con-tours of the Establishment Clause can be found in Chief Justice War-ren Burger’s majority opinion in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). It is possible to view Lemon as a systematic attempt to codify the Court’s jurisprudence with respect to questions of religious establishment. In Lemon Burger proposed a three-pronged test to determine whether the Establishment Clause has been violated by an act of government. The Lemon test would require that a policy be invalidated if it has the purpose or the effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion, or entails an “excessive entanglement” between government and reli-gion (Jelen and Wilcox 1995, 18; Wald 1997). A government policy must be declared unconstitutional if it fulfills any of these conditions. Debating the Public Role of Religion 75 Furthermore, the Lemon test applies to all government entanglements with religion generally—not only to governmental advancement or inhibition of a particular denomination. At this writing Lemon appears to remain the operative precedent in Establishment Clause jurisprudence. Indeed, as recently as 2005, Justice Souter utilized the Lemon framework in his majority opinion in McCreary County v. ACLU . Nevertheless, the Lemon test is a source of continuing controversy in constitutional law.

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  Encyclopedia of Education Law

  • Charles J. Russo, Charles Russo(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Lemon v. Kurtzman ——— 507 Lemon v. Kurtzman (Excerpts) Lemon v. Kurtzman and its companion case, Earley v. DiCenso, are the Supreme Court’s most important cases on the parameters of permissible state aid to students and their religiously affiliated non-public schools under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In creating the so-called tripartite Lemon test, which also applies in disputes involv-ing prayer and religious activities in public schools, the Court ruled that interactions between religion and government must have a secular legislative purpose, must have a principal or primary effect that does not advance or inhibit religion, and do not result in excessive entan-glement of government in religion. Supreme Court of the United States LEMON v. KURTZMAN, EARLEY v. DICENSO 403 U.S. 602 Argued March 3, 1971. Decided June 28, 1971. Mr. Chief Justice BURGER delivered the opinion of the Court. These two appeals raise questions as to Pennsylvania and Rhode Island statutes providing state aid to church-related elementary and secondary schools. Both statutes are challenged as violative of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Pennsylvania has adopted a statutory program that provides financial support to nonpublic elementary and secondary schools by way of reimbursement for the cost of teachers’ salaries, textbooks, and instruc-tional materials in specified secular subjects. Rhode Island has adopted a statute under which the State pays directly to teachers in nonpublic elementary schools a supplement of 15% of their annual salary. Under each statute state aid has been given to church-related edu-cational institutions. We hold that both statutes are unconstitutional. I The Rhode Island Statute The Rhode Island Salary Supplement Act was enacted in 1969.

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  The Praeger Handbook of Religion and Education in the United States

  [2 volumes]

  • James C. Carper, Thomas C. Hunt, James C. Carper, Thomas C. Hunt(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Guiding these decisions was the so-called ‘‘Lemon test.’’ 211 Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) and a separationist reading the ‘‘test’’ it put forth influenced most of the Supreme Court’s ‘‘no establishment’’ cases for the next 15 years. In this pivotal decision, which included cases from Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the ‘‘purchase of secular services,’’ in this instance states paying part of the salaries of teachers of secular subjects in private schools, was unconstitutional. It was so, the Court reasoned, because it led to ‘‘excessive entanglement’’ between church and state because of the government surveillance of church schools required and hence a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Court established far-reaching and controversial guidelines for dealing with subsequent church-state cases, much to the dismay of advocates of government aid to church-related schools. In the ‘‘Tripartite test’’ or Lemon test, the high court asserted that in order to survive an Estab- lishment Clause challenge, a contested policy or practice had to satisfy the following requirements: (1) it must have a secular purpose; (2) its primary effect must neither advance nor inhibit religion; and (3) it must not create excessive entanglement between government and religion. 212 While the Court was applying separationist logic in disestablishment cases, it was moving in the opposite direction in free exercise law. From the 1940s to the early 1980s, the high court interpreted the Free Exercise Clause in ‘‘expansive terms.’’ For example, in the year following the Lemon decision, the Court granted the Amish, who RELIGION AND EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES 29 believed that formal education should end at grade eight, an exemption from Wisconsin’s compulsory education law that mandated school attendance through age 16.

