William Bentley Ball and the 'Century of Struggle' for School Choice

William Bentley Ball was among the most important religious liberty litigators of the twentieth century. Aside from arguing nine cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including Wisconsin v. Yoder, he represented religious individuals and institutions in dozens of state and federal courts across the nation. And yet, his story has been almost entirely forgotten by historians and legal scholars. This paper thus uncovers the profound influences on Ball as a Catholic schoolboy in Cleveland, Ohio, during the early twentieth century. In doing so, it introduces a novel way of understanding the origins of the school choice movement — a movement that, along with others that staked claims on the Religion Clauses, has an important place in the history of the twentieth-century Supreme Court. As Ball himself remarked after arguing his first case before the Justices in 1971, the “fight” for school choice in Lemon v. Kurtzman “was the windup of years of work — a century of struggle.” To be sure, Ball was not litigating for a century before Lemon, but the ideas that so decisively shaped his thinking about the constitutionality of public funding for private religious education indeed emerged one hundred years before Ball first appeared behind the Court’s rostrum. Exploring the intellectual formation that Ball underwent long before Lemon thus promises to shed new light on the twentieth-century Court and yet another one of the legal campaigns that has figured so prominently in its history.