Court Opinion

ID: 9425241
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:14:09.473549+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:54.213511
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Douglas,
with whom Mr. Justice Brennan and Mr. Justice Stewart concur,
dissenting.
There is as much a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment whether the payment from public funds to sectarian schools involves last year, the current year, or next year. Madison in his Remonstrance stated: “[T]he same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment . ...”1
Whether the grant is for teaching last year or at the present time, taxpayers are forced to contribute to sectarian schools a part of their tax dollars.
The ban on that practice is not new. Lemon I, 403 U. S. 602, did not announce a change in the law. We had announced over and over again that the use of taxpayers’ money to support parochial schools violates the First Amendment, made applicable to the States by virtue of the Fourteenth.
We said in unequivocal words in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U. S. 1, 16: “No tax in any amount, *210large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.” We reiterated the same idea in Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U. S. 306, 314, in McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U. S. 420, 443, and in Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U. S. 488, 493. We repeated the same idea in McCollum, v. Board of Education, 333 U. S. 203, 210, and added that a State’s tax-supported public schools could not be used “for the dissemination of religious doctrines” nor could a State provide the church “pupils for their religious classes through use of the State’s compulsory public school machinery.” Id., at 212.
Mr. Justice Brennan in his separate opinion in Lemon I put the matter succinctly when he said,
“[F]or more than a century, the consensus, enforced by legislatures and courts with substantial consistency, has been that public subsidy of sectarian schools constitutes an impermissible involvement of secular with religious institutions.” 403 U. S. 642, 648-649.
So there was clear warning that those who proposed such subsidies were treading on unconstitutional ground. They can tender no considerations of equity that should allow them to profit from their unconstitutional venture.
The issues presented in this type of case are often caught up in political strategies, designed to turn judicial or legislative minorities into majorities. Lawyers planning trial strategies are familiar with those tactics. But those who use them and lose have no equities that make constitutional what has long been declared to be unconstitutional. From the days of Madison, the issue of subsidy has never been a question of the amount of the subsidy but rather a principle of no subsidy at all.
*211The problem of retroactivity involved in criminal cases is therefore inapplicable. There the question is whether the newly announced rule goes to the fairness of the trial that had been completed under the old rule. See Johnson v. New Jersey, 384 U. S. 719, 726-729. Here there is no new rule supplanting an old rule. The rule of no subsidy has been the dominant one since the days of Madison. We deal with the normal situation that governs judicial decisions. Normally they determine legal rights and obligations with respect to events that have already transpired. By definition, courts decide disputes that have already arisen. A losing litigant has no equity in the fact that he “relied” on advice that turned out to be unreliable or wrong.2 A decision overruling a prior authority may at times deny a litigant due process if applied retroactively. See Brinkerhoff-Faris Trust & Savings Co. v. Hill, 281 U. S. 673. Only a compelling circumstance has been held to limit a judicial ruling to prospective applications. The disruptive effect in criminal law enforcement is one example. Stovall v. Denno, 388 U. S. 293, 300. Likewise, a ruling on the legality of municipal bonds has been given only prospective application where many prior bonds had been issued in good faith on a contrary assumption. City of Phoenix v. Kolodziejski, 399 U. S. 204, 213-215.
Retroactivity of the decision in Lemon I goes to the very core of the integrity of the judicial process. Constitutional principles do not ride on the effervescent arguments advanced by those seeking to obtain unconstitu*212tional subsidies. The happenstance of litigation is no criterion for dispensing these unconstitutional subsidies. No matter the words used for the apologia, the subsidy today given to sectarian schools out of taxpayers’ monies exceeds by far the “three pence” which Madison condemned in his Remonstrance.
I would reverse the judgment below and adhere to the constitutional principle announced in Lemon I.

 Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, 2 Writings of James Madison 183, 186 (G. Hunt ed. 1901). The Remonstrance is reprinted in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U. S. 1, 63 (Rutledge, J., dissenting), and in Walz v. Tax Comm’n, 397 U. S. 664, 719 (Douglas, J., dissenting).

 The rule of Bruton v. United States, 391 U. S. 123, which rejected Delli Paoli v. United States, 352 U. S. 232, was given retrospective effect. We said, “The element of reliance is not persuasive, for Delli Paoli has been under attack from it's inception and many courts have in fact rejected it.” Roberts v. Russell, 392 U. S. 293, 295.