First Amendment Flashcards
Under the Lemon test, a law must satisfy all three of the following conditions: 1) the law must have a secular legislative purpose; 2) the law’s principal effect must neither advance nor inhibit religion; and 3) the law must not foster excessive government entanglement with religion.
Rhode Island enacted a statute under which the state paid teachers in nonpublic schools, including church-related schools, a 15 percent supplement of their annual salary. Teachers were only eligible for the supplement if they taught subjects offered in public schools with instructional materials used in public schools, and if they agreed in writing not to teach religion classes while receiving the salary supplement.
The cumulative impact of the statutory programs involves excessive entanglement of the government with religion. In particular, an extensive degree of state supervision and surveillance is necessary to ensure compliance with the statutory requirements separating secular and religious education.
Lemon v. Kurtz
A state may not deny unemployment benefits to an applicant who refuses to accept employment offers because a condition of the offered employment violates the applicant’s religious beliefs.
Adell Sherbert (plaintiff) was a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Sherbert’s employer fired her because she would not work on Saturday, the Sabbath Day of her faith. Sherbert looked for other work, but she could not find another job because she refused to take a position that would require her to work on Saturdays. Sherbert filed for unemployment compensation under the South Carolina Unemployment Compensation Act. Verner (defendant), an official of the Employment Security Commission, denied her claim for benefits because she had failed, without good cause, to accept suitable work when it was offered to her.
Sherbert v. Verner
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that individual freedom to practice religion is not a license to ignore neutral laws of general applicability simply because the law imposes a minimal burden on religious practice.
Employment Division v. Smith
The Court confirmed that laws targeted at religious practices would be subject to strict scrutiny. The Court invalidated a city’s ban on animal sacrifice that was “gerrymandered with care to proscribe religious killings of animals but to exclude almost all secular killings.”
Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah
McGowan (defendant) and six other employees of a discount retail store were indicted under a law of the state of Maryland (plaintiff) that prohibited the sale of all merchandise on Sunday except for a limited list of permissible items. The employees appealed the indictment on grounds that the law violated the separation of church and state and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
The state supreme court determined that the purpose of the law was not to promote religion, but to recognize a day for rest and recreation. The state court’s view finds support in the fact that the current laws provide a host of exemptions for activities that formerly were prohibited.
McGowan v. Maryland
The U.S. Supreme Court has held that content-based restrictions on speech are presumptively invalid and will be upheld only if the underlying speech is itself unprotected, or if the restrictions can be shown to be narrowly tailored to satisfy a compelling government interest, that is, if they can survive strict scrutiny.
The restrictions that government may place on speech vary based on the nature of the forum in which the speech takes place. A public forum is government property that the government must make available for constitutionally protected speech, such as a public park or sidewalk.
A designated public forum is somewhere that the government does not have to open to public speech, but chooses to do so, such as a public university building.
Once it does so, the regulation of speech is subject to the same rules that apply to public forums. A limited public forum is a property that the government chooses to open to only certain types of speech. The government may reasonably limit speech in a limited public forum as long as the limitations are viewpoint neutral and reasonable given the forum’s purpose. Finally, the government may categorically prohibit speech in a nonpublic forum as long as the prohibition is viewpoint neutral and reasonable.
R.A.V v. City of St. Paul
