Supreme Court Orders New Review of Religious Exemptions to School Vaccines

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ordered a federal appeals court to reconsider its decision to uphold a New York state law that eliminates religious exemptions for required school vaccinations.

The justices asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, in New York City, to give a second look to the claims of a group of Amish schools and parents in light of the high court’s decision last summer in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which held that parents have a free exercise of religion right to challenge certain aspects of the public school curriculum.

The order came on a busy day for education cases at the Supreme Court. The justices declined to review another federal appeals court’s ruling that makes it more difficult for students and others to challenge school and public library book-removal decisions. And the court asked the Trump administration to advise whether it should take up a case asking if teachers may sue for employment discrimination under Title IX.

Amish schools’ and parents’ challenge to a change in New York state law

The school vaccination case, Miller v. McDonald, involves New York state’s 2019 decision following a severe measles outbreak to remove long-standing religious-based exemptions to required school vaccinations.

New York’s state health commissioner in 2022 upheld financial sanctions, ranging from $20,000 to $52,000, against three Amish schools for violating the law that ended religious exemptions. The schools, joined by several parents, challenged the sanctions and the 2019 law based on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free exercise of religion.

The 2nd Circuit, in a March 2025 decision, ruled among other things that the 2019 New York law’s threat to free-exercise rights was “not equivalent to the existential threat the Amish faced” in Wisconsin v. Yoder, the 1972 case in which the high court held that the Old Order Amish could not be compelled to send children to school beyond 8th grade.

In their appeal to the Supreme Court, the Amish schools and parents stressed that the high court had revived elements of Yoder in its Mahmoud decision and that the justices should take up their case or, at the least, order the 2nd Circuit to reconsider their case in light of Mahmoud.

A brief on behalf of James V. McDonald, New York’s state health commissioner, urged the Supreme Court not to take up the case, arguing that “Yoder does not extend to school vaccination laws that promote public health, safety, and child welfare” and nothing in the high court’s Mahmoud decision altered that.

But the justices opted for the challengers’ secondary recommendation to have the 2nd Circuit reconsider the case, which could then come back to the high court in the future.

Court declines to take up book-removal case

Meanwhile, the justices declined without comment in Little v. Llano County to review a federal appeals court’s decision to uphold the removal of 17 books, most of which had been challenged as inappropriate for children.

Though the case involved a public library in Texas, the 10-7 ruling of the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit discussed challenges to book removals in school libraries and held that a 1982 Supreme Court decision on that topic provides little guidance on modern book removals.

The 5th Circuit majority said that the high court’s ruling in Board of Education of Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico decided “neither the extent nor, indeed, the existence of … First Amendment implications in a school book removal case.”

In their appeal to the Supreme Court, the challengers argued that the 5th Circuit got it wrong about Pico. While acknowledging that Pico was a fractured decision with no majority opinion, the challengers said “eight justices agreed that First Amendment scrutiny applies to a school library’s removal of books for the purpose of suppressing particular viewpoints.”

And viewpoint-based book bans violate a “bedrock principle” underlying the First Amendment that “the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”

The challengers drew support from book publishers, First Amendment professors, and such groups as PEN American Center, the American Library Association, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The Llano County public library, in a brief urging the Supreme Court not to take up the case, said that libraries “continually remove books from their collections to make room for new materials and ensure that their limited shelf space is reserved for materials of requisite quality and relevance to their communities.”

The 5th Circuit correctly ruled that “a public library does not and cannot ‘abridge’ the freedom of speech by removing books from its collection that it had no constitutional obligation to provide in the first place,” lawyers for the Texas library said in their brief.

The justices’ decision is not a ruling on the merits. But its refusal to take up the case prompted PEN America, a free-expression group that has issued several reports documenting book removals in schools and libraries, to criticize the court’s action of leaving in place the 5th Circuit ruling, which PEN said “has already been used to uphold the devastating wave of book bans across the country.”

Trump administration asked to opine on Title IX issue

In another education case, Crowther v. Board of Regents of the University of Georgia, the Supreme Court asked the Trump administration whether teachers, professors, and other education employees have a right to sue under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bars sex discrimination in federally funded education institutions.

In a decision last year dealing with the combined cases of a college basketball coach and an art professor in the University of Georgia system who filed employment claims under Title IX, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, ruled that there was no private right of action under the sex-discrimination statute and that the workers had to bring their claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, sex, and other characteristics.

Many education employees, including K-12 teachers and others, bring employment-discrimination claims under both Title VII and Title IX, and the federal appeals courts are split on whether Title IX covers employment. (The Supreme Court has ruled that students have the private right to sue under Title IX over claims of sex bias, and it has held that employees may sue for retaliation under the statute for such things as complaining about discriminatory conditions for students.)

In their appeal to the Supreme Court, the lawyers for the two dismissed higher education employees argued that the high court “repeatedly has recognized that Congress has provided a variety of remedies, at times overlapping, to eradicate employment discrimination.”

Contrary to the 5th Circuit’s decision, “there is nothing ‘odd’ about parallel enforcement under both Title VII (which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of various protected characteristics) and Title IX (which reaches only sex discrimination),” the brief says.

The Georgia board of regents, in a brief urging the court not to take up the case, said the availability of Title VII’s “well-established legal framework undermines any supposed importance of answering the question whether Title IX provides another, redundant remedy.”

The justices’ order to the U.S. solicitor general to provide his views gives no deadline, but the office typically responds to such requests within a matter of months.