Kiryas Joel V. Grummet Case Summary

Kiryas Joel v. Grummet, 512 U.S. 687 (1994)

The case of Kiryas Joel v. Grummet, 512 U.S. 687 (1994) was a case in which the New York Village of Kiryas Joel, a religious enclave of Satmar Hasidim, and its incorporators drew its boundaries under the state’s general village incorporation law to exclude all but Satmars (Find Law, 2015) in a separate district.

Facts

Facts about this case define the separation of a school district, based on the state of a New York law. This leads to a fact about this case. A sect’s village Satmar Hasidic Sect that fell within the Monroe-Woodbury Central School District that enacted on a statute separating this village from other districts as its very own, to serve only this population of students, mainly special education students (Find Law, 2015). Another fact about this case is that in 1989, only one child from Kiryas Joel was attending Monroe Woodbury’s public schools due to non-beliefs, fear, and trauma of the public schools, while some received

A divided New York Appellate Division affirmed on the ground that the statute was unconstitutional because it has the primary effect of advancing religion (Mercer Law Review, n.d). As the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In this case the state of New York Legislature violated the Constitution. Therefore, the holding for this case by Justice Souter signifies that Chapter 748 violated the Establishment Clause. Souter held that the state law departed from the constitutional mandate of neutrality toward religion by delegating the state’s discretionary authority over public schools and that a state may not delegate its civic authority to a group chosen according to religious criteria (Osborne, n.d). The statute was also seen as impermissible as an advancement of religious