I'm delighted to report that my Hoover colleague (and emeritus professor at Cornell), Barry Strauss, will be guest-blogging this week about this new book of his. Here's the publisher's summary:
A new history of two centuries of Jewish revolts against the Roman Empire, drawing on recent archeological discoveries and new scholarship by leading historian Barry Strauss.
Jews vs. Romeis a gripping account of one of the most momentous eras in human history: the two hundred years of ancient Israel's battles against Rome that reshaped Judaism and gave rise to Christianity. Barry Strauss vividly captures the drama of this era, highlighting the courageous yet tragic uprisings, the geopolitical clash between the empires of Rome and Persia, and the internal conflicts among Jews.
Between 63 BCE and 136 CE, the Jewish people launched several revolts driven by deep-seated religious beliefs and resentment towards Roman rule. Judea, a province on Rome's eastern fringe, became a focal point of tension and rebellion. Jews vs. Rome recounts the three major uprisings: the Great Revolt of 66–70 CE, which led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, culminating in the Siege of Masada, where defenders chose mass suicide over surrender; the Diaspora Revolt, ignited by heavy taxes across the Empire; and the Bar Kokhba Revolt. We meet pivotal figures such as Simon Bar Kokhba but also some of those lesser-known women of the era like Berenice, a Jewish princess who played a major role in the politics of the Great Revolt and was improbably the love of Titus—Rome's future emperor and the man who destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple.
Today, echoes of those battles resonate as the Jewish nation faces new challenges and conflicts. Jews vs. Rome offers a captivating narrative that connects the past with the present, appealing to anyone interested in Rome, Jewish history, or the compelling true tales of resilience and resistance.
The story notes that the Trump Administration has sought emergency or interim relief more often than did the Biden Administration, and has had more success--prevailing in 84 percent of such cases compared to 53 percent during the Biden Administration. "That is perhaps unsurprising, given that the court is dominated by six Republican appointees," Liptak writes.
The story notes that there appears to be an ideological or partisan pattern in the justices votes on such orders.
The emergency docket presents a different portrait of the court, one in which partisan affiliations map onto voting patterns quite closely, reinforcing the declining public confidence in the court reflected in opinion polls.
On the far right side of the court, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. voted with the Trump administration 95 percent of the time and the Biden administration just 18, for a gap of 77 percentage points.
On the far left, the size of the gap was identical, but in the other direction. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson favored the Biden administration by 77 percentage points.
These are striking numbers, but there are reasons for caution: "The cases the two administrations pursued were different, of course, making comparison inexact, and the concentrated volume and sheer ambition of President's Trump's applications dwarfed those of his predecessor."
The article has this to say about the Biden Administration's record seeking interim relief from the Court:
Despite the court's conservative supermajority, the Biden administration did obtain relief in a slight majority of its emergency applications, including ones involving a commonly used abortion pill and "ghost guns," which are kits that can be bought online and assembled into untraceable homemade firearms.
But victories like those were influenced by two factors.
Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, like her predecessor in the first Trump administration and her successor in the current one, made strategic choices about which cases to bring to the court, generally choosing only ones with at least a fair prospect of success.
Second, more than two-thirds of the Biden administration's emergency applications took on rulings from the U.S. Court of Appeals from the Fifth Circuit. Opponents of the administration's policies and programs often filed challenges in that circuit, correctly anticipating that they would meet a favorable reception with its especially conservative judges. Still, those rulings often proved too conservative even for a generally conservative Supreme Court.
Moreover, in three cases in which the justices initially turned down the Biden administration's requests for emergency interim relief from Fifth Circuit rulings, the administration ultimately prevailed when the cases were set down on the merits docket for full briefing and argument.
For whatever reason, the article does not include a similar analysis of the second Trump Administration's record of success seeking interim relief.
It seems to me rather clear that the primary reason the Trump Administration has seen such success on the interim docket is because it has been very selective in deciding which cases to bring to the justices. The Trump Administration has aggressively pursued Supreme Court relief in cases where district courts lacked jurisdiction or provided overbroad or improper relief, but has acquiesced to the normal pace of litigation and appeals where the Administration's legal position is weak. It is no accident no case involving the Administration's attacks on law firms or universities has yet to reach the Court.
