## Facts

- Arkansas enacted a 1928 statute making it a misdemeanor for teachers in state-supported schools to teach that humans evolved from lower forms of animals or to use textbooks teaching that theory.
- The statute also subjected violating teachers to dismissal.
- In the 1960s, Little Rock public schools adopted a biology textbook containing a chapter describing human evolution, and Susan Epperson, a public high school biology teacher, was required to use it.
- Epperson faced a conflict between complying with the curriculum and risking criminal prosecution and termination.
- Epperson sought declaratory and injunctive relief, alleging the statute violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments; a parent intervened in support.

## Issues

1. Whether Arkansas’s statutory ban on teaching human evolution in public schools violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.
2. Whether the state’s authority to set public school curricula permits prohibiting instruction in a scientific theory based on religious objections.
3. Whether the statute is unconstitutional regardless of whether it prohibits teaching evolution as true or merely explaining the theory.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court unanimously reversed and held the statute unconstitutional.
- The Court ruled that the law violated the Establishment Clause, applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.
- The statute was invalid whether construed to bar teaching evolution as true or to bar explaining it.
- The Court declined to decide whether the statute was void for vagueness because the Establishment Clause violation was dispositive.

## Legal Principles

- The First Amendment requires governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.
- A state may not use its public school system to advance or protect a particular religious doctrine by suppressing instruction that conflicts with that doctrine.
- Although a state has broad authority to prescribe public school curricula, it may not impose criminal prohibitions on teaching a scientific theory when the prohibition is based on reasons that violate the First Amendment.
- Curriculum decisions may not be tailored to the principles or prohibitions of any religious sect or dogma.

## Conclusion

Arkansas’s ban on teaching human evolution was an unconstitutional law respecting an establishment of religion because it selectively suppressed a scientific theory for a religious purpose, exceeding constitutional limits on state control of public school curricula.


Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968)