Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing
The Supreme Court upheld a New Jersey program that reimbursed parents for the cost of sending their children on public buses to school, including Catholic parochial schools, ruling that the reimbursement did not amount to government support for religion.
The decision was the Court's first major statement on the First Amendment's ban on government establishment of religion applied to the states, declaring that a 'wall of separation between church and state' must be kept high while also holding that some indirect benefits to religious school families do not breach that wall.
“The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable.”
The majority's summary statement of the separation-of-church-and-state principle underlying the ruling.
How it got here: A New Jersey trial court ruled the reimbursement unconstitutional under the state constitution, but New Jersey's highest appellate court reversed, upholding the law, and the taxpayer appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A New Jersey township's school board reimbursed parents for money they spent sending their children on regular public buses to school, including four Catholic parochial schools that taught religion alongside secular subjects. A local taxpayer sued, arguing that using tax dollars this way improperly forced him to help support Catholic religious education and violated the Constitution.
The question before the Court
Could a New Jersey township use tax money to reimburse parents for bus fares their children paid to ride public buses to Catholic schools?
Why it matters
Families sending children to religious schools continued to receive the same general public benefits, like bus fare reimbursement, available to all schoolchildren. The ruling set the framework future courts would use to decide how far governments can go in helping religious institutions or their students without violating the separation of church and state, shaping decades of school-aid litigation.
What changes now
This is a final merits decision resolving the constitutional challenge; the New Jersey reimbursement program remained in effect. The ruling did not address the statute's separate exclusion of students at profit-making private schools, since that issue was not properly raised, leaving it open for a future challenge if such students sought the same benefit.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly did not decide whether New Jersey could exclude children at profit-making private schools from transportation reimbursement, since no one before the Court had standing to raise that issue on this record. It also did not decide whether a state must extend transportation benefits to religious schools, only that doing so here did not violate the Constitution.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Jackson
Justice Jackson argued the majority ignored the actual facts, insisting the township provided no real transportation service but merely reimbursed fares regardless of any safety benefit, and that the resolution discriminated by aiding only public and Catholic school families while excluding others. He contended aiding students at religious schools is indistinguishable from aiding the church itself, since Catholic education is central to the Church's mission, and found no principled line between small and large forms of state support for religion.
Dissent — Justice Rutledge
“Neither so high nor so impregnable today as yesterday is the wall raised between church and state by Virginia's great statute of religious freedom and the First Amendment”Rutledge's objection that the majority weakened the separation between church and state despite its own rhetoric.
Justice Rutledge argued the First Amendment's establishment clause forbids any public money from aiding religious institutions or instruction in any degree, however small, tracing this absolute rule to Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance against Virginia's religious assessment. He rejected the majority's 'public welfare' framing as a loophole that could justify far larger subsidies to religious schools, and would have held the New Jersey program unconstitutional and reversed the judgment.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first rejected the argument that reimbursing parents violated due process by taking one person's property for another's private benefit, holding that a state legislature may reasonably decide that helping all children get safely to and from school, regardless of the type of school, serves a genuine public purpose.
- Turning to the core constitutional question, the Court reviewed the history behind the First Amendment's ban on laws 'respecting an establishment of religion,' tracing it to colonial-era religious persecution and forced tithing that the framers, especially Madison and Jefferson in Virginia, fought to abolish.
- From that history the Court distilled a broad rule: government cannot set up a church, aid one or all religions, or tax citizens to support religious activities or institutions in any amount, evoking Jefferson's phrase describing a 'wall of separation between church and State.'
- The Court also recognized a competing constitutional command: government cannot exclude people from general public benefits simply because of their religion, meaning New Jersey could not deny bus-fare help to families only because their children attended religious schools.
- Applying these principles, the Court found that New Jersey's bus program was like other general public services, such as police and fire protection, that benefit everyone equally without funding religious teaching itself, since the money went to reimbursing transportation rather than paying for religious instruction.
- Because the state contributed nothing directly to the schools and the aid flowed to parents as part of a religion-neutral general welfare program, the Court concluded the arrangement came close to, but did not cross, the constitutional line against establishing religion.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Cochran v. Louisiana State Board of Education (281 U.S. 370)
The Court relied on this earlier case upholding state-provided secular textbooks as supporting a public purpose in aiding schoolchildren generally.