The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this week handed Louisiana a major legal victory, upholding the state's law requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms and overruling a lower court decision that had blocked the statute before a single poster ever went up.
All 17 active judges on the court participated in the decision. The posters never made it into classrooms after the initial lower court injunction. Now they might.
Louisiana in 2024 became the first state in the country to pass a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms in easily readable letters. The legal challenges were immediate, and a lower court blocked the law before implementation. But the full 5th Circuit reversed course, finding that the challengers had not met the threshold to stop the law in its tracks.
The court's reasoning centered on a procedural point with enormous consequences. The 5th Circuit found that the challenge to the law was premature, since the posters had never actually been displayed and the challengers were attacking the law's minimum requirements in the abstract, The Hill reported. The ruling noted:
The parents (and the principal dissent) seek to sidestep this difficulty by framing the case as an attack on H.B. 71's minimum requirements alone. But an unripe challenge does not become ripe merely because a party asserts that the challenged action would be unlawful on any conceivable set of facts. The Supreme Court has squarely rejected that approach.
In other words, the court told opponents: you can't strike down a law based on what you imagine it might look like in practice. You have to wait until it actually takes effect. The 5th Circuit left the door open for another challenge once the posters are displayed in schools, but for now, the law stands.
The legal landscape for religious expression in public spaces has shifted dramatically since the Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the case that allowed a football coach to pray at the 50-yard line after high school games. That ruling didn't just protect one man's prayer. It dismantled the framework that had been used to scrub religious expression from public life for half a century.
Kelly Shackelford, president, CEO, and chief counsel at First Liberty Institute, explained the scope of that shift:
Within that decision, there was this major precedent called the Lemon test and, in that case, they said Lemon, which had been the precedent for 50 years and had been cited over 7,000 times to kind of stop different types of religious expression in public — they overruled it. They threw it out. They said it wasn't good law. And so, what that does is that that opens up a whole lot of things that people don't realize are now totally protected by the Constitution.
For decades, the Lemon test served as the judiciary's favorite tool for treating any whiff of religion in public spaces as a constitutional crisis. Cited over 7,000 times across 50 years, it gave courts a convenient mechanism to strip religious expression from schools, courthouses, and government buildings. The Supreme Court killed it. The legal establishment hasn't fully reckoned with what that means.
Shackelford put it plainly: "I just think these laws are going to be upheld now, after the Kennedy decision."
Louisiana isn't fighting alone. Two other states, Texas and Arkansas, are currently battling similar legal challenges over Ten Commandments display laws. The Texas case also sits in the 5th Circuit, making this week's ruling directly relevant. The Arkansas case is before the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Joe Davis, senior counsel at Becket and an attorney representing Louisiana, outlined the cascading effects:
The 5th Circuit's ruling is going to be binding precedent on the Texas case, for sure, since that case also arises in the 5th Circuit. The 8th Circuit doesn't have to follow the 5th Circuit, but I would expect it to, given that the opinion has a great deal of persuasive value, so I do think it's going to be quite relevant in those cases.
The Texas case was argued on the same day as Louisiana's, but the court has not yet issued a ruling. Davis noted it remains to be seen whether the 5th Circuit resolves the Texas case on the same jurisdictional grounds or reaches the merits of whether the law is constitutional. Either way, Louisiana's win sets the floor.
Opponents have 90 days to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, one of the organizations behind the lawsuit, signaled the fight isn't over:
We're certainly going to continue fighting for the religious freedom of Louisiana parents and children, but the specific next steps are still under discussion.
Note the framing. "Religious freedom" in this context means the freedom to ensure students never encounter the Ten Commandments on a classroom wall. The same organizations that champion every possible expansion of government speech codes and DEI mandates in schools suddenly discover the virtues of restraint when the text in question is "Thou shalt not steal."
Whether the challengers petition the Supreme Court or wait and mount a new challenge once the posters actually go up, the trajectory points toward the high court. A circuit split between the 5th and 8th Circuits would accelerate that timeline. Even without a split, the constitutional question is significant enough to attract the justices' attention.
The broader pattern is unmistakable. For generations, the legal establishment treated religious expression in public life as presumptively unconstitutional. The Lemon test gave that impulse the veneer of doctrine. Kennedy gutted it. Louisiana tested the new landscape. The 5th Circuit just confirmed that the ground has shifted.
None of this means the fight is over. The Supreme Court struck down religious charter schools just last year, a reminder that the current court is not a rubber stamp for every religious liberty claim. The legal questions around government-mandated religious displays differ from voluntary religious expression, and the challengers will press that distinction hard.
But the burden of proof has moved. The era in which any public acknowledgment of the Judeo-Christian tradition was treated as an establishment clause violation is closing. Louisiana wrote the law. The 5th Circuit let it stand. The posters may finally go up.
And the Ten Commandments will survive a classroom wall just fine.