One can see how the Trump Administration has been selective and strategic just by looking at the numbers. According to Just Security there have been approximately 400 suits filed against he Trump Administration, over 125 of which have resulted in injunctions or other judicial orders blocking or staying the Administration action. So while the Trump Administration may have prevailed in 84 percent (16 of 19) applications, it remains the case that it has obtained Supreme Court relief in less than 15 percent of the cases in which its actions have been blocked or stalled by lower courts.
It is also fair to note that, as a general matter, the circuit courts of appeal were more likely to corral wayward district court orders during the Biden Administration than they have been in 2025. (See, for instance, how they handled suits against the "Social Cost of Carbon" EO.)
The story also notes that the Court refused to consider the propriety of universal injunctions when asked by the Biden Administration, but agreed to consider that question in Trump v. CASA. This is a fair point, but the story glosses over some important distinctions, such as that the brief at issue sought consideration of the scope of relief available under the APA, a more difficult question than that resolved in CASA that the Court has yet to address. More importantly, the Biden Administration combined its request for consideration of universal relief with review of the merits and, the latter of which was granted. As has been the Court's fairly consistent practice, a majority of justices saw no need to consider the scope of relief in that posture, perhaps because any judgment of the Court would, by its nature, apply nationwide.
My own view is that the Court's treatment of the second Trump Administration, to date, presents a very incomplete picture. More telling will be how the Court handles cases involving the Administration's more aggressive and more legally questionable actions, particularly those the Trump Administration has kept out of the shadows of the interim docket thus far.
There's been some press coverage—The Harvard Crimson, Boston Globe—of the Charlie Kirk vigil last night at Harvard, where I spoke alongside several students as well as my colleagues Randy Kennedy and Adrian Vermeule. I thought I'd recount my remarks here to give them full context, as well as to give credit where credit's due. Below is the prepared text, adjusted to match its delivery, as best I can remember it:
Thank you.
I want to confess that I was a little apprehensive in accepting your invitation to speak.
First, I was worried that it would be presumptuous, as I feel that I know so much less of Charlie Kirk's life and work than so many of you do. I deeply appreciate the students who have spoken today.
Second, I was apprehensive that in a place like Harvard, mourning Charlie Kirk would make one a target of opprobrium or disgust. There are some who believe those deeply moved by Kirk's murder, the widowing of his wife, and the fatherlessness of his children, shouldn't be so moved unless they're willing to take as their own every statement Kirk made and every position Kirk held. Charlie Kirk helped to put on the table on college campuses a wide range of conservative views; that's why so many people are here, who don't all agree about everything. I feel that no one here should feel it their burden to defend everything that other people might believe in order to mourn his unjust death. In that, I'd agree with Jonathan Adler, who noted that one can be a martyr without having to be a saint.
Third, I was apprehensive that it could make one a more literal target, that there could be some wacko out there. As to that, Kirk's example is one of very real courage—not just physical courage, knowing the sort of threats he faced, but intellectual courage, the kind that's necessary to stand under a sign that reads "prove me wrong" and take the very real risk that the next person to step up to the microphone might do just that.
Kirk was, certainly, a gifted communicator. And some think that it's by the gifts of such communicators that a political or intellectual movement thrives or fails. That may be true—in the short run. But in the long run, what makes more difference is the courage to pursue the truth, the courage that leads you to seek out the chance to be proven wrong.
Scott Alexander once wrote that a short-term "focus on transmission" may be
part of the problem. Everyone … knows that they are right. The only remaining problem is how to convince others. Go on Facebook and you will find a million people with a million different opinions, each confident in her own judgment, each zealously devoted to informing everyone else.
Instead, he writes,
… Debate is difficult and annoying. It doesn't scale. It only works on the subset of people who are willing to talk to you in good faith and smart enough to understand the issues involved. And even then, it only works glacially slowly, and you win only partial victories. What's the point?
Logical debate has one advantage over narrative, rhetoric, and violence: it's an asymmetric weapon. That is, it's a weapon which is stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys. In ideal conditions (which may or may not ever happen in real life) … the good guys will be able to present stronger evidence, cite more experts, and invoke more compelling moral principles. The whole point of logic is that, when done right, it can only prove things that are true.
