## Facts

- Employees of a discount department store in Anne Arundel County, Maryland sold various nonexempt retail items on Sunday.
- Maryland’s Sunday closing statute generally barred Sunday retail sales, while allowing sales of certain listed goods (e.g., food staples, gasoline, drugs, newspapers) and creating additional county-specific and business-specific exemptions.
- The employees were prosecuted, convicted, and fined for violating the Sunday sales restrictions.
- Maryland’s highest court affirmed the convictions, and the employees sought review in the U.S. Supreme Court.

## Issues

1. Whether Maryland’s Sunday closing scheme, given its history and choice of Sunday, violated the Establishment Clause as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.
2. Whether the statute’s exemptions and classifications denied equal protection by irrationally discriminating among businesses and counties.
3. Whether an exemption provision using terms such as merchandise “essential to” or “incidental to” certain recreational businesses was unconstitutionally vague under the Due Process Clause.
4. Whether the employees had standing to assert a Free Exercise Clause claim.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court affirmed the convictions.
- The employees lacked standing to press a Free Exercise claim because they alleged economic injury rather than interference with their own religious beliefs or practices.
- The Court reached the Establishment Clause challenge and held the Sunday closing law constitutional because its contemporary purpose and effect were secular.
- The Court held the statutory classifications and exemptions permissible under equal protection.
- The Court held the challenged exemption language sufficiently definite to satisfy due process.

## Legal Principles

- A claimant asserting Free Exercise rights must show a concrete burden on personal religious belief or conduct; economic injury alone is insufficient for standing on that theory.
- A law does not violate the Establishment Clause merely because it has religious origins or coincides with religious doctrine; the controlling inquiry is the law’s present purpose and effect.
- A state may, under its police power, designate a uniform day of rest and recreation to protect public welfare without establishing religion, even if the day chosen has religious significance for many.
- Economic and geographic classifications in commercial regulation are reviewed deferentially; they are valid if they bear a rational relation to legitimate legislative objectives.
- Statutory terms are not void for vagueness if, read in context and measured against ordinary understanding and practice, they give fair notice and provide workable enforcement standards.

## Conclusion

The Court upheld Maryland’s Sunday closing statute as a secular regulation providing a common day of rest and recreation, concluding that the law neither established religion nor denied equal protection or due process, and that the employees could not pursue a Free Exercise claim based only on economic harm.


McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961)