New York v. Cathedral Academy
434 US 125 (Decided December 6, 1977)
Bill Long
This case does not advance the Supreme Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence, but it does illustrate the way that the Court sometimes needs to police its decisions to make sure the states comply with them.
Levitt Redivivus
As we saw in Levitt, in the crisis over declining enrollments at Catholic schools New York passed a law authorizing reimbursement to nonpublic schools for state-mandated recordkeeping and testing services. In April 1972, the New York District Court declared the statute unconstitutional as failing the Lemon test. The US Supreme Court upheld that decision in 1973. While the decision was pending before the Supreme Court, however, the New York Legislature decided to pass a law authorizing reimbursement to sectarian schools for their disallowed expenses that were incurred during 1971-72. In other words, since nonpublic schools had already either made what they thought were legitimate expenditures or planned to make them in 1971-72 and then learned that they wouldn't get reimbursed for them, they were caught "holding the bag." Instead of being helped by the law, their situation became even more precarious. Thus, by enacting the revised statute, the Legislature was trying to complete its "moral obligation" to the schools by passing the revised statute. It also pursued its plan because of the procedure followed by the Pennsylvania District Court on remand after Lemon was decided by the US Supreme Court in 1971.
Procedure after the Lemon Decision
After Lemon, the PA District Court on remand enjoined payments under the unconstitutional statute for any services performed after the date of the US Supreme Court's decision, but allowed reimbursement for services performed before that date. The US Supreme Court, in Lemon II (1973), upheld this practice as a proper exercise of a court's equitable powers. Thus, what seemed to be at stake in the New York statute was the desire to allow the same kind of situation in New York as obtained in Pennsylvania.
There was only one problem with this, however. In the present case, after Levitt was decided in 1973, the District Court decided on remand that it would not limit its decree as the PA District Court, but expressly enjoined payments for amounts "heretofore or hereafter expended." Thus, by its terms, the NY order disallowed what the PA court left open.
The Court's Decision
The question, therefore, before the Supreme Court was whether NY's action could be squared with the precedent of Lemon II, which affirmed the practice of the PA District Court. Justice Stewart stated the issue: "To approve the enactment of ch. 996 (the subsequent NY statute) would thus expand the reasoning of Lemon II to hold that a state legislature may effectively modify a federal court's injunction whenever a balancing of constitutional equities might conceivably have justified the court's granting similar relief in the first place." Stated in this way, it is not difficult to see how the Court rejected New York's statute by a wide margin (8-1, with White dissenting).
The only thing remaining for the Court was to ascertain if, in fact, the statute passed by NY (ch. 996) differed in any substantial way from the original statute passed, which the Court refers to as ch. 138. After examining the text of the statute, Justice Stewart concluded: "Thus, while ch. 996 provides for only one payment rather than many, and changes the method of administering the payments, nothing on the face of the statute indicates that payments under ch. 996 would differ in any substantial way from those authorized under ch. 138. The deficiency in the original statute (there was no assurance that lump sum payments to nonpublic schools reflected actual expenditures for mandated services and there was an impermissible risk of religious indoctrination inherent in some of the required services themselves) persisted in this statute.
Conclusion
Thus, the Court held that ch. 996 is unconstitutional because it would of necessity either have the primary effect of aiding religion or result in excessive state involvement in religious affairs.
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