Violence, by contrast,
is a symmetric weapon; the bad guys' punches hit just as hard as the good guys' do. … [H]opefully the good guys will be more popular than the bad guys, and so able to gather more soldiers. But … the good guys will only be more popular … insofar as their ideas have previously spread through some means other than violence. …
Unless you use asymmetric weapons, the best you can hope for is to win by coincidence…. Overall you should average out to a 50% success rate. When you win, it'll be because you got lucky.
Remember, he writes,
You are not completely immune to facts and logic. But you have been wrong about things before. You may be a bit smarter than the people on the other side. You may even be a lot smarter. But fundamentally their problems are your problems, and the same kind of logic that convinced you can convince them. It's just going to be a long slog. You didn't develop your opinions after a five-minute shouting match. You developed them after years of education and acculturation and engaging with hundreds of books and hundreds of people. Why should they be any different? …
All of this is too slow and uncertain for a world that needs more wisdom now. It would be nice to force the matter, to pelt people with speeches and documentaries until they come around. This will work in the short term. In the long term, it will leave you back where you started.
If you want people to be right more often than chance, you have to teach them ways to distinguish truth from falsehood. If this is in the face of enemy action, you will have to teach them so well that they cannot be fooled. You will have to do it person by person until the signal is strong and clear. You will have to raise the sanity waterline. There is no shortcut.
I hope that Kirk's example will help remind us of this—of the need for the courage to pursue the truth, person by person—and that, zichrono livracha, his memory will be a blessing.
Thank you.
(updated 12:42 p.m. to add the names of other speakers)
From today's decision in Noland v. Land of the Free, L.P., by Justice Lee Smalley Edmon, joined by Justice Anne Egerton and Riverside Superior Court Judge Kira Klatchko:
[N]early all of the legal quotations in plaintiff's opening brief, and many of the quotations in plaintiff's reply brief, are fabricated. That is, the quotes plaintiff attributes to published cases do not appear in those cases or anywhere else. Further, many of the cases plaintiff cites do not discuss the topics for which they are cited, and a few of the cases do not exist at all. These fabricated legal authorities were created by generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools that plaintiff's counsel used to draft his appellate briefs. The AI tools created fake legal authority—sometimes referred to as AI "hallucinations"—that were undetected by plaintiff's counsel because he did not read the cases the AI tools cited.
A nice headline for a Free Press editorial, drawing the entirely coincidental verbal connection to the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders.
It also reminds me of a passage I mentioned after those murders, from Rebecca West, writing about the English in 1940 as they anticipated the German attack on England after the fall of France:
Let nobody belittle them by pretending they were fearless. Not being as the ox and the ass, they were horribly afraid. But their pale lips did not part to say the words that would have given them security and dishonour.
Perhaps this wasn't so with Hebdo, and the Charlie Hebdo editors really were fearless (see, e.g., this quote from Stephane Charbonnier). Perhaps Kirk hadn't really foreseen the risk to him (though it sounds like had faced serious threats before). But whenever I have occasion to think about true courage, it is West's words that come to my mind.
I much appreciated John Podhoretz's comments on this, and I thought I'd pass them along in their entirety (without the Twitter breaks). Social media has in one way fulfilled the promise of free speech, by making speech cheaper, easier, and more frictionless than ever before. But some friction can be good, and we might be missing it about now. From Podhoretz:
Here's the danger of social media. It allows people to publish their internal monologues.
Our internal monologues and fantasies are often incredibly ugly. People go to therapists because they feel so guilty about them, and one of the tasks of a therapist is to explain that thoughts are not actions. You can rage in your thoughts about your brother, or someone at work, even fantasize about them dying—but you have done nothing and are guilty of nothing, and you need to forgive yourself and learn how to calm yourself down.
This is, I imagine, what Catholic confession is for, though you are, I gather, obliged to do penance for your evil thoughts. But remember—they are still inside you. They are between you and you.
Since 2007, people have a means of externalizing that interior monologue and this means something. A researcher at MIT saying, rather than thinking, "I really want to see that video of Charlie Kirk dying again because it works better than my anti-depressant" has become a public act. [I'm not sure whether this is a reference to a specific post, or just a concrete hypothetical standing in for posts of this sort. -EV] I see it. I am affected by it. The public discourse is too.
My sense of how the world works and what people are really like undergoes a change. I become rageful, and believe people who think this way are evil. It's likely they are not. They just have a means of externalizing the parts of them that no one ever saw.
