U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission et al. in favor of the Catholic Charities Bureau, as Schaerr | Jaffe attorneys had urged the Court to do in an amicus brief filed on behalf of eleven major religious organizations that collectively represent 90 million Americans: the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, The United Methodist Church, the Church of Christ, Scientist, the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, Hindu American Foundation, and BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha.

The Court ruled that Wisconsin discriminated among religions by treating some as religious and others as not based on the state’s own definition of what it means to be religious when the state determined whether Catholic Charities qualified for a religious organizations’ exemption from the state unemployment compensation tax. And that religious discrimination triggered strict scrutiny, which the state could not satisfy, the Court held, thus violating the First Amendment.

Schaerr | Jaffe attorneys urged the Court to keep in mind the church autonomy implications of the case, and Justice Thomas, in a concurrence, did exactly that, spelling out why the state also violated the church autonomy right of “religious institutions to define their internal structure for themselves” by refusing to accept the corporate structure the Archdiocese had selected for itself and Catholic Charities.

The following Schaerr | Jaffe attorneys appeared on the amicus brief: Gene Schaerr, Erik Jaffe, Chris Bartolomucci, Hannah Smith, James Phillips, Josh Prince, Megan Shoell, and Miranda Sherrill. They were aided by paralegal Kristina Robinson.