Opinion ID: 782263
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Limited Context

Text: 44 First, the Seal is solely limited to the very narrow context of authenticating legal documents. There is a tight nexus between a legitimate secular purpose for using the pictograph of the Ten Commandments and sword (using recognizable symbols of secular law, ones that suggest the force of law) and the context in which the Seal is used (authentication of legal documents). Even when the government's motives are permissible, if there is not a tight nexus between the secular purpose for using a symbol and the context in which the symbol appears, a reasonable observer may suspect that the true reason for adopting the symbol was to endorse religion. Cf. Edwards, 482 U.S. at 586, 107 S.Ct. 2573 (applying Lemon 's purpose prong to strike down Louisiana's creation-science and evolution-science act because, inter alia, there was not a tight fit between the act's stated purpose of promoting academic freedom and the act's effect, which limited teachers' autonomy in deciding how to teach science). In this case, a reasonable observer has no reason to harbor such suspicions, 9 as the use of this recognizable legal symbol promotes the secular purpose of enabling individuals to recognize the legal validity of documents. 45 In addition to using the Seal in a manner that promotes a secular purpose, the clerk of the superior court has not used the Seal in contexts in which a reasonable observer might not understand the relationship between the Seal's symbols and its secular purpose. Courts have held the use of religious symbols to be unconstitutional when the symbols have appeared in contexts in which the links between the symbols and their supposed secular purposes are not readily apparent. Cf. Friedman v. Bd. of County Comm'rs of Bernalillo County, 781 F.2d 777 (10th Cir. 1985) (applying Lemon 's effect test and holding that a county-wide seal with religious imagery was unconstitutional). Here, however, the Seal has not proliferated to contexts unrelated to document authentication. As stated previously, with the exception of the embossing instruments themselves, no representations of the Ten Commandments or other religious symbols appear in the office of the court clerk; the Seal is not displayed in the superior court's courtroom or anywhere else in the courthouse; and the Seal is not used on official stationery or envelopes. Rather, the seal of the state of Georgia appears on the office's official stationery. The clerk of the court has confined the use of the Seal to the very limited context of authenticating legal documents, where reasonable observers would logically perceive it as a symbol of the force of law. 46