A federal appeals court on Friday unanimously upheld a lower court’s injunction blocking Louisiana’s law requiring a display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom—a decision that may be consequential now that other states have adopted similar laws.
“If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,” said a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in New Orleans. “This is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause,” the provision of the First Amendment that forbids any government establishment of religion.