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  Religion and American Law

  An Encyclopedia

  • Paul Finkelman(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In recent years a majority of current justices have indicated dissatisfaction with the Lemon test. In Lee v. Weisman (1992), for example, Justice Anthony Kennedy expressly declined to use Lemon as the basis for his majority opinion striking down prayer at a middle school graduation. Despite growing dissatisfaction, the Court has not repudiated Lemon. Indeed, it reaffirmed Lemon (albeit in passing) in its decision in Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District (1993), provoking sharp criticism from Justice Antonin Scalia: “Like some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad after being repeatedly killed and buried, Lemon stalks our establishment clause jurisprudence once again, frightening … little children and school attorneys. …” Phillip Presby Donald G. Nieman Bibliography Kahn, Ronald, “Polity and Rights Values in Conflict: The Burger Court, Ideological Interests, and the Separation of Church and State,” 3 Studies in American Political Development: An Annual 279–293 (1989). Levy, Leonard, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment (New York: Macmillan, 1988). Morgan, Richard E., “The Establishment Clause and Sectarian Schools: A Final Installment?” Supreme Court Review 57 (1973). Cases Cited Board of Education v. Allen, 392 U.S. 236 (1968). DiCenso v. Robinson, 316 F. Supp. 112 (D.R.I. 1970). Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947). Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District, 508 U.S. 384 (1993). Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992). Lemon v. Kurtzman, 310 F. Supp. 35 (E.D. Pa. 1969). Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 reh’g denied, 404 U.S. 876 (1971). School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963). Tilton v. Richardson, 403 U.S. 672 (1971). Walz v. Tax Commission of City of New York, 397 U.S. 664 (1970). Levitt v. Committee for Public Education and Religious Liberty 413 U.S

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  The Constitution of Religious Freedom

  God, Politics, and the First Amendment

  • Dennis J. Goldford(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Baylor University Press

    (Publisher)

  Drawing together the strands of previous Establishment Clause cases, Chief Justice Burger states for the Court in Lemon v. Kurtzman , Every analysis in this area must begin with consideration of the cumula-tive criteria developed by the Court over many years. Three such tests may be gleaned from our cases. First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion . . . ; finally, the statute must not foster “an excessive government entanglement with religion.” 39 The purpose prong necessarily presumes the possibility of distinguish-ing between a secular and a religious legislative purpose. Teaching reli-gion—as opposed to teaching about religion—is obviously a religious activity, whereas teaching math or physics or chemistry is evidently a secular activity. But are math and physics and chemistry secular subjects if they are taught as evidence of divine intelligence or design? 40 Similarly, if someone justifies government by reference to Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and government’s role to provide order in a fallen world, is 36 Walz v. Tax Commission , 397 U.S. 664 (1970), at 694. 37 Walz , at 716. 38 Marsh v. Chambers , 463 U.S. 783 (1983), at 821 (footnote omitted). 39 Lemon v. Kurtzman , 403 U.S. 602 (1971), at 612. Compare Abington , at 222: The test may be stated as follows: what are the purpose and the primary effect of the enactment? If either is the advancement or inhibition of religion then the enactment exceeds the scope of legislative power as circumscribed by the Consti-tution. That is to say that to withstand the strictures of the Establishment Clause there must be a secular legislative purpose and a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion.

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  Routledge Revivals: Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties (2006)

  Volume 3, R - Z

  • Paul Finkelman(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Disputes involving the display of religious symbols on public property are resolved under the establishment clause of the First Amendment: does the government’s display of a religious symbol, like a crèche, constitute an establishment of religion? The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have not settled upon any one standard for resolving these disputes, but rather have articulated and applied a variety of tests. Partly because of the unsettled nature of the legal doctrine, the results in these cases have been unpredictable.

  In Lemon v. Kurtzman, a 1971 decision, the Court articulated a three-part test to determine whether a governmental action, such as a statute, violates the establishment clause. The Lemon test provided as follows: “First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster ‘an excessive government entanglement with religion.’” For approximately a decade, the Lemon test remained the standard for resolving establishment clause issues, but it has since been subject to severe criticisms. Regardless, the Court still occasionally applies this test and has never expressly or fully repudiated it. The uncertainty surrounding Lemon has provided the doctrinal context for the Court’s decisions regarding religious symbols.

  Religious Symbol Cases

  The seminal religious-symbol case is Lynch v. Donnelly, decided in 1984. The city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, constructed a Christmas display in a public park. The display was “essentially like those to be found in hundreds of towns or cities across the Nation—often on public grounds—during the Christmas season,” the Court explained. It consisted of “many of the figures and decorations traditionally associated with Christmas, including, among other things, a Santa Claus house, reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh, candy-striped poles, a Christmas tree, carolers, cutout figures representing such characters as a clown, an elephant, and a teddy bear, hundreds of colored lights, a large banner [reading] ‘SEASONS GREETINGS,’ and the crèche.” The Court focused solely on whether the governmental display of the crèche violated the establishment clause.