But another human tendency, the tendency to extrapolate from individual samples to the whole, kicks in then as well. I will assume that anyone and everyone like that MIT researcher is an enemy of everything good and is unsalvageable. In that way my world shrinks.
From Chief Judge James Boasberg (D.D.C.) yesterday in Doe v. Rollins:
Plaintiffs … worked at the Department of Agriculture in jobs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion…. On the first day of his new Administration, Trump issued an executive order that denounced federal DEI programs as "shameful discrimination," charged them with "immense public waste," and directed federal agencies to end them. Days later, Plaintiffs were placed on administrative leave. The Office of Personnel Management then issued guidance that, Plaintiffs allege, shows that they would soon be fired and would be allowed to apply for reassignment only to other DEI-focused jobs—which, thanks to the recent Executive Order, no longer existed.
Plaintiffs are challenging their placement on leave and OPM's guidance as violations of the Administrative Procedure Act and the First and Fifth Amendments. And they have moved to bring that challenge under pseudonyms. For the reasons below, the Court will deny their Motion to proceed pseudonymously….
Generally, a complaint must identify the plaintiffs. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 10(a); [D.D.C. Local Civil Rule] 5.1(c)(1), 11.1. That requirement reflects the "presumption in favor of disclosure [of litigants' identities], which stems from the 'general public interest in the openness of governmental processes,' and, more specifically, from the tradition of open judicial proceedings." A party moving to proceed pseudonymously thus "bears the weighty burden of both demonstrating a concrete need for such secrecy, and identifying the consequences that would likely befall it if forced to proceed in its own name." As a result, the court must "'balance the litigant's legitimate interest in anonymity against countervailing interests in full disclosure'" … Plaintiffs have not met their burden to show that their privacy interests outweigh the public's presumptive and substantial interest in learning their identities.
Start with whether this case concerns "a matter of a sensitive and highly personal nature." Plaintiffs argue that it does because they fear that being outed as having worked on DEI programs will damage their professional prospects.
Some have been calling for the firing of people who publicly praised the murder of Charlie Kirk, or at least who argued that the murder was justified or defensible. I'm not wild about such calls; I think we generally need less cancel culture, not more, even as to people who say morally repugnant things. (Among other things, these calls for firing tend to spiral, to cover a wide range of other speech beyond the outrageous statements that first led to them.) But here let me focus not on the ethical or pragmatic question, but the legal one: If a government employer fires an employee for such speech, would that violate the employee's First Amendment rights?
[1.] Praising violence doesn't generally fall into any existing First Amendment exception, so that means it's protected against the government as sovereign—against criminal punishment, civil liability, and the like. The "incitement" exception is limited to speech that is intended to and likely to cause imminent illegal conduct. Praise of a past murder wouldn't qualify: Even if such praise may have a long-term tendency to influence people in the future to do bad things, the Court has rejected this "bad tendency" test for punishing speech.
Intentionally soliciting a criminal attack on a particular person may potentially be punishable as "solicitation" of crime, under U.S. v. Williams (2008) and U.S. v. Hansen (2023). But that certainly wouldn't apply to mere praise or justification of an attack that had already happened. (Just when it would apply to general advocacy of a future attack is a complex and unsettled question.) For more on these rules, see this post on the Graham Linehan controversy.
[2.] Of course, here the government is acting as employer, and in that capacity it has more latitude to discipline and fire employees than it does to imprison or fine them. Generally speaking, the government may discipline an employee based on the employee's speech if
The employee sued, claiming the firing was retaliation; the jury found for the hospital, and the Sixth Circuit upheld the verdict (among other things upholding the admission of evidence of the employee's interest in BDSM).
In Graf v. Morristown-Hamblen Hospital Ass'n, decided Wednesday by Sixth Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore, joined by Judges Richard Griffin and John Nalbandian, Graf—a nursing assistant technician—said that Ogle, a security guard, "had raped her" "during a lunch break and on hospital grounds." The hospital "determined that the sexual interaction between Graf and Ogle had been consensual," and fired "Graf on the grounds that she had violated hospital policy by having intercourse while on the clock and in an unauthorized area." (Ogle was also fired.)
Graf sued, claiming she was retaliated against for having brought the complaint, but the jury "returned a verdict in favor of MHHA on all counts." The court affirmed; here is an excerpt of the facts:
Records obtained during the discovery process indicate that Graf and Ogle began texting on June 19, 2021. The two exchanged hundreds of texts over the course of the next several months. According to Graf, the two were "work friends, and that was it."
