Blog #5: Unit 20 on Permissibility of Aid
Today’s class will make more sense if you remind yourself where we are in the course. Take a look at the syllabus. Units 14 and 15 introduced us to questions of school funding and the Supreme Court’s Lemon Test. From there, we moved away from funding to look at Lemon and subsequent establishment clause tests in a variety of other contexts: school prayer, legislative prayer, public displays, and local government. Today, we return to funding.
The primary reason that I interrupted our funding discussion with establishment clause issues unrelated to funding was to give you some additional background on Lemon and the other tests. But you can think of the funding cases as chronologically ordered: Unit 14 introduced the Everson “some aid” era; Unit 15 covered the “little aid” era which only permitted aid under narrow certain circumstances, and now Units 20 through 23 take us into the era of increased aid but also increased complexity under an approach that moves toward “neutral aid” (though you should have all of the usual suspicions of the “neutral” description). We’ll finish the semester with three classes unrelated to funding.
There are a lot of cases in the background of today’s discussion, most of which I did not ask you to read. I’ll talk about some of them on the podcast. So that you can follow my references, they are:
Mueller v Allen (1983)
Aguilar v. Felton (1985)
Grand Rapids v. Ball (1985)
Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School Dist. (1993)
Rosenberger v. University of Virginia (1995)
Agostini v. Felton (1997)
Mitchell v. Helms (2000)
With the exception of Rosenberger (which you’ll read next week), you don’t need to know any of these cases in detail. The challenge of teaching this section of the course is to give you enough background to understand key decisions like Zelman without overwhelming you with too much reading. (This is similar to our approach to public displays, but more challenging in the funding area because there are more cases and the doctrine is more complex).
It will also help you to have in mind the three prongs of the Lemon test: (1) secular purpose; (2) neither advancing nor inhibiting religion; and (3) no excessive entanglement.
Here’s today’s podcast: