Amanda Harmon Cooley (South Texas College of Law Houston) has posted Quiet Encroachments on School Prayer Jurisprudence on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Over the last decade, there have been multiple occurrences of religious indoctrination and teacher-led prayer in public schools, despite 75 years of consistent Supreme Court precedent that has determined these school-sponsored exercises violate the Establishment Clause. These dogged attempts to install prayer in public schools have been spurred on by a judicial ideology that has advocated for the constitutionality of expansive religious practices within government based on the history of the United States being a religious nation. By embracing this ideology in its Establishment Clause analyses, the conservative majority of the Roberts Court has constructed a firm foundation upon which motivated interests can argue that school-sponsored prayer no longer transgresses the boundaries of the First Amendment when analyzed through an interpretive lens of history and tradition. The 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case has become the new high watermark for the Supreme Court’s embrace of this flawed decision-making approach through its series of insidious quiet encroachments upon the Court’s longstanding school prayer jurisprudence. As such, this Article uses a detailed analysis of the Kennedy majority’s […]
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