Supreme Court Religious Expression Doctrine in the Public Schools

There is a significant split in the literature on the Supreme Court as a policymaker, with some scholars suggesting the Court is powerful and rarely defied, and others that both governmental institutions and the public are often successful at defying Court policy directives.1 Some scholars suggest that resistance may manifest itself at the administrative and local official levels.2 As C. F. Abel and Hans J. Hacker note, the Supreme Court imposes authoritative constraints in the public sphere through the setting of standards for the regulation of citizen rights, duties, and interests.3 The absolutist nature of politico-moral disputes, such as those involving religious expression in public schools, tends to lend them to judicial resolution more readily and more frequently than standard political disputes. Yet because of this moral dimension, the Court’s doctrine is more likely to be resisted at the local and state levels when popular politico-moral convictions are in conflict with the Court’s legal policy prescriptions. A number of scholars provided assessments of the Court’s doctrine on religious expression and how it applies to public schools, though the most comprehensive of these assessments have been legal analyses reported mostly in law reviews, rather than in the empirical policy and political science literature.4

Doctrine · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Supreme court · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law