The Texas Ten Commandments law requiring every public school classroom in the state to display the biblical text is now heading toward a potential Supreme Court showdown, after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a joint petition for a writ of certiorari asking the justices to intervene.
Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 10 (S.B. 10) into law in June 2025. The statute mandates that every public school classroom display the Ten Commandments as rendered in the King James Bible, in a format at least 16 inches wide by 20 inches tall, printed legibly from anywhere in the room. Schools may use privately donated displays; the legislation provides no state funding for the requirement.
A 9-8 Split and the Road to Washington
The Texas Ten Commandments law survived its first major legal test in April 2026, when a 9-8 en banc majority of the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower district court ruling that had blocked S.B. 10. The majority held that the law violates neither the Establishment Clause nor the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The margin tells its own story: one judge switching sides would have produced a different outcome.
The original challenge, Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District, was filed on 2 July 2025 in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas. The ACLU’s certiorari petition covers that case alongside a second related case, Cribbs Ringer v. Comal Independent School District.
More than 25 families spread across 22 school districts in Texas are party to the petition. They are represented by the ACLU, the ACLU of Texas, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and Simpson Thacher and Bartlett LLP acting as pro bono counsel. The families span Baha’ism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Unitarian Universalism, and non-religious traditions.
The Precedent Problem: Stone v. Graham
Challengers have a powerful precedent on their side. In Stone v. Graham (1980), a 5-to-4 per curiam Supreme Court struck down a nearly identical Kentucky statute requiring Ten Commandments postings in public school classrooms. Crucially, the Kentucky displays had also been purchased with private contributions, yet the Court still found the law unconstitutional under the first part of the Lemon v. Kurtzman test, concluding the statute served no secular legislative purpose.
The Court’s reasoning in Stone bears directly on the Texas dispute. ‘If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,’ the Court wrote. ‘However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.’
The ACLU brief also draws on the Court’s more recent decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), which held that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause is infringed when a school ‘substantially interfere[s] with the religious development’ of a child or poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the beliefs a parent wishes to instil. The brief argues that ‘if the permanent, unavoidable imposition of biblical scripture in public-school classrooms does not interfere with, or threaten to undermine, parents’ ability to direct their children’s religious education… it is difficult to imagine what would.’
Whether the current Court sees it that way is far from certain. Justice Clarence Thomas has argued for years that the Establishment Clause is a structural limit on federal power only and ‘resists incorporation’ against the states via the Fourteenth Amendment. On that reading, the clause ‘protects state establishments from federal interference, but does not protect any individual right.’ Other conservative justices, while not endorsing Thomas’s position in full, have separately criticised modern Establishment Clause doctrine as excessively hostile to religious expression by state actors, including public school officials.
The National Constitution Center notes that Justice Samuel Alito extended the deadline for filing the certiorari petition, a procedural step that brought the petition before the Court on schedule.
Subject to any decision by the Court to grant or deny certiorari, the Texas Ten Commandments law now sits in Washington’s in-tray. If the justices agree to hear the case, they will be confronted with a direct conflict between a recent circuit ruling upholding S.B. 10 and forty-five years of precedent pointing the other way. The vote at the Fifth Circuit was nine to eight; the vote that matters next will be taken by nine.