But according to Ogle, although the relationship started off friendly, the two began discussing that they "were both part of the BDSM world" and having intimate, sexual conversations. Graf admitted to having discussions with Ogle about various topics, including her past abusive relationships and intimate sexual matters, but stated that Ogle always initiated sexual conversations and that they never discussed having relations with each other. The two also met "on a regular basis" during their breaks, meeting in a "numerous amount of spots" including stairwells around the hospital.
One day in June 2021, Ogle texted Graf and asked her to meet him for lunch. Graf agreed to meet, and Ogle guided her to the security office—a location that was on the hospital's campus but where Graf was not authorized to be—via text messages. Graf did not clock out, because she was not required to do so during breaks, and she had a coworker cover her during the break.
In a post earlier this week I cited some of the illiberal and, in some cases, unconstitutional incursions by the Trump administration onto the First Amendment in the past few months. Some of the most disturbing violations, though, have targeted our institutions of higher education.
One of the most high-profile attacks has come in the form of the broadside against Harvard University. Thanks to Harvard's willingness to stand up for itself, however, this campaign against universities, despite widespread pusillanimity on the part of campus leaders, is finally starting to show some cracks.
Earlier this month, a Massachusetts federal district court found that the Trump administration violated Harvard's First Amendment rights, and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, when it revoked billions in funding in a transparent effort to punish the university for its, and its community members', political views under the guise of combatting antisemitism. The government does not receive a dispensation to use unlawful means simply because it says it does so in the name of fighting antisemitism or other discrimination on campus.
Cato Institute scholar has a great overview of the data on how much political violence there is, and who perpetrates it. It is less prevalent than many think, and right-wing political violence is more common than the left-wing kind.
The awful murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has stimulated interest in the nature and extent of political violence in the United States. We do not yet know the identity and motive of the killer; but there is at least a substantial likelihood the motive was political in nature. My Cato Institute colleague Alex Nowrasteh has a great overview of the available data on political violence since 1975. He finds that the overall incidence of such violence is much lower than many assume. The 9/11 attacks dominate the stats, accounting for 83% of total deaths. Setting that aside, right-wing violence is significantly more prevalent than the left-wing variety.
It should, perhaps, go without saying. But I condemn the murder of Charlie Kirk without reservation. It is utterly indefensible, and I hope the killer is caught and severely punished. I was no fan of Kirk and his ideology. His organization, TPUSA, even once put me on its "Professor Watchlist" (they apparently removed me from the list a few months later, without explanation). But no one should be attacked or killed for their political beliefs. The murder is all the more tragic in light of the fact that Kirk left behind a wife and two small children. They did nothing to deserve this.
Now for Alex's summary of the data on violence:
A total of 3,599 people have been murdered in politically motivated terrorist attacks in the United States from January 1, 1975, through September 10, 2025. Murders committed in terrorist attacks account for about 0.35 percent of all murders since 1975. Only 81 happened since 2020, accounting for 0.07 percent of all murders during that time, or 7 out of 10,000. Terrorism is the broadest reasonable definition of a politically motivated murder because it is the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a nonstate actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through coercion, fear, or intimidation….
Eighty-three percent of those murdered since 1975 were committed by the 9/11 terrorists…. The Oklahoma City Bombing accounts for about another 5 percent. Those murdered since 2020 account for just 2 percent. Terrorists inspired by Islamist ideology are responsible for 87 percent of those murdered in attacks on US soil since 1975…. Right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total. The definition here of right-wing terrorists includes those motivated by white supremacy, anti-abortion beliefs, involuntary celibacy (incels), and other right-wing ideologies.
Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total. Left-wing terrorists include those motivated by black nationalism, anti-police sentiment, communism, socialism, animal rights, environmentalism, anti-white ideologies, and other left-wing ideologies. Those murders that are politically motivated by unknown or other ideologies are a vanishingly small percentage, which is unsurprising because terrorists typically want attention for their causes.
"Right" and "left" are somewhat arbitrary and incoherent categories. Thus, people can argue about some of Alex's coding choices here. For example, I am not sure black nationalists really qualify as "left" and incels as "right." Nonetheless, the coding here mostly tracks the way these terms are generally used in current US political discourse. Thus, Alex is right to conclude that right-wing violence is more prevalent than the left-wing kind, even though one can quarrel with the classification of a few specific perpetrators at the margin.
