Kind of a win.......

Deadlocked Supreme Court won’t allow nation’s first public religious charter school

But the 4-4 judgement sets no precedent for officials around the country.

By Josh Gerstein and Juan Perez Jr.

The Supreme Court deadlocked Thursday on whether openly religious schools are entitled under the Constitution to receive public money through state charter-school programs.

By splitting 4-4 on the question, the justices left in place a lower-court ruling in Oklahoma denying public funding to what would have been the nation’s first religious public charter school. But the high court’s deadlock sets no precedent on the issue to guide officials in the rest of the country.

The court was short-handed because Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has ties to a clinic at Notre Dame Law School that advised the Catholic Oklahoma school, recused from the case. It’s unclear whether she would participate if the issue came before the court again in another case.

The court’s one-page judgment did not specify how individual justices voted, but it appears likely that a conservative justice sided with the court’s three liberal justices to produce the deadlock.