A federal judge has blocked—in four districts for now—an Arkansas law requiring classroom displays of the Ten Commandments, ruling that the measure likely violates the U.S. Constitution and is inconsistent with a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
The law known as Act 573, which Arkansas lawmakers passed in April, is similar to measures adopted in 2024 by Louisiana and this year by Texas. All generally require displays in every classroom of a version of the Ten Commandments drawn from the King James version of the Bible.
U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks said the Arkansas measure is “nearly identical” to the Kentucky law that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in 1980 in Stone v. Graham.
“Why would Arkansas pass an obviously unconstitutional law?” Brooks, an appointee of President Barack Obama, said in his Aug. 4 decision in Stinson v. Fayetteville School District. “Most likely because the state is part of a coordinated strategy among several states to inject Christian religious doctrine into public-school classrooms.”
The Louisiana law was blocked statewide by a federal judge last November, and in June, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in New Orleans, upheld the preliminary injunction. Louisiana has asked the full 5th Circuit court to take up the case.
Meanwhile, the same coalition of groups that have challenged the Louisiana and Arkansas laws—the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation—sued last month over the Texas law.
Texas, like Louisiana (and Mississippi), is part of the 5th Circuit, so any decision by the appeals court could apply to that state’s law assuming the court found them substantially similar. (Arkansas, however, is in the 8th Circuit.)
The Arkansas lawsuit named the Fayetteville, Bentonville, Siloam Springs, and Springdale school districts as defendants, but the districts declined to defend the law. That led the state to intervene in support of the measure.
The measure was due to take effect Aug. 5, and it was unclear whether the state planned to require other districts to comply despite the injunction blocking it in the four defendant districts. The state attorney general’s office declined to elaborate on that question.
“I am reviewing the court’s order and assessing our legal options,” Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, a Republican, said in a statement.
Judge says more recent Supreme Court rulings have not undermined 1980 Ten Commandments decision
In his 35-page decision, Brooks said, “This case begins and ends with Stone,” the Supreme Court’s 1980 decision involving the similar Kentucky law.
“As Stone explains, posting the Ten Commandments on a classroom wall ‘serves no educational function,’” Brooks wrote, quoting the high court’s unsigned opinion in the Kentucky case. (The opinion in the 6-3 case was later revealed to have been written by Justice William J. Brennan Jr. Education Week explored the case in an article last year.)
Brooks rejected arguments from the state that more recent Supreme Court decisions, particularly its 2022 ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, have undermined Stone.
The Kennedy decision upheld a high school football coach’s post-game prayers and effectively overruled a key legal test for analyzing government laws and policies with respect to religion and replaced it with one focused on historical practices and understandings.
“But Kennedy did not overrule any public-school Establishment Clause cases involving a state’s or school district’s imposition of religious doctrine or practices on public-school children,” Brooks said.
Even if the Stone decision did not require the Arkansas law being blocked, Brooks said, the statute could not be saved based on the Kennedy decision’s historical-practices test.
Brooks credited the testimony and report of the challengers’ expert, Steven Green, a professor of history and religious studies at Willamette University in Salem, Ore.
Green argued that the Arkansas law was incompatible with the Founding Fathers’ conception of religious liberty and that there is no evidence of a long-standing historical practice of displays of the Ten Commandments in U.S. classrooms.
Brooks concluded that the display of the Ten Commandments in a public school classroom would be “problematically coercive.” Even the Supreme Court’s decision in late June in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which upheld the right of parents with religious objections to remove their children from LGBTQ+ lessons, supported that conclusion, Brooks said.
The Mahmoud decision “recognized the potentially coercive nature of classroom instruction in public schools,” Brooks said. “Once students are at school, staff control their movements and often their expression. Students may not move around freely to avoid official religious indoctrination or to contest it beyond certain limits. This is especially true in the classroom context.”
Brooks noted that in contrast with the Louisiana law, which allows districts to use public funds to purchase the Ten Commandments posters, the Arkansas measure largely requires that the displays be donated or funded privately.
The judge noted that the Fayetteville district had recently received a donation of hundreds of Ten Commandments posters, and a number of private groups have offered to raise money and donate such displays to schools.
Lucas Harder, the policy services director and staff attorney of the Arkansas School Boards Association, said in an interview that when the state required the national motto, “In God We Trust,” to be displayed in classrooms and libraries in 2017, there were soon donations to every district to help them comply with the law.
Harder said he has received only a handful of questions about the Ten Commandments law, but he expected that may change after the judge’s ruling and given the fact that the new school year is about to open.
As for whether the non-defendant school districts should comply with the law, Harder said, “It would be our understanding that, unless something else changes, [the preliminary injunction] would apply only to the four districts” who were defendants in the case.
He also said there seemed to be little in the way of an enforcement mechanism in the law, but he would advise school districts to consult their lawyers about how best to comply with the statute.
The law’s challengers encourage all Arkansas districts to follow the injunction
Advocates for the challengers welcomed Brooks’ decision.
The ruling “ensures that our clients’ classrooms will remain spaces where all students, regardless of their faith, feel welcomed and can learn without worrying that they do not live up to the state’s preferred religious beliefs,” Heather L. Weaver, the senior counsel with the ACLU’s Program on Religious Freedom and Belief, said in a statement.
Rachel Laser, the president and CEO of Americans United, said the decision “will ensure that Arkansas families—not politicians or public school officials—get to decide how and when their children engage with religion.”
Americans United said it was encouraging all school districts in Arkansas to respect the preliminary injunction, adding that “any district that implements Act 573 will be violating the First Amendment and could be inviting additional litigation.”
