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Sherbert
v. Verner
374
U.S. 398 (1963)
The
Rothgerber Johnson & Lyons Religious Institutions
Group gratefully acknowledges the contribution of the
Ethics and Public Policy Center which provided the following case commentary taken from Terry Eastland, Religious
Liberty in the Supreme Court: The Cases That Define
the Debate over Church and State (1993).
Here
for the first time the Supreme Court ruled that the free-exercise
provision of the First Amendment requires exemption of religious
believers from a non-discriminatory secular law. Adell Sherbert,
a Seventh-day Adventist, was fired by her South Carolina
employer because she refused to work on Saturday, the Sabbath
day of her faith. Unable to find another job that did not
require Saturday work, she filed a claim for unemployment
compensation. The state rejected her claim on the grounds
that by refusing to work on Saturday she had refused to
accept suitable work and was therefore disqualified. Not
surprisingly, given the Supreme Court's free-exercise decisions
to this point, the South Carolina Supreme Court rejected
Sherbert's contention that the state law abridged her First
Amendment rights.
But,
in a critical turning point for free-exercise jurisprudence,
the Supreme Court reversed that judgment. Under Reynolds
v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879), government had
authority to regulate religiously motivated action so long
as it had a rational basis for doing so. The rational-basis
burden was so easy to satisfy as to foreclose the possibility
of constitutionally mandated exemptions from general law.
In Sherbert v. Verner, the Court held that government
may burden the free exercise of religion only if it has
a compelling interest in doing so. South Carolina did not
meet this new test.
In
crafting a free-exercise exemption from general law, the
Court, in an opinion written by Justice William Brennan,
viewed the case differently from Braunfeld v. Brown,
366 U.S. 599 (1961),
which
declined to recognize an exception for Sabbatarians from
laws limiting work on Sunday. Writing separately, Justice
Potter Stewart concurred in the judgment but thought the
Court should have overruled Braunfeld. Justice John
M. Harlan II, joined by Justice Byron White, in dissent,
argued that the majority read the free-exercise provision
too expansively and in fact did overrule Braunfeld.
These three opinions are presented here. Sherbert v.
Verner was handed down on the same day as Abington
School District v. Schempp.
Participating
in Sherbert v. Verner, decided June 17, 1963, were
Chief Justice Earl Warren and Associate Justices Hugo L.
Black, William J. Brennan, Jr., Tom C. Clark, William O.
Douglas, Arthur J. Goldberg, John M. Harlan II, Potter Stewart,
and Byron R. White.
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