  The Court’s opinion in Lynch revealed the justices’ ambivalence regarding the appropriate doctrine for adjudicating an establishment clause issue. The Court began with a review of American history showing that government and religion have often been entwined despite the establishment clause: “There is an unbroken history of official acknowledgment by all three branches of government of the role of religion in American life from at least 1789.” The Court, however, did not rely solely on that history to uphold the governmental action. Instead, the Court presented the Lemon

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  Constitutional Debates on Freedom of Religion

  A Documentary History

  • Gerald Long, John J. Patrick(Authors)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Constitutional Prohibition of Establishment of Religion 215 proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned. The Court has more recently attempted to add some mortar to Ever- son’s wall through the three-part test of Lemon v. Kurtzman, which served at first to offer a more useful test for purposes of the Establishment Clause than did the ‘‘wall’’ metaphor. Generally stated, the Lemon test proscribes state action that has a sectarian purpose or effect, or causes an impermissible governmental entanglement with religion. . . . The secular purpose prong has proven mercurial in application be- cause it has never been fully defined, and we have never fully stated how the test is to operate. . . . The entanglement test as applied in cases like Wolman also ignores the myriad state administrative regulations properly placed upon sectarian institutions such as curriculum, attendance, and certification require- ments for sectarian schools, or fire and safety regulations for churches. These difficulties arise because the Lemon test has no more grounding in the history of the First Amendment than does the wall theory upon which it rests. The three-part test represents a determined effort to craft a workable rule from a historically faulty doctrine; but the rule can only be as sound as the doctrine it attempts to service. The three-part test has simply not provided adequate standards for deciding Establishment Clause cases, as this Court has slowly come to realize. Even worse, the Lemon test has caused this Court to fracture into unworkable plurality opinions, depending upon how each of the three factors applies to a certain state action. The results from our school services cases show the difficulty we have encountered in making the Lemon test yield principled results. . . . The true meaning of the Establishment Clause can only be seen in its history. As drafters of our Bill of Rights, the Framers inscribed the prin- ciples that control today.

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  Religion and the Constitution, Volume 2

  Establishment and Fairness

  • Kent Greenawalt(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  49

  I conclude that the Supreme Court has, in Establishment Clause cases up until now, been right to inquire about the actual purposes legislators entertain and to use legislative history as one device to discern those purposes.

  THE LEMON TEST: EFFECTS

  The second strand of the test of Lemon v. Kurtzman is that a law or practice violates the Establishment Clause if it has a primary effect of advancing or inhibiting religion. This, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, has provedpractically the most significant part of the entire test, and in one sense the least controversial. It is the least controversial in that everyone agrees that some effects of laws are forbidden by the Establishment Clause. But critics may nonetheless take the view that the formulation of the effects rule, as such, is so vague, misleading, and unhelpful that it should be abandoned.We need to consider these related points: (1) the relation of purpose to effects; (2) effects judged by principle and effects judged by particular consequences; (3) primary effects and remote or incidental effects; (4) effects under Lemon and under endorsement; (5) the inclusion of inhibiting religion as an Establishment Clause violation (when it might seem more natural for that to raise concerns under the Free Exercise Clause); and (6) the possibility that the effects test, whatever its abstract theoretical soundness, is unhelpful for courts deciding controversies.

  Most important cases resolved under the Lemon test have been decided under the effects strand. On occasion, the Court has said that a law is invalid under both purpose and effect or both effect and entanglement. And when the Court has relied on impermissible administrative entanglement alone, the scheme that was deemed to be excessively entangling was designed to avoid what the Court had previously said were forbidden effects. Typically, when the Court has found an improper purpose, it would have proceeded to say that there were improper effects, had it undertaken that inquiry. A simple example was the state law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in all school classrooms. The Court discerned a forbidden purpose to promote religion;50

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  Routledge Revivals: Religion and American Law (2006)

  An Encyclopedia

  • Paul Finkelman(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  However, White refused to apply an entanglement test, because he believed that the Establishment Clause did not mandate such a test. The analysis of Justice White was significant for its renunciation of Lemon ’s third prong, and his continuing attack on the test revealed the fragile status of the 5-to-4 Lemon opinion as precedent. Since Roemer, the Court has moved away from the Lemon test to a focus on the issues of endorsement and coercion as the central factors of contemporary Establishment Clause jurisprudence. Ten years after Roemer, the Court upheld a different form of aid under Lemon ’s primary effect prong, in Witters v. Washington Department of Services for the Blind (1986). In Witters the Court upheld the validity of an assistance program that gave aid to a blind student attending a religious college to study for a career in the ministry. The Court reasoned that such aid did not have the primary effect of advancing religion, because the aid was made available to the individual, regardless of where he chose to go to school, and because it devised no financial incentive for him to choose sectarian education over secular education. Thus, the aid flowed to the religious college only as a result of the genuinely independent and private choices of aid recipients

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  Conscience and Belief: The Supreme Court and Religion

  The Supreme Court in American Society

  • Kermit L. Hall(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This article tends to side with those seeking to restrain the judiciary. Judicial decisionmaking is no more neutral than legislative or administrative; it simply replays the disputes in a different arena before a different audience with different resolution mechanisms. The legislative and administrative arenas generally provide a forum in which more voices may be heard, often by more informed decision makers. Given the protections offered by religious political pluralism, strict scrutiny of educational policies raising establishment clause concerns is unwarranted.

