Lemon v. Kurtzman

The Original Cases

Lemon I involved jointure of two separate cases interpreting statutes in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania that provided funds and materials for religious schools. The case from Rhode Island addressed the constitutionality of a Salary Supplement Act enacted in 1969 that provided for a 15% salary supplement to be paid to teachers in nonpublic (including religious) schools at which the average per-pupil expenditure on secular education was below the average in public schools. For teachers in nonpublic schools to be eligible for the supplement, they had to teach only courses offered in the public schools, use only materials that were used in the public schools, and agree not to teach courses in religion.

The case from Pennsylvania involved a constitutional challenge to the state's Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act, passed in 1968, which authorized reimbursement for specific secular subjects and for textbooks and materials used in those courses by nonpublic schools and approved by the superintendent. The law did not allow for any payment for teachers' salaries, textbooks, and instructional materials for any courses containing subject matter expressing religious teaching or the morals or forms of worship of any sect.

Approximately 25% of all elementary students in Rhode Island and 20% in Pennsylvania attended religious schools, virtually all of which were operated by the Roman Catholic Church. Three-judge federal trial courts in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania reached opposite conclusions about the constitutionality of the state statutes, with the court in Rhode Island finding the state's statute a violation of the Establishment Clause. Conversely, the court in Pennsylvania did not think that there was any such violation. On direct appeal to the Supreme Court in Lemon I, it struck down both statutes as violating the Establishment Clause.

The Supreme Court held that both statutes violated the third part of the so-called Lemon test, namely, that supervision of the nonpublic school support programs authorized by the statutes would excessively entangle the states with the religious schools being served. In both cases, the Court decided that the law violated the Establishment Clause because of the restrictions and surveillance that were necessary to ensure that teachers played a strictly nonideological role and by creating state supervision of nonpublic school accounting procedures to establish the cost of secular as distinguished from religious education.

The Court also determined that political divisive-ness along religious lines would likely result, as religious groups benefiting from the successive and probably annual state legislative appropriations would intensify their lobbying efforts for more funding.

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