Supreme Court to weigh in on efforts to establish nation’s first charter religious school
SCOTUS NEWS
on January 24, 2025
at 5:00 pm
The court is scheduled to hear Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, Inc. v. Davis as well as Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board, Inc. v. Drummond during the spring. (Katie Barlow).
The Supreme Court added three new cases to its docket on Friday afternoon. Two of them will be argued in conjunction. The justices also agreed to weigh in on a question relating to the certification of class actions. She did not give any explanation for her recusal. She did not give any explanation as to why she recused herself. Isidore’s educational philosophy is to operate the school as Catholic school.
The charter school board and the school came to the Supreme Court to ask the justices for their opinion in October. The school contended that the state supreme court’s ruling “unconstitutionally punished the free exercise of religion by disqualifying the religious from government aid.” What’s more, the school argued, the state supreme court circumvented the U.S. Supreme Court’s cases establishing a right to the free exercise of religion “by transmuting St. Isidore into an arm of the government”: It “reasoned that excluding St. Isidore on religious grounds raised no Free Exercise problem because St. Isidore’s contract would turn the school into a ‘surrogate of the State,’ noting that Oklahoma’s legislature had labeled the charter schools ‘public.'”
The state urged the justices to deny review. The school emphasized its intention to “serve” the evangelizing missions of the church. It also argued that the state supreme courts ruling was based on a separate conclusion that the contract between the school and charter school board violated Oklahoma Constitution. This is the type of “adequate independent” state grounds that precludes Supreme Court review.