  Relaxation of judicial scrutiny, however, can go too far. At least two different doctrines provide protection against that possibility in the establishment clause context. First, this article proposes nothing which would undermine the free exercise clause. Governmental action that infringes on an individual’s right to the exercise of religion should be invalidated.

  Second, a doctrine that rests on groups’ willingness to influence the political process requires protection from itself. It may break down if groups are discouraged from participating because of messages “that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community . . . .”373 So far, no Justice or commentator has suggested a good test for determining when a governmental message conveys so strong a message of disapprobation to disfavored groups or endorsement of favored groups that it should be declared unconstitutional. In the absence of a superior test, the Court should retain the language of the effects prong of the Lemon test, that the principal effect neither advance nor inhibit religion.

  This language, although a compromise between two “failed” conceptions of neutrality, may nevertheless represent prudent public policy. It gives leeway to religious groups seeking greater accommodation of their educational interests, but requires that the accommodation have primarily a secular effect. It is at least a reasonable line to draw between constitutional actions and those communicating too strong a message of political disapprobation to disfavored religious groups.374

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  Illustrated Great Decisions of the Supreme Court

  • Tony Mauro(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  BACKGROUND The Supreme Court did not end the national debate over prayer in the public schools with its rulings in the early 1960s in Engel v. Vitale and School District of Abington v. Schempp. (See School District of Abington Township v. Schempp. ) Those highly controversial rulings struck down state-sponsored or teacher-led prayers and Bible readings on the grounds that they violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which bars government actions “respecting an establishment of religion.” In the decades since, religious conservatives continued to hope that, either through a constitutional amendment or a change in the Supreme Court’s views, official prayer could be brought back into the classroom. Passage of a constitutional amendment proved difficult, but by 1992 chances seemed good for a new take on the issue from a Supreme Court that was drastically different from the one that had ruled in the early 1960s. Two of the justices who had cham-pioned separation of church and state—Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan Jr.—had retired and had been replaced by jus-tices who seemed open to greater accommodation. Both David H. Souter and Clarence Thomas had acknowl-edged during their confirmation hearings the controversy sur-rounding the so-called Lemon test, the standard for assessing government involvement with religion, first announced in 1971 in Lemon v. Kurtzman. The Lemon test has been criticized for building too high a wall of separation between church and state. (See Lemon v. Kurtzman. ) Another signal of possible change was the closeness of the vote in a 1989 case, Allegheny County v. ACLU Greater Pitts-burgh Chapter. That ruling said government could not include a crèche or nativity scene by itself in a holiday season display. Four justices—including the newest, Anthony Kennedy—had dissented, urging a different approach to the establishment clause.

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  The History of the New York Court of Appeals

  1932-2003

  • Bernard Meyer, Francis Bergan, Burton Agata, Seth Agata(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  Grumet v. Board of Education of the Kiryas Joel Village School District , 81 N.Y.2d 518 (1993), affirmed sub nom. Board of Education of the Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet , 512 U.S. 687 (1994). Judge Smith’s opinion for the Court affirmed the finding of unconstitution-ality solely on Federal and not on State constitutional grounds. First, he explained, the “subject of the parties’ focus” in the Court of Appeals was on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Second, Judge Smith disagreed with the trial court’s view of the State Constitution’s Blaine Amendment as a “coun-terpart” to the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, declaring that the Blaine Amendment is “significantly different from the Establishment Clause, both in text and history . . . . ” 81 N.Y.2d, at 531–532. Concluding that the Village of Kiryas Joel School District statute was uncon-stitutional because it violated the second or “principal or primary effect” of the Lemon prong, Judge Smith found it unnecessary to address the other Lemon prongs. Chief Judge Kaye and Judge Hancock agreed with Judge Smith that the statute ran afoul of Lemon ’s second prong, but the Chief Judge, in her concur-ring opinion, contended that Lemon was not the “preferred” framework for ana-lyzing the Kiryas Joel issues , 81 N.Y.2d, at 532, and Judge Hancock, in his con-curring opinion, referred to and addressed all three Lemon prongs. In determining whether the “principal or primary effect” of the legislation advanced or inhibited religion, Judge Smith posited that the prohibition on gov-ernment involvement with religion was not limited to “direct and funded efforts to indoctrinate citizens in specific religious beliefs but includes a close identifi-cation of the responsibilities of government and religion .” 81 N.Y.2d, at 527 (emphasis added).

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