Lemon v. Kurtzman | 403 U.S. 602 (1971) | Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center
The test for determining whether a law meets the requirements of the Establishment Clause is whether it has a legitimate secular purpose, does not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion, and does not result in an excessive entanglement of government and religion. Under the Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Pennsylvania gave the Superintendent of Public Schools the authority to allocate state funds for textbooks, educational materials, and teacher salaries in private schools. Most of these private schools happened to be Catholic institutions. However, the law was carefully written to require that the salaries of teachers could be augmented only if they taught the same courses as those offered in public schools, used the same materials, and refrained from teaching courses in religion. In reality, the only beneficiaries of the extra funding were teachers at Catholic schools, which constituted 95 percent of the state's total private schools, whic
The test for determining whether a law meets the requirements of the Establishment Clause is whether it has a legitimate secular purpose, does not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion, and does not result in an excessive entanglement of government and religion. Under the Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Pennsylvania gave the Superintendent of Public Schools the authority to allocate state funds for textbooks, educational materials, and teacher salaries in private schools. Most of these private schools happened to be Catholic institutions. However,
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