Sherbert v. Verner

On 17 June 1963, the Supreme Court reversed the ruling of the South Carolina Supreme Court and ruled in Sherbert's favor. In contrast to the Sunday closing cases of the preceding sessions, the Court concluded that an unfairly heavy and 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 is unmistakable. The ruling forces her to choose between following the precepts of her religion and forfeiting benefits, on the one hand, and abandoning one of 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 her Saturday worship.

Next, the Court turned to the question of whether the state of South Carolina had a compelling enough interest to curtail Sherbert's religious liberties and deny her unemployment benefits. It dismissed the state's claim that it had an interest in weeding out individuals who used bogus religious beliefs as a way of unscrupulously claiming compensation. "[E]ven if the possibility of spurious claims did threaten to dilute the fund and disrupt the scheduling of work," 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 ruling in 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 but reaffirms a principle that we announced a decade and a half ago, namely that no State may "exclude individual Catholics, Lutherans, Mohammedans, Baptists, Jews, Methodists, Non-believers, Presbyterians, or the members of any other faith, because of their faith, or lack of it, from receiving the benefits of public welfare legislation."