Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1997

Agostini v. Felton

521 U.S. 203 | 117 S. Ct. 1997 | 138 L. Ed. 2d 391 | 1997 U.S. LEXIS 4000

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Takeaway

In short, Agostini overruled Aguilar’s ban on public employees providing neutral, supplemental Title I instruction inside religious schools and held that a prospective injunction based on Aguilar had to be vacated under Rule 60(b)(5).

Background

Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provides federally funded remedial instruction and related services to disadvantaged children. Eligible private-school students must receive services comparable to those available to public-school students, but the services must be secular, supplemental, and controlled by the local public educational agency.

Before 1985, New York City sent public-school teachers and counselors into religious schools during the school day to provide Title I remedial instruction, guidance, and counseling. The employees were publicly hired and supervised, instructed not to engage in religious activity, and subject to periodic unannounced monitoring visits. In Aguilar v. Felton, the Supreme Court held that this arrangement created excessive entanglement between government and religion, chiefly because monitoring teachers in religious schools would be necessary to ensure secular instruction. The District Court then permanently enjoined New York City from providing Title I teaching or counseling on sectarian-school premises.

To comply, the City offered services at public or leased sites, in mobile classrooms near religious schools, and through computer-assisted instruction. These alternatives were costly and reduced funds otherwise available for eligible children. In 1995, the Board and parents of eligible parochial-school students moved under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b)(5) to vacate the injunction, arguing that intervening Establishment Clause decisions had undermined Aguilar. The District Court denied relief, and the Second Circuit affirmed, reasoning that Aguilar remained binding until the Supreme Court itself overruled it.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the costs and operational burdens of complying with the Aguilar injunction constituted a significant factual change justifying relief under Rule 60(b)(5).

Holding

No. The additional costs did not amount to a qualifying change in factual conditions because they were anticipated when Aguilar was decided.

Reasoning

Rule 60(b)(5) permits relief from a prospective judgment when a significant change in factual conditions or law makes continued enforcement inequitable. But modification ordinarily is not warranted when the moving party relies on circumstances anticipated at the time the injunction was entered.

The costs of moving Title I services off religious-school premises were known to the parties and to the Court in 1985. That the predicted costs later materialized did not transform them into a new factual development under Rule 60(b)(5).

Issue #2

Whether intervening Establishment Clause precedent had so undermined Aguilar and the relevant portion of School District of Grand Rapids v. Ball that on-premises Title I instruction by public employees was unconstitutional.

Holding

Yes. Subsequent cases had displaced the assumptions underlying Aguilar and Ball; a neutrally available, carefully supervised program of supplemental remedial instruction on religious-school premises does not, without more, violate the Establishment Clause.

Reasoning

Aguilar and Ball rested on several premises: that public employees teaching in religious schools should be presumed likely to inculcate religion; that their presence itself created a symbolic union of church and state; that direct assistance to the educational function of religious schools necessarily financed religious indoctrination; and that close monitoring of public teachers therefore created excessive entanglement.

Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District rejected a categorical rule against placing public employees in sectarian schools. The Court would not presume that a publicly employed sign-language interpreter would depart from professional duties merely because the interpreter worked in a religious setting. The same principle applied to Title I teachers, particularly where the record showed no instance of religious indoctrination by such teachers.

The City’s program did not create unconstitutional governmental indoctrination or endorsement. The teachers were public employees, instructed to provide only secular services, accountable to public supervisors, and assigned to eligible children without regard to religion. The mere location of services inside a religious school, rather than in a nearby van or off-campus site, did not itself communicate state endorsement of religion.

Witters and Zobrest also changed the Court’s approach to aid. Aid does not become unconstitutional simply because religious institutions may benefit from it when it is allocated under neutral criteria and reaches students regardless of the school they attend. Title I services were available to all qualifying children, did not depend on religious affiliation, and were legally required to supplement rather than replace the schools’ regular educational programs.

The program did not foster excessive entanglement. Administrative cooperation between the public agency and religious schools, and the possibility of political controversy, existed whether services were offered on or off campus and were insufficient by themselves to invalidate the program. Once the Court rejected the presumption that public teachers in religious schools would inculcate religion, it also rejected the premise that pervasive monitoring was necessary. Periodic public supervision was not excessive entanglement.

The Court therefore overruled Aguilar and the portion of Ball concerning the Shared Time program to the extent those decisions were inconsistent with this analysis. It held that federally funded, neutral, supplemental remedial instruction may be delivered on sectarian-school premises by government employees when safeguards like those in New York City’s program are in place.

Issue #3

Whether stare decisis or the law-of-the-case doctrine barred the Court from overruling Aguilar in this litigation.

Holding

No. Stare decisis did not require adherence to a constitutional decision whose doctrinal foundations had been substantially eroded, and the law-of-the-case doctrine did not apply where continued adherence would produce manifest injustice.