Given the outsize weight of the 9/11 attacks in the data, partisans will be tempted to categorize radical Islamists with their political opponents. Thus, left-wingers might argue that Islamists are on the right, due to their extreme social conservatism (they hate LGBT people, want women to be subordinated to men, and so on). On the other hand, one could also argue that they are actually left-wing, due to their hatred of Israel and opposition to American influence in the world. These latter attitudes are more prevalent on the far left, though there are elements of them on the nationalist/MAGA right, as well. In my view, al Qaeda and its ilk don't really fit on the US right-left political spectrum, and thus Alex is right to group radical Islamists in a separate category from either.
Regardless of the source, it is reassuring that political violence is relatively rare. The average American is vastly more likely to die in a car accident than be a victim of politically motivated murder. And, as Alex notes, such attacks account for only a tiny percentage of all murders. Prominent political figures are probably more at risk. Nonetheless, the overall level of danger is low, even for most of them.
For understandable reasons, Alex's data does not include death threats, which are surely far more common than actual murders or attempts. While the vast majority of such threats aren't acted on, they still cause pain and fear to those they target. I have reason to know, having gotten several myself, over the years, including one that turned out to be from "mail bomber" Cesar Sayoc. Better-known activists and political commentators likely get a lot more than I do. The increasing prevalence of social media and other forms of electronic communication have, I suspect, made such threats more common.
I am not aware of any good data on the relative prevalence of death threats by ideology (as opposed to actual attacks). But I suspect that right-wing ones are more common here, as well.
One person's experience isn't necessarily indicative. But over twenty years of libertarian commentary on law and public policy issues, I have said many things that annoy people on both right and left. With one arguable exception (a Russian nationalist angered by my condemnations of Vladimir Putin's regime), every single one of the threats I have gotten was from right-wingers, mostly related to the issue of immigration. By contrast, I have never gotten threats for things like criticizing affirmative action, condemning socialism, opposing "defunding the police," or attacking student loan forgiveness. Some of these have generated other types of online nastiness. But never any threats of violence.
As already noted, more systematic data is needed here. Perhaps my experience will turn out to be atypical.
I don't see any ready solution to the problem of politically motivated death threats. Given how easy they are to make, it is probably unrealistic to expect the authorities to track down more than a small fraction of them. Social media firms may be doing a better job of combating them then a few years ago. But that, too, is difficult. All I can say is that we should condemn them, and avoid being intimidated by them.
As for actual political violence, it is good that it remains relatively rare. But we should be wary of the danger that it might become worse.
UPDATE: Alex Nowrasteh has a follow-up post with more information on his methodology and data sources.
"The Supreme Court has recently confirmed that the Free Exercise Clause does not prohibit a state from providing 'a strictly secular education in its public schools'"—and, the court held, that extends to California charter schools and their parental "home-based direct instruction approved by the school and coordinated, evaluated, and supervised by state-certified teachers."
From today's decision in Woolard v. Thurmond, written by Judge Andrew Hurwitz and joined by Judges Eric Miller, and Jennifer Sung:
California provides free public education through its common schools. It long did so through brick-and-mortar schools owned and operated by public school districts. In 1992, California authorized the establishment of charter schools, "public schools funded with public money but run by private individuals or entities rather than traditional public school districts."
Like traditional public schools, charter schools can provide non-classroom-based instruction, including "independent study" programs, in which parents provide home-based direct instruction approved by the school and coordinated, evaluated, and supervised by state-certified teachers. To participate in these programs, parents must enter into a contract with the school specifying the objectives, methods of study, and methods used for evaluating student work. The school is then required to provide appropriate materials and services necessary to achieve the agreement's objectives.
The plaintiffs in this 42 U.S.C. § 1983 action are parents and guardians of students enrolled in independent study programs at two California charter schools who requested that the schools purchase and permit the use of sectarian curricular materials for instruction in the programs. The schools rejected those requests because California law provides that "sectarian or denominational doctrine" shall not "be taught, or instruction thereon be permitted, directly or indirectly, in any of the common schools of this State," and that "a charter school shall be nonsectarian in its programs."
The court rejected the plaintiffs' Free Exercise Clause challenge:
