Committee for Public Education and Religious Liberty v. Nyquist (1973)

Supreme Court Decisions on Religious Liberty

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Background Information

A New York law provided grants to non-public schools that served large numbers of low-income students in order to help with the maintainence of school facilities and to the parents of these students for the purpose of tuition reimbursement. These were only supplements - grants could not go over 50 percent of the actual amount the family paid in school tuition. Parents who did not qualify for the reimbursements because their income was too high were offered tax-deductions for their tuition costs.

The purpose of this law was to provide all parents a choice in where their children were educated because the legislature feared that a decline in non-public school education might end up causing overcrowding in public schools. However, almost immediately after this law was signed, the Committee for Public Education and Religious Liberty (PEARL) and several individual taxpayers filed suit to have the law overturned. They argued that each section of the law constituted an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state because they caused the government to support private, sectarian religion.

Court Decision

With Justice Powell writing the majority opinion, the Court ruled all three sections of the New York legislation unconstitutional. The Court found that the law did pass the first prong of the Lemon test because it did have a secular purpose. However, the law did not fare so well with the second prong because it appeared that each of its three parts had the primary effect of furthering religion.

The "maintenance and repair" section had the primary effect of aiding religion because it was impossible for the goverment to guaranteee that money would only used on secular facilities:

Nothing in the statute, for instance, bars a qualifying school from paying out of state funds the salaries of employees who maintain the school chapel, or the cost of renovating classrooms in which religion is taught, or the cost of heating and lighting those same facilities. ...If the State may not erect buildings in which religious activities are to take place, it may not maintain such buildings or renovate them when they fall into disrepair.

The tuition reimbursement portion was also found to aid religion - as with the first part of the law, the government could not ensure that the tuition funds to only be used in a secular manner. Furthermore, the reimbursements functioned much like a incentive to send children to private schools. The tax-deduction program was ruleed unconstitutional for the same reasons:

The qualifying parent under either program receives the same form of encouragement and reward for sending his children to nonpublic schools. The only difference is that one parent receives an actual cash payment while the other is allowed to reduce by an arbitrary amount the sum he would otherwise be obliged to pay over to the State. We see no answer to Judge Hays' dissenting statement below that "in both instances the money involved represents a charge made upon the state for the purpose of religious education."... Special tax benefits... cannot be squared with the principle of neutrality established by the decisions fo the Court. To the contrary, insofar as such benefits render assistance to parents who send their children to sectarian schools, their purpose and inevitable effect are to aid and advance those religious institutions.

Significance

It is important to note that in this decision the Court found that money which was paid directly to parents for the reimbursement of private school tuition was not, in reality, a benefit for the parents. Instead, the ultimate beneficiary was found to be the schools - and in fact religious schools were the primary beneficary under this law. Because the government cannot fund religious institutions directly, it cannot also fund them indirectly by giving money to individuals which the government requires them to then turn over to a religious school.