Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1987

Edwards v. Aguillard

482 U.S. 578 | 107 S. Ct. 2573 | 96 L. Ed. 2d 510 | 1987 U.S. LEXIS 2729 | 55 U.S.L.W. 4860

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Takeaway

In short, this case holds that a State may not require “balanced” teaching of creation science and evolution in public schools when the measure’s real purpose is to promote a religious doctrine or to undermine evolution for religious reasons.

Background

Louisiana’s Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act barred public schools from teaching evolution unless they also taught “creation science.” The Act did not require either subject to be taught, but required “balanced treatment” whenever either was taught. It described both subjects as scientific evidence and inferences, and declared its purpose to be protecting “academic freedom.”

Parents, teachers, and religious leaders challenged the Act under the Establishment Clause. The Federal District Court granted summary judgment for the challengers, concluding that the Act either prohibited evolution or required teaching a religious doctrine. The Fifth Circuit affirmed, holding that the Act’s claimed academic-freedom purpose was inconsistent with its compulsory pairing of creation science with evolution and that its actual purpose was to discredit evolution in favor of a religious belief. The Supreme Court affirmed.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Louisiana’s requirement that creation science be taught whenever evolution is taught violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Holding

Yes. The Act is facially unconstitutional because its primary purpose is to advance a particular religious belief, failing the secular-purpose requirement of Lemon v. Kurtzman.

Reasoning

The Court applied the three-part Lemon test: a law must have a secular purpose, must neither principally advance nor inhibit religion, and must avoid excessive government entanglement with religion. Failure on any one prong is enough. Because the Court found an impermissible religious purpose, it did not need to analyze the Act’s effects or entanglement under the remaining prongs.

The public-school setting heightens Establishment Clause concerns. Elementary and secondary students are impressionable, compulsory attendance gives the State substantial coercive authority, and families reasonably expect that public classrooms will not be deliberately used to promote religious beliefs that may conflict with their own.

Although Louisiana labeled the Act an academic-freedom measure, the Court held that this stated purpose was not sincere or was, at minimum, not advanced by the statute. The Act did not expand teachers’ freedom to teach scientific theories, because Louisiana law already allowed teachers to present legitimate scientific concepts. Instead, it restricted teachers by forbidding them to teach evolution unless they also taught creation science.

The Act also did not further an objective of comprehensive or fair science instruction. It singled out creation science for special protection, required creation-science curriculum guides and resource services, and protected creation scientists from discrimination without comparable provisions for evolution or other scientific theories. Moreover, the Act did not require teaching creation science at all; it required it only when evolution was taught, revealing its function as a restriction on evolution rather than a neutral expansion of the curriculum.

The statute’s legislative history confirmed its religious purpose. Its sponsor and supporting witnesses described creation science as involving a supernatural creator, and the legislative record linked the proposed curriculum directly to religious objections to evolution. The Court concluded that the Legislature sought to restructure science instruction to conform with the religious view that a divine creator made humankind.

This was materially similar to Epperson v. Arkansas, which invalidated a ban on teaching evolution because the State may not tailor public-school teaching to the principles or prohibitions of a religious sect. Louisiana violated the same principle by either excluding evolution unless creation science accompanied it or by giving a preferred position to a doctrine understood by the Legislature as religious.

The Court emphasized that its decision did not prevent schools from teaching scientific critiques of prevailing theories or a variety of genuinely scientific theories concerning human origins. Such instruction could be constitutional if adopted with the clear secular purpose of improving science education. Louisiana’s Act failed because its actual purpose was religious endorsement, not scientific instruction.

Issue #2

Whether unresolved factual disputes about the meaning or scientific status of “creation science” barred summary judgment.

Holding

No. The District Court properly granted summary judgment because the relevant evidence established the Legislature’s purpose and the State’s later-submitted expert affidavits did not create a genuine dispute of material fact.

Reasoning

Legislative purpose may be determined from the statute’s text, its legislative history, its historical context, and the sequence of events leading to enactment. The challengers relied on all of those sources, as well as evidence concerning how Louisiana education officials understood the Act. Together, that record established the Act’s religious purpose as a matter of law.

