Possible Road Map Seen in Dover Case

Judge’s rejection of intelligent design could guide policymakers, educators.

In issuing a blistering, unequivocal decision declaring “intelligent design” to be illegitimate science, a federal judge in Pennsylvania may have provided an authoritative guide for school officials and science teachers seeking to defend the teaching of evolution, legal observers say.

The landmark ruling last month by U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III not only found the Dover, Pa., district’s policy promoting intelligent design unconstitutional, but also delved deeply into the scientific claims of the concept itself—and thoroughly rejected them.

“Many school board members and educators need a way to resolve this, in communities where they may be looking for alternatives to evolution,” said Charles A. Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center of the Freedom Foundation, in Arlington, Va., which studies constitutional issues. “It gives school boards a way to say to their communities, ‘The public school is not the...