| Popis: |
This chapter details the rise and fall of the Lemon test. In Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), a school-funding case, the U.S. Supreme Court laid down three rules: A law must have a secular purpose, must have a “primary effect” that “neither advances nor inhibits religion,” and may not foster an “excessive entanglement” between government and religion. Failure to meet any of these three rules rendered a law unconstitutional. For three decades, the Court treated the Lemon test as a one-size-fits-all doctrine for evaluating establishment claims, applying it to a wide array of factual scenarios. However, the Lemon test was plagued by conceptual ambiguity, overemphasized separationism at the expense of religious freedom, and departed from the historical understanding of disestablishment. As such, instead of a single Establishment Clause test, the Court has developed context-sensitive doctrines that reflect a more accurate understanding of the history of religious disestablishment. |