Reasoning

Stare decisis is a policy of stability, not an inexorable command. Its force is comparatively weaker in constitutional cases because constitutional interpretation can be corrected only through amendment or through the Court’s own reconsideration of precedent.

The Court concluded that Aguilar was not being discarded simply because the present Court preferred a different result. Rather, intervening Establishment Clause decisions had rejected the assumptions on which Aguilar depended, leaving it as a remnant of obsolete constitutional reasoning.

The law-of-the-case doctrine generally discourages reopening issues resolved at earlier stages of the same litigation. But it does not require adherence to a prior ruling that is clearly erroneous and would work a manifest injustice. Continuing an injunction based on a rule the Court now found unconstitutional would meet that exception.

Issue #4

Whether the intervening change in Establishment Clause law entitled petitioners to relief from the permanent injunction under Rule 60(b)(5).

Holding

Yes. Because the injunction rested on a legal rule the Court overruled, continued prospective enforcement was inequitable, and the injunction had to be vacated.

Reasoning

The general practice is to apply the rule announced in the Court’s decision to the parties before it, including when the Court overrules precedent. Once Aguilar no longer supplied a valid constitutional basis for the injunction, the lower courts’ judgments resting on Aguilar could not stand.

The District Court and the Second Circuit properly treated Aguilar as binding while it remained on the books. Lower courts must follow directly applicable Supreme Court precedent even if later decisions appear to undermine its reasoning; only the Supreme Court may overrule its own cases. But that constraint did not prevent the Supreme Court from deciding Aguilar’s continued validity when reviewing the Rule 60(b)(5) ruling.

The Court rejected the concern that its ruling converted Rule 60(b)(5) into an unrestricted mechanism for rehearing old cases. The decision was tied to a continuing prospective injunction and a genuine, significant change in governing law. The Court also found it especially inequitable to leave New York City bound by an injunction that forced substantial spending on alternative delivery systems rather than remedial services for disadvantaged children.

Dissents

Justice Souter

Reasoning

Justice Souter, joined by Justices Stevens and Ginsburg, and joined by Justice Breyer as to the procedural discussion in Part II, maintained that Aguilar and Ball drew a sound constitutional line. In his view, publicly funded teachers who teach core subjects within religious schools assume responsibilities the schools themselves would otherwise bear, thereby directly subsidizing the schools’ religious missions and creating an apparent partnership between church and state.

He argued that the majority overstated the significance of Zobrest. A sign-language interpreter merely transmits what others say for one student and is constrained by professional duties of accurate translation. A teacher or counselor, by contrast, exercises substantial discretion and may reinforce a religious school’s pervasive sectarian environment. Thus, Zobrest did not reject the concerns about indoctrination or symbolic endorsement identified in Aguilar and Ball.

Justice Souter also distinguished Witters and Zobrest as cases of limited assistance flowing to individual beneficiaries through genuinely private choices. New York City’s Title I program, in contrast, served thousands of students in religious schools and provided systematic instruction in central educational subjects. In his view, this arrangement relieved religious schools of expenses they otherwise would incur and freed their resources for religious purposes.

Neutral eligibility criteria did not cure the constitutional defect, according to Justice Souter. Evenhandedness is necessary, but it is not sufficient when the actual effect of a program is substantial public support for religious institutions or a public appearance that government has endorsed their religious mission.

He further contended that the practical burdens caused by Aguilar were foreseen from the outset. Constitutional boundaries may produce regrettable costs and inconvenience, but those consequences did not justify erasing what he regarded as a principled and necessary line between on-premises and off-premises public instruction.

Justice Ginsburg

Reasoning

Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, and Breyer, focused on procedure. She argued that the Court had effectively granted an untimely rehearing of its own 1985 judgment, although the Court’s rehearing rule permits petitions only within a short period and ordinarily requires a request by a Justice who joined the original judgment.

In her view, Rule 60(b)(5) could not properly serve as a vehicle for relitigating Aguilar itself. On appeal from a denial of Rule 60(b) relief, the question is whether the District Court abused its discretion in concluding that changed facts or law made prospective enforcement inequitable; the underlying judgment is not reopened for a fresh merits determination.

The lower courts did not abuse their discretion because there had been no significant factual change, and Aguilar remained binding law when they acted. Under Rodriguez de Quijas, lower courts had no authority to conclude that later Supreme Court decisions had implicitly overruled directly controlling precedent; they were required to follow Aguilar unless and until the Supreme Court overruled it.

Justice Ginsburg warned that using Rule 60(b)(5) in this manner distorted a rule governing district-court judgments into an anytime rehearing device. She would have awaited another case presenting the substantive Establishment Clause question through ordinary litigation, preserving procedural integrity and avoiding incentives to seek reconsideration of settled cases based on changes in the Court’s membership.