Sherbert v. Verner

Appellant
Adeil Sherbert
Appellees
Verner, et al.
Appellant's Claim
That South Carolina's denial of unemployment benefits to a Seventh Day Adventist who refused to work on Saturdays constituted a violation of her constitutional right to freely exercise her religion.
Chief Lawyer for Appellant
Daniel R. McLeod
Chief Lawyer for Appellees
William D. Donnelly
Justices for the Court
Hugo Lafayette Black, William J. Brennan, Jr. (writing for the Court), Tom C.Clark, William O. Douglas, Arthur Goldberg, Potter Stewart, Earl Warren
Justices Dissenting
John Marshall Harlan II, Byron R. White
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
17 June 1963
Decision
South Carolina's denial of unemployment benefits to Adeil Sherbert, a SeventhDay Adventist, was held to be a violation of her constitutional free exercise rights under the First Amendment.
Significance
The Supreme Court's decision in Sherbert v. Verner substantially broadened its protection of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
Legal Context
Sherbert v. Verner was one in a long line of cases revolving around the issue of state restrictions on the free exercise of religion. The trend atthe time this case was decided was toward narrower protection of free exercise. In the 1961 case of Braunfeld v. Brown, the Court held that a Pennsylvania "blue law" that banned certain stores from remaining open on Sunday did not violate the free exercise rights of an Orthodox Jewish shopkeeper whocould not, for religious reasons, operate his shop on Saturday. This decisionwas essentially reaffirmed in Gallagher v. Crown Kosher Market (1961). In these cases, the Court concluded that restrictions on religious freedomare not unconstitutional if they impose only an indirect burden, such as lossof economic opportunities, on individuals.
Sherbert v. Verner presented a somewhat different set of circumstances. In this case, the appellant claimed to have suffered a direct and substantial economic burden. Adeil Sherbert, a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, was fired from her job because she refused to work on Saturdays, the Sabbath day of her faith. Sherbert attempted to find work elsewhere, but was turned down for a number of jobs because of her unwillingness to work Saturdays.She then applied for unemployment compensation from the state of South Carolina. The South Carolina Unemployment Compensation Act provided compensation for any individual who has made a good faith effort to accept available suitable work when offered. The state denied Sherbert's claim on the grounds that she had failed to accept jobs when offered. Sherbert appealed this denial of benefits, claiming her freedom to practice religion had been unfairly restricted. But the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the unemployment commission'sdecision. Sherbert then appealed her case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
High Court Reverses
On 17 June 1963, the Supreme Court reversed the ruling of the South CarolinaSupreme Court and ruled in Sherbert's favor. In contrast to the Sunday closing cases of the preceding sessions, the Court concluded that an unfairly heavyand direct burden had been placed on Sherbert without a compelling state interest for doing so.
The Court did not expend much time in determining that Sherbert's right to the free exercise of her religion had indeed been impinged upon. Writing for the majority, Justice Brennan reasoned:

[N]ot only is it apparent that appellant's declared ineligibility for benefits derives solely from the practice of her religion, but the pressure upon her to forego that practice isunmistakable. The ruling forces her to choose between following the preceptsof her religion and forfeiting benefits, on the one hand, and abandoning oneof the precepts of her religion in order to accept work, on the other hand.Governmental imposition of such a choice puts the same kind of burden upon the free exercise of religion as would a fine imposed against appellant for herSaturday worship.

Next, the Court turned to the question of whether the state of South Carolinahad a compelling enough interest to curtail Sherbert's religious liberties and deny her unemployment benefits. It dismissed the state's claim that it hadan interest in weeding out individuals who used bogus religious beliefs as away of unscrupulously claiming compensation. "[E]ven if the possibility of spurious claims did threaten to dilute the fund and disrupt the scheduling ofwork," Brennan wrote, "it would plainly be incumbent upon the appellees to demonstrate that no alternative forms of regulation would combat such abuses without infringing First Amendment rights."
Finally, Brennan and his fellow justices explicitly denied that their rulingin this case amounted to an unconstitutional establishment of religion. He wrote:

Our holding today is only that South Carolina may not constitutionally apply the eligibility provisions so as to constrain a worker to abandon his religious convictions respecting the day of rest. This holding butreaffirms a principle that we announced a decade and a half ago, namely thatno State may "exclude individual Catholics, Lutherans, Mohammedans, Baptists,Jews, Methodists, Non-believers, Presbyterians, or the members of any otherfaith, because of their faith, or lack of it, from receiving the benefits ofpublic welfare legislation."

Dissenting Opinion
Refusing to join in this "amen chorus" were Justices Harlan and White, who issued a dissent. They decried the precedent set by the Court in carving out aspecial religious exemption from the normal rules of state benefit eligibility. Writing for himself and White, Harlan opined: "To require South Carolina to so administer its laws as to pay public money to the appellant under the circumstances of this case is thus clearly to require the State to violate theEstablishment Clause as construed by this Court." The majority's ruling would, in Harlan's opinion, force states to "single out for financial assistance those whose behavior is religiously motivated, even though it denies such assistance to others whose identical behavior (in this case, inability to work onSaturdays) is not religiously motivated."
Impact
The Supreme Court's decision in Sherbert v. Verner signaled a shift inthe Court's attitude toward expanded protection for the free exercise of religion. In subsequent cases like Thomas v. Review Board of the Indiana Employment Security Division (1981), the Court further restricted a state's ability to deny benefits to religious observers.
Related Cases

• Solomon v. South Carolina, 382 U.S. 204 (1965).
  
• Russell v. Catherwood, 399 U.S. 936 (1970).
  
• Roach v. United States, 406 U.S. 935 (1972).
  
• Thomas v. Review Board of the Indiana Employment Security Division, 450 U.S. 707 (1981).

Sherbert Test
Named for the 1963 Supreme Court case Sherbert v. Verner, the Sherberttest greatly expanded the religious free-exercise clause in the First Amendment. The test weighs the free-exercise rights of a citizen against the rightsof a state to regulate religious actions. Prior to the Sherbert test, a state could regulate the religious actions of citizens by proving it had a rational basis for doing so. As long as a state could satisfy the rational-basis burden--and it was not difficult to do so--the state's actions were consideredconstitutional.
However, the Sherbert test changed that by placing a greater burden onto thestate. The test required a state government to demonstrate a "compelling interest," such as public health and safety, to justify restricting or infringingon a citizen's religious free-exercise rights. A state could only justify those types of action when it provided a "compelling interest" to do so.
Sources
Eastland, Terry. Religious Liberty in the Supreme Court. Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1993.