User:GhostRiver/edgerton

Edgerton Bible Case
Court	Wisconsin Supreme Court
Full case name	State ex rel. Weiss et al. v. District Board of School District No. 8 of the City of Edgerton
Decided	March 18, 1890
Citation	76 Wis. 177, 44 N.W. 967 (W.I. 1890)
Transcript	76 Wis. 177
Case history
Appealed from	Circuit Court of Rock County
Related action	Abington School District v. Schempp
Court membership
Judges sitting	Orsamus Cole, William P. Lyon, David Taylor, Harlow S. Orton, John B. Cassoday
Case opinions
Mandated reading of the King James Bible in Wisconsin public schools is an unconstitutional form of sectarian instruction.
Decision by	Lyon
Concurrence	Orton and Cassoday
Concur/dissent	5–0
Dissent	None
Keywords
Common schools Bible reading Sectarian instruction Maintenance of "place of worship" Religious seminaries Ordinance of 1787

State ex rel. Weiss et al. v. District Board of School District No. 8 of the City of Edgerton, 76 Wis. 177 (1890), colloquially referred to as the Edgerton Bible Case, was a Wisconsin Supreme Court case in which ...

Background

Bible reading in schools

See also: School prayer in the United States

By the time of the Edgerton case, similar legal challenges involving the use of the Bible in public schools had been made in states including Maine, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Iowa. The first of these cases was Donahoe v. Richards, which was decided in the Maine Supreme Judicial Court in 1854. An Irish-American Catholic student had been expelled from her public school for refusing to participate in an exercise using the Protestant Bible. The girl had offered to complete the exercise using the Douay translation instead, a request which was denied.

• Donahoe v. Richards
• Spiller v. Inhabitants of Woburn
• Board of Education of Cincinnati v. Minor et al.
• Moore v. Monroe

Works cited

• John O. Geiger, The Edgerton Bible Case: Humphrey Desmond's Political Education of Wisconsin Catholics, 20 J. Church & St. 13 (1978).
• David M. Gold, State-Court Protection of Individual Rights: The Historians' Neglect, 225 Const. Comment. 419 (1985).
• Thomas C. Hunt, The Reformed Tradition, Bible Reading and Education in Wisconsin, 59 J. Presby. Hist. 73 (1981).
• Thomas C. Hunt, The Edgerton Bible Decision: The End of an Era, 67 Cath. Hist. Rev. 589 (1981).
• R. Laurence Moore, Bible Reading and Nonsectarian Schooling: The Failure of Religious Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Public Education, 86 J. Am. Hist. 1581 (2000).
• Michael deHaven Newsom, Common School Religion: Judicial Narratives in a Protestant Empire, 11 S. Cal. Interdisc. L.J. 219 (2002).
• State ex rel. Weiss et al. v. District Board of School District No. 8 of the City of Edgerton, 76 Wis. 177 (Wis. 1890).
• John R. Vile, Donahoe v. Richards (Maine Supreme Court) (1854), The First Amendment Encyclopedia (June 16, 2022).