Zorach v. Clauson

Facts of the Case

Zorach involved a challenge to the constitutionality of a program in New York City that allowed its public schools to release students during the school day so that they could leave school grounds and participate in religious instruction and services at religious centers. Students could be released only with the written consent of their parents. Students who were not released remained in their classrooms. Unlike the practice that the Courts struck down as unconstitutional 4 years earlier, in Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), the program did not involve the use of public funds or the use of public facilities.

Even so, a group of city taxpayers and residents filed suit, challenging the constitutionality of the law that allowed for the released-time program. The plaintiffs alleged that the program was unconstitutional because the weight and influence of the public schools were put behind religious instruction, public school teachers policed the program by keeping tabs on students who were released, all classroom activities came to a halt when students were released for religious instruction, and the schools provided a crutch for the churches to lean on for support of their religious training. Without the cooperation of the schools, the plaintiffs argued, the program would have been ineffective.

The initial suit was filed in state courts. Having lost there, the plaintiffs in Zorach appealed to the Supreme Court. On further review, the Supreme Court affirmed that the program was constitutional.

The Court's Ruling

Justice Douglas, writing the majority opinion, ruled that it took “obtuse” reasoning to inject any issue of the free exercise of religion into this case insofar as no one was forced to attend the religious classes and no one brought religious exercises or instruction into the public school classrooms. Rather, Douglas pointed out that the decision of whether students attended religious classes was up to them and their parents. The majority saw no evidence to support the contention that coercion was used to get public school students into religious classrooms.

According to Justice Douglas, in passing the law, the City of New York did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In fact, he offered that condemning the released-time law would have pressed the concept of separation of church and state to an extreme level. Instead, Douglas concluded that there was no constitutional requirement for government to be hostile to religion. In Zorach, he concluded that all the schools did was to accommodate their schedules to a program of external religious instruction.

Justice Black, in a dissenting opinion, asserted that the sole question before the Court was whether the state could use its compulsory education laws to help religious sects get attendees for their religious instruction classes. Black argued that the state made religious sects beneficiaries of its power to compel students to attend secular schools by manipulating compulsory education laws to help those sects get students. In another dissent, Justice Frankfurter added that there was all the difference in the world between letting students out of school and letting some students out of school to attend religious classes. As Frankfurter saw it, formalized religious instruction was substituted for other school activities, which those who did not participate in religious classes were required to attend.

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