Law Commons^™

Private Schools' Role And Rights In Setting Vaccination Policy: A Constitutional And Statutory Puzzle, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

Measles and other vaccine-preventable childhood diseases are making a comeback, as a growing number of parents are electing not to vaccinate their children. May private schools refuse admission to these students? This deceptively simple question raises complex issues of First Amendment law and statutory interpretation, and it also has implications for other current hot-button issues in constitutional law, including whether private schools may discriminate against LGBTQ students. This Article is the first to address the issue of private schools’ rights to exclude unvaccinated children. It finds that the answer is “it depends.” It also offers a model law that states …

Private Schools' Role And Rights In Setting Vaccination Policy: A Constitutional And Statutory Puzzle, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

Measles and other vaccine-preventable childhood diseases are making a comeback, as a growing number of parents are electing not to vaccinate their children. May private schools refuse admission to these students? This deceptively simple question raises complex issues of First Amendment law and statutory interpretation, and it also has implications for other current hot-button issues in constitutional law, including whether private schools may discriminate against LGBTQ students. This Article is the first to address the issue of private schools’ rights to exclude unvaccinated children. It finds that the answer is “it depends.” It also offers a model law that states …

Forgotten Federal-Missionary Partnerships: New Light On The Establishment Clause, Nathan Chapman

Scholarly Works

Americans have long disputed whether the government may support religious instruction as part of an elementary education. Since Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Supreme Court has gradually articulated a doctrine that permits states to provide funds, indirectly through vouchers and in some cases directly through grants, to religious schools for the nonreligious goods they provide. Unlike most other areas of Establishment Clause jurisprudence, however, the Court has not built this doctrine on a historical foundation. In fact, in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017), the dissenters from this doctrine were the ones to rely on the founding-era record.

Intriguingly, …