Arkansas Schools Blocked From Enforcing Ten Commandments Law

Six Arkansas school districts are now permanently barred from enforcing a state law requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in elementary and secondary school classrooms and libraries, a district court ruled Monday.

A group of Arkansas parents have proven that Arkansas Act 573 violates their First Amendment right under both the establishment and expression clauses, Judge Timothy L. Brooks said in a memorandum opinion granting their motion for summary judgment in the US District Court for the Western District of Arkansas.

“The law serves no educational purpose, as the state admits, and consequently deprives plaintiffs of their rights,” Brooks said.

The parents sued various school districts over their intentions to enforce the statute, which was signed into law in April 2025. They alleged Act 573 unconstitutionally requires a state-approved version of the Ten Commandments associated with Protestant faiths that conflicts with versions followed by Catholics and Jewish people. The parents assert more than 470,000 students enrolled in Arkansas public schools practice a “wide array” of faiths, with some not adhering to any religion at all.

Brooks last year granted a preliminary injunction against six of the districts blocking them from enforcing the law, ruling it likely violated the parents’ constitutional rights, and ordered the districts to remove all posters displaying the Ten Commandments in compliance with the law.

Standing to Sue

The districts argued that the plaintiffs lack standing to sue and asked the district court to gauge the parents’ likelihood of injury by the number of Ten Commandments posters the districts received after the initial preliminary injunction went into effect, the opinion said. The district court found prior to the preliminary injunction that some of the school districts were likely to receive enough Ten Commandments donations to hang one in every classroom, making the plaintiffs’ likelihood of injury “real and imminent.” But Brooks ruled the volume of post-injunction donations is immaterial to the pre-injunction standing analysis, considering the districts received hundreds of posters prior to the injunction.

“Therefore, all original plaintiffs possessed standing to sue based on the pre-enforcement likelihood of First Amendment injury,” Brooks said.

Arkansas, which intervened in the suit, contends the lawsuit isn’t ripe, either, since the plaintiffs haven’t seen an Act 573 display in their classrooms. But Brooks refuted this and referenced multiple photographs of the Ten Commandments posters previously displayed in classrooms at now-enjoined school districts.

US Supreme Court precedent already establishes that such displays, when they don’t integrate the Ten Commandments into the curriculum in a study of history, civilization, ethics, or comparative religion, violate the Establishment Clause, the opinion said. The other precedents the school districts point to are inadequate comparisons since they involve voluntary actions while school children “cannot similarly avoid reading the Ten Commandments posted in their classrooms for thirteen years of compulsory schooling,” Brooks said.

The state’s own admission that the law may be a “little coercive” also doesn’t point to any law to support the argument that “a little coercive religious indoctrination is fine,” the opinion said. Brooks further rejected the districts’ arguments that the history of public schooling in Arkansas supported Act 573.

“Discussing history is both unhelpful and irrelevant when the challenged law is coercive, applied universally in the public-school context, and has no educational, secular purpose,” Brooks said.

The parents also showed that Act 573 deprives them of the opportunity to discuss the Ten Commandments’ concepts at a time of their own choosing, Brooks said.

The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, the ACLU of Arkansas, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and Freedom From Religion Foundation represent the parents. Friday, Eldredge & Clark LLP and Bequette, Billingsley & Kees PA represent the districts.

The case is Stinson v. Fayetteville Sch. Dist. No. 1, W.D. Ark., No. 5:25-cv-05127, 3/16/26.