Which was decided first, Katzenbach v. Morgan or Brown v. Board of Education?
Brown v. Board of Education Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) , was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision overturned the "Plessy v. Ferguson" decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, "de jure" racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the Civil Rights Movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases. However, the decision's fourteen pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in "Brown II", 349 U.S. 294 (1955) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".
Lemon v. Kurtzman Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971), was a case argued before the Supreme Court of the United States. The court ruled in an 8–1 decision that Pennsylvania's Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act (represented through David Kurtzman) from 1968 was unconstitutional, violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The act allowed the Superintendent of Public Schools to reimburse private schools (mostly Catholic) for the salaries of teachers who taught in these private schools, from public textbooks and with public instructional materials. The decision also upheld a decision of the First Circuit, which had struck down the Rhode Island Salary Supplement Act providing state funds to supplement salaries at private elementary schools by 15%. As in Pennsylvania, most of these funds were spent on Catholic schools.