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date: 17 April 2021

Abstract and Keywords

The public funding of private religious education has been one of the more contentious issues in the history of American education and in US constitutional law. Unlike the situation in many Western democracies, the United States does not have a tradition of equal funding of public and private schools. This is based in large part on interpretations of the US Constitution and the historical development of public education in the United States. This article discusses the evolution of the “no-funding rule” from the early nineteenth century through the latest interpretations of that rule by the US Supreme Court. It demonstrates that neither the rule nor its application has remained static over time.

Keywords: Catholic Church, Establishment Clause, nonsectarian, no-funding rule, religious schools, School Question, Supreme Court

Steven K. Green

Steven K. Green is the Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law, affiliated professor of History, and director of the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. He is the author of Inventing a Christian America (Oxford University Press, 2015), The Bible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash that Shaped Modern Church-State Doctrine (Oxford University Press, 2012), The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2010), co-author of Religious Freedom and the Supreme Court (Baylor University Press, 2008), and author of more than forty book chapters and articles on church and state. He has also participated as co-counsel in three Supreme Court cases and filed more than twenty friend-of-the-court briefs at the high court.

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