View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Michigan School of Law Michigan Law Review Volume 100 Issue 2 2001 A Political History of the Establishment Clause John C. Jeffries Jr. University of Virginia School of Law James E. Ryan University of Virginia School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, First Amendment Commons, Fourteenth Amendment Commons, Legal History Commons, Religion Law Commons, and the Supreme Court of the United States Commons Recommended Citation John C. Jeffries Jr. & James E. Ryan, A Political History of the Establishment Clause, 100 MICH. L. REV. 279 (2001). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol100/iss2/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Michigan Law Review at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Michigan Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. A POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE lohn C. effries,l Jr.* James E. Ryan** Now pending before the Supreme Court is the most important church-state issue of our time: whether publicly funded vouchers may be used at private, religious schools without violating the Establish ment Clause.1 The last time the Court considered school aid, it over ruled precedent and upheld a government program providing comput ers and other instructional materials to parochial schools.2 In a plurality opinion defending that result, Justice Thomas dismissed as irrelevant the fact that some aid recipients were "pervasively sectar ian.