Federal judge permanently blocks Arkansas Ten Commandments school law

💎Arkansas Act 573, signed by Governor SHSarah Huckabee Sanders on April 14, 2025, required every public school classroom and library in Arkansas to display the Ten Commandments. The law specified the Protestant King James Bible version, including a minimum display size of 11 by 14 inches and exact required text. Attendance at public school is compulsory in Arkansas, meaning every student in the state would spend their school day in rooms displaying a specifically Protestant religious text, regardless of their own religious background.

Act 573 had broad support in the Republican-controlled 💎Arkansas legislature and was signed by Sanders, a former White House Press Secretary under Trump who has made religious conservatism a centerpiece of her governorship. Proponents argued it was consistent with America's historical and moral foundations. SASamantha and Jonathan Stinson, the Jewish Fayetteville family who became the lead plaintiffs, said the Protestant King James version required by the law differed from their religious tradition and placed their children under a specifically sectarian text each school day.

In June 2025, a group of families filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of 💎Arkansas challenging Act 573 as unconstitutional. The lead plaintiffs are SASamantha and Jonathan Stinson, a Jewish couple whose children attend Fayetteville public schools. Other plaintiffs include Stephen Caldwell, Joseph Armendariz, Talara and Shane Taylor, Carol Vella, Daniel Rix, and Leah Bailey — representing families from across the six defendant school districts: Bentonville, Conway, Fayetteville, Lakeside, Siloam Springs, and Springdale.

The ACLU of 💎Arkansas and Americans United for Separation of Church and State jointly represented the plaintiff families. The case is formally captioned Stinson v. Fayetteville School District No. 1. Judge TBTimothy Brooks issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law in November 2025, then conducted full summary judgment proceedings and issued a permanent injunction on March 16–18, 2026.

U.S. District Judge TBTimothy Brooks' permanent injunction ruling held that Act 573 violates both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. On the Establishment Clause, Brooks found the law had no secular purpose. "The only reason to display a sacred, religious text in every classroom is to proselytize to children," he wrote. On Free Exercise, he found the mandatory displays violated the religious freedom of the plaintiff families by coercing their children to study under a text that conflicts with their own faith or lack of one.

Brooks wrote that "the state has said the quiet part out loud," noting that 💎Arkansas publicly defended Act 573 on religious grounds, which made the absence of any secular purpose unusually clear. He added that "nothing could possibly justify hanging the Ten Commandments in a calculus, chemistry, French, or woodworking class." Arkansas Attorney General TGTim Griffin announced an immediate appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

The Establishment Clause — the First Amendment's prohibition that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" — was originally a limit on the federal government. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) extended the Bill of Rights to apply to state governments. Since then, the Establishment Clause has governed what state and local governments, including public schools, can do with religion.

Public schools occupy a special place in this framework because attendance is compelled by law. Courts have consistently found that the combination of compulsory attendance and government-sponsored religious displays or practices creates a form of coercion that doesn't exist in purely voluntary settings. A student who can walk out of a government ceremony can avoid the establishment; a student who must be in a classroom to avoid truancy charges cannot.

Brooks cited Stone v. Graham (1980), a U.S. Supreme Court case in which the Court struck down a nearly identical 🐴Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms. In Stone, the Court held that posting the Ten Commandments serves no secular legislative purpose — the text is "plainly religious in nature" and commands students to adhere to religious duties. The Court struck the Kentucky law even though the displays were privately funded and included a small notation that the text was the "secular application of the law."

Act 573 is a direct descendant of the 🐴Kentucky law struck down in Stone. Both require the same text, in the same setting, for the same stated purpose. Brooks found that 46 years of legal development since Stone had not changed the analysis on the core question: mandating a sacred religious text in every compulsory school setting has no secular purpose the government can honestly articulate.

💎Arkansas defended Act 573 primarily by pointing to Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), in which the Supreme Court ruled that a public school football coach could pray on the field after games and was protected by the Free Exercise Clause. The Kennedy majority, written by Justice NGNeil Gorsuch, replaced the old Lemon test with a "historical practice and understanding" standard — asking whether a government practice is consistent with America's historical tradition of religious expression.

Judge Brooks found Kennedy didn't save Act 573. Kennedy was about a public employee's personal, voluntary prayer during a moment when official duties had ended. Act 573 is mandatory, state-sponsored, and targets students rather than employees. Brooks applied the historical-practice standard and found no historical tradition of states mandating specific denominational religious texts in compulsory school settings. The Lemon test's demise didn't strip courts of tools to block government-sponsored religious coercion — it just changed the framework.

The Ten Commandments are numbered and worded differently across religious traditions, and Act 573 mandated the specifically Protestant King James Bible version. The Protestant numbering counts the prohibition on graven images as a subsection of the first commandment and splits the final commandment on coveting into two. Catholic tradition uses a different numbering. Jewish tradition uses a different structure entirely. What Christians call the "first commandment" is in Judaism a preamble, not a commandment. The specific Protestant version in Act 573 is therefore not a generic monotheistic text but a denominationally specific one.

This distinction was relevant to the Establishment Clause analysis. A law that mandates a religiously neutral message might still survive scrutiny as having a secular purpose. A law that mandates the specific text of one Protestant tradition, and that publicly states its purpose is to instill religious values, removes any ambiguity about whether the government is endorsing a particular religion. Courts have generally found that sectarian specificity makes an Establishment Clause violation more obvious, not less.

🎺Louisiana passed a similar Ten Commandments display law in 2024, which has been litigated separately in federal court. 💎Arkansas' appeal to the Eighth Circuit and Louisiana's pending litigation could produce different outcomes in different circuits, setting up a potential split that would compel Supreme Court review. 🤠Texas introduced similar legislation in 2025, and at least four other states have considered comparable bills.

The pattern matters civically: when multiple states pass similar laws that federal courts strike down, the legal fight tends to escalate upward toward the Supreme Court. Given the current Court's composition after Kennedy v. Bremerton, supporters of these laws are betting the Court might revisit Stone v. Graham's blanket prohibition. Brooks' ruling and the Eighth Circuit appeal are likely just the first chapter of what could be a multi-year constitutional fight that reaches SCOTUS before the decade is out.

The Eighth Circuit, which handles appeals from 💎Arkansas, 🌉Missouri, 🌽Iowa, 🦆Minnesota, 🌽Nebraska, 🦬North Dakota, and 🗿South Dakota, has a mixed record on Establishment Clause cases. Arkansas Attorney General Griffin said the state would appeal immediately. If the Eighth Circuit upholds Brooks' permanent injunction, the state could petition the Supreme Court for certiorari. If SCOTUS takes the case, it would be the first time the Court directly revisits its 1980 Stone v. Graham ruling in a post-Kennedy framework.

The ACLU of 💎Arkansas and Americans United said they were "confident" the ruling would hold on appeal. Under Stone v. Graham's 46-year precedent, mandating a specifically denominational religious text in compulsory school settings has no secular purpose the government can honestly defend. That clarity hasn't stopped comparable laws from advancing. 🎺Louisiana's Ten Commandments law is being litigated in a parallel federal case, and Arkansas' immediate appeal signals a coordinated strategy to test whether the current Supreme Court would revisit Stone.