Impact
In its first hundred years, the United States Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution's Bill of Rights as a limit on federal government and considered the states bound only by those rights granted to its citizens by their own state constitutions. Because the federal laws during this period were remote influences at most on the personal affairs of its citizens, minimal attention was paid by the Court to how those provisions in the federal Bill of Rights were to be interpreted.
Following the passage of the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution at the end of the Civil War, the Supreme Court would hear hundreds of cases involving conflicts over the constitutionality of laws passed by the states. The decisions in these cases were often criticized as resulting more from the biases of the individual Justices than the applicable rule of law or constitutional duty to protect individual rights. But, by the 1930s, the Court began consistently reasoning that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizens First Amendment protections from even state and local governments, a process known as incorporation.
The 1940 decision in Cantwell v. Connecticut was the first Supreme Court decision to apply the First Amendment's religious protections to the states, that case focusing on the so-called Free Exercise Clause. The decision Everson followed in 1947, the first incorporating the Establishment Clause. Numerous state cases followed disentangling the church from public schools, most notably the 1951 New Mexico case of Zellers v. Huff.
Similar First Amendment cases have flooded the courts in the decades following Everson. Having invoked Thomas Jefferson's metaphor of the wall of separation in the Everson decision, the lawmakers and courts have struggled how to balance governments' dual duty to satisfy both the nonestablishment clause and the free exercise clause contained in the language of the amendment. The majority and dissenting Justices in Everson split over this very question, with Rutledge in the minority by insisting that the Constitution forbids "every form of public aid or support for religion".
Read more about this topic: Everson V. Board Of Education
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