The Supreme Court sided with a Catholic charity in a legal dispute with Wisconsin state authorities over unemployment benefit taxes. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion for the court cited the First Amendment’s mandate of “government neutrality between religions.”
As framed by the charity, the legal question in the case was whether a state violates the First Amendment by “denying a religious organization an otherwise-available tax exemption because the organization does not meet the state’s criteria for religious behavior.”
Catholic Charities Bureau argued that its exclusion by the state from a religious exemption was unconstitutional “in at least three ways,” including for allegedly being discriminatory.
A divided Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with the state last year. The court’s liberal majority concluded that the charity isn’t “operated primarily for religious purposes” under state law, over conservative dissent that said the majority “rewrites the statute to deprive Catholic Charities of the tax exemption, rendering unto the state that which the law says belongs to the church.”
Reversing the state court on Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court deemed this case an easy one, reasoning that the state court failed to apply the rigorous constitutional analysis required.
“When the government distinguishes among religions based on theological differences in their provision of services, it imposes a denominational preference that must satisfy the highest level of judicial scrutiny,” Sotomayor wrote for the court. “Because Wisconsin has transgressed that principle without the tailoring necessary to survive such scrutiny, the judgment of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion,” she wrote, referring to the process of a higher court sending a case back to a lower court. The March 31 oral argument reflected bipartisan concern among Supreme Court justices in the charity’s favor. The state had argued that the group didn’t engage in “distinctively religious activities” and didn’t assert “a religious objection to contributing to unemployment insurance.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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