Supreme Court Declines to Hear Appeals on Religious Murals, Special Education

Washington

A First Amendment challenge to a principal’s power to alter religious murals and a complaint by parents in a special education dispute over their child’s reassignment to another school were two appeals out of hundreds of cases that the U.S. Supreme Court turned away at the start of its new term last week.

The high court denied requests to review lower-court decisions in those cases, allowing the rulings to stand as the law in their courts’ jurisdictions.

Denial is the fate of the vast majority of appeals to the Supreme Court. In recent years, the court typically has accepted only about 80 cases per term, out of more than...