The State’s affidavits, offered after enactment by scientists and other outside experts, asserted that creation science was a scientific theory concerning abrupt appearance of life. But those affiants did not participate in passing or implementing the Act. Their postenactment views therefore did not materially illuminate what the Louisiana Legislature intended when it enacted the statute.

A trial-level battle between experts over possible technical meanings of “creation science” was unnecessary because the constitutional question turned on the Legislature’s contemporaneous purpose. The legislative record showed that the Act’s supporters understood creation science to include a supernatural creator and sought to counter evolution for religious reasons.

Concurrences

Justice Powell

Reasoning

Justice Powell, joined by Justice O’Connor, agreed that the Act failed Lemon’s secular-purpose requirement. He stressed that the statute’s ordinary language required public schools to present evidence for divine creation whenever they taught evolution, making its religious character apparent even before consulting the legislative record.

Powell found the statutory reference to academic freedom ambiguous, so he examined the bill’s development and history. The original proposal expressly required instruction in creation by God, and later revisions removed explicit religious terms and a list of creationist propositions without changing the bill’s underlying object. The organizations and witnesses relied on by the bill’s sponsor likewise tied creation science to biblical creation and belief in God.

Powell emphasized that school officials ordinarily have broad discretion over curricular choices. A curriculum decision does not violate the Establishment Clause merely because it happens to align with religious beliefs. But that discretion ends when officials select material for the purpose of advancing a particular religious belief.

He also underscored that public schools may constitutionally teach about religion, religious texts, and the nation’s religious history when the instruction has a genuine secular educational purpose. The Bible, for example, may be used in appropriate courses on history, literature, ethics, or comparative religion; Louisiana’s Act was unconstitutional because its purpose was religious promotion rather than such neutral study.

Justice White

Reasoning

Justice White concurred only in the judgment. He would accept the Fifth Circuit’s construction of the Louisiana statute because federal courts generally defer to a court of appeals’ reasonable interpretation of state law, especially where the district court agreed and the state’s highest court had not interpreted the provision.

Under the lower courts’ reasonable reading, “creation science” referred to a religious belief and the Act made teaching evolution conditional on teaching that belief. Once that construction and the lower courts’ finding of a primary religious purpose were accepted, existing Establishment Clause precedent required affirmance. White did not independently elaborate the majority’s broader analysis of legislative purpose.

Dissents

Justice Scalia

Reasoning

Justice Scalia, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist, argued that the Court improperly invalidated the Act based on speculation about legislative motive. In his view, the case came to the Court before Louisiana had implemented the law, before the Louisiana Supreme Court had construed it, and without a full evidentiary hearing on whether creation science could be taught as a nonreligious scientific theory.

Scalia maintained that the Act’s stated aim—academic freedom—had a plausible secular meaning: protecting students from indoctrination by ensuring that they heard evidence against evolution and could reach their own conclusions about origins. The Act did not require either evolution or creation science to be taught, required each to be presented as a theory rather than fact, and required the teaching of evolution whenever creation science was taught. Those features, he argued, were inconsistent with a purpose to give creationism a preferred position.

He criticized the majority for treating the Act’s secular purpose as a sham because it did not improve teachers’ freedom or comprehensiveness in the manner the Court preferred. The relevant question, he argued, was whether legislators sincerely believed that the law would remedy perceived censorship or one-sided presentation of scientific evidence, not whether the Court agreed with their scientific judgments.

Scalia also argued that the Court’s precedents required only some genuine secular purpose, rather than a showing that religious motives were wholly absent. The legislative record included repeated assurances from the bill’s sponsor and witnesses that the proposal sought to provide students with balanced scientific information and not to teach the Bible or religious doctrine. That evidence, he concluded, foreclosed summary judgment against the State.

More fundamentally, Scalia challenged Lemon’s purpose prong itself. Determining the subjective motives of a multimember legislature is unreliable because legislators may vote for numerous and differing reasons, and statements by a sponsor cannot establish the motives of all who supported a bill. He contended that the Establishment Clause should focus on what a law does, not on judicial attribution of religious motive to legislators.