Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1968

Epperson v. Arkansas

393 U.S. 97 | 89 S. Ct. 266 | 21 L. Ed. 2d 228 | 1968 U.S. LEXIS 328

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Takeaway

In short, this case holds that a State may not use its control over public-school curriculum to suppress a scientific theory because it conflicts with the religious beliefs of a particular group.

Background

Arkansas’s 1928 anti-evolution statute made it a misdemeanor for a teacher in a state-supported school or university to teach that humans descended or ascended from a lower order of animals. It also prohibited public institutions from adopting or using textbooks that taught that theory. A conviction could bring a fine and require the teacher or textbook official to vacate the position.

In 1965, Little Rock adopted a tenth-grade biology textbook containing a chapter on human evolution. Susan Epperson, a Central High School biology teacher, faced a conflict between her assignment to use the textbook and the statute’s criminal prohibition. She sought a declaration that the law was unconstitutional and an injunction against its enforcement; a public-school parent intervened in support.

The Arkansas Chancery Court held the statute unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment, reasoning that it restricted the freedom to teach and learn. The Arkansas Supreme Court reversed in a brief opinion, treating the law as a valid exercise of the State’s authority to prescribe public-school curriculum. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Arkansas Supreme Court.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Arkansas’s prohibition on teaching human evolution in public schools and universities violated the First Amendment’s religion clauses, as applied to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.

Holding

Yes. Arkansas could not exclude evolution from its public-school curriculum because the law’s purpose was to suppress a scientific theory deemed inconsistent with a particular religious interpretation of Genesis.

Reasoning

The First Amendment requires governmental neutrality both among religions and between religion and nonreligion. The State may not use public education to aid, foster, promote, or prefer a particular religious doctrine, nor may it suppress ideas simply because they conflict with that doctrine.

Arkansas had broad authority to prescribe the curriculum of its public schools, but that authority was limited by the Constitution. A State cannot condition public-school employment on compliance with rules that violate fundamental First Amendment guarantees.

The statute did not neutrally remove all instruction concerning humanity’s origins. Instead, it singled out one theory—human evolution—for exclusion because it was thought to contradict a literal Biblical account of creation. Its history, including its connection to Tennessee’s Scopes-era law and the fundamentalist campaign for its adoption, confirmed that sectarian religious conviction was its reason for being.

Under the test stated in Abington School District v. Schempp, a law exceeds constitutional limits if its purpose or primary effect advances or inhibits religion. Arkansas’s law inhibited the teaching of evolution in order to protect a particular religious view, so it violated the Establishment Clause.

Issue #2

Whether the statute was unconstitutionally vague, or independently invalid as a restraint on speech and academic freedom.

Holding

The Court did not decide those questions. It held that the statute was unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause regardless of whether it prohibited merely teaching evolution as true or even mentioning the theory at all.

Reasoning

The Arkansas Supreme Court had declined to say whether the statute barred an explanation of evolution or only the teaching of evolution as true. At oral argument, however, the State took the broader position that even making students aware of Darwin’s theory could trigger liability.

The Court concluded that resolving this uncertainty was unnecessary. Either possible construction left the central constitutional defect unchanged: Arkansas had selected a segment of scientific knowledge for suppression because of its perceived conflict with a particular religious doctrine.

Concurrences

Justice Black

Reasoning

Justice Black first questioned whether a genuine, live case or controversy existed. The anti-evolution law had never been enforced, Arkansas defended it without enthusiasm, and the record did not establish that Epperson or the intervening parent faced a concrete present injury. Nevertheless, he reluctantly accepted the Court’s decision to reach the case.

Black would have invalidated the statute for vagueness, or remanded for the Arkansas Supreme Court to clarify it. Because that court refused to determine whether the Act prohibited discussion of evolution altogether or only teaching it as true, a teacher could not know what conduct would expose her to criminal punishment and dismissal.

He objected to the majority’s Establishment Clause analysis because, in his view, the Court attributed a religious motive to the legislature despite the difficulty of determining legislative motives. Arkansas might instead have sought to remove a controversial subject from its curriculum, an action Black thought generally within the State’s educational authority.

Black also cautioned that requiring Arkansas to permit instruction on evolution might itself raise difficult neutrality concerns for those who regarded evolution as anti-religious. He rejected any broad implication that public-school teachers have a constitutional right to teach subjects that school authorities have not included in the curriculum.

Justice Harlan

Reasoning

Justice Harlan agreed that the statute established religion in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. He regarded the Arkansas Supreme Court’s terse and unclear opinion as an effort to avoid confronting the statute’s constitutional infirmity, but concluded that the federal constitutional claim had been properly raised and necessarily rejected below.

He saw no need for the majority to discuss vagueness and free-speech issues after deciding the Establishment Clause question. In his view, that unnecessary discussion obscured an otherwise straightforward holding and suggested implications from which he did not join.

Justice Stewart

Reasoning

Justice Stewart agreed that States ordinarily may choose their own school curricula, including whether to offer particular subjects. But he distinguished a curricular choice from imposing criminal punishment on a teacher for merely informing students that an established body of thought exists.

Because the Arkansas Supreme Court had left unresolved whether the Act prohibited even mentioning Darwin’s theory, the statute failed to give teachers fair notice of what it forbade. Stewart therefore would invalidate it as unconstitutionally vague under the Fourteenth Amendment; if the statute barred even mention of evolution, it would also infringe the First Amendment’s protection for free communication.