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Adam Laats, Robert Daniel Rubin. Judicial Review and American Conservatism: Christianity, Public Education, and the Federal Courts in the Reagan Era., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 265–266, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.265
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In the mid-1980s, Judge W. Brevard Hand of the District Court for the Southern District of Alabama issued two startling decisions that raised difficult questions for a generation of scholars and activists. First, how can an activist judge oppose judicial activism? Second, can a non-religion function as a state-established religion? And, finally, why should two district court cases warrant so much attention from historians, pundits, and armchair legal scholars when they were quickly overturned and even “ridiculed” (311)? In his sensitive and meticulous examination of Hand’s school-religion decisions, Robert Daniel Rubin offers cogent answers to all three of these difficult questions.
The two cases—Jaffree v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County (1983) and Smith v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County (1987)—broke new legal ground on the question of prayer in public schools. In the first, secular activist Ishmael Jaffree sought to stop Mobile’s public school teachers from leading students in prayer. In the second, evangelical activists hoped to prove that Mobile’s public schools had unconstitutionally established secular humanism as their de facto religion. In both of his decisions, Hand disregarded Supreme Court precedent to make intentionally provocative legal and political points.
