Larkin v. Grendel’s Den: Ruling, Rehnquist Dissent, and Legacy

Larkin v. Grendel’s Den, Inc., 459 U.S. 116 (1982), is the Supreme Court decision that struck down a Massachusetts law giving churches and schools the power to block liquor licenses for nearby premises. By an 8–1 vote, the Court held that letting a religious body veto a license application violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because it handed discretionary governmental authority to a church. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote the majority opinion; Justice William Rehnquist was the lone dissenter.¹

The Law at the Center of the Case

Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 138, Section 16C, as it stood in 1977, prohibited the issuance of a liquor license for any premises within 500 feet of a church or school if the governing body of that church or school filed a written objection. No reasons were required. No findings had to be made. The licensing authority had no discretion to override the objection.¹

The statute had grown out of an earlier, stricter rule. It began in 1954 as a flat ban on liquor licenses within 500 feet of a church or school. In 1968, the legislature loosened it to allow a license if the church consented in writing. In 1970, it was amended to the version challenged in this case: the license would be blocked whenever the church or school objected in writing.²

How the Dispute Arose

Grendel’s Den is a restaurant in Harvard Square, Cambridge, opened in 1971. Its back wall sat about ten feet from the back wall of the Holy Cross Armenian Catholic Parish at 100 Mount Auburn Street. In 1977, the restaurant applied to the Cambridge License Commission for a liquor license. The parish filed a written objection under Section 16C, citing concern about “having so many licenses so near” the church, and the commission denied the application on that basis alone. The Massachusetts Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission later confirmed that the church’s objection was the sole reason for the denial.¹

Grendel’s Den, represented by Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, sued in federal court.³ The district court declared the statute unconstitutional on its face, and the First Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed that judgment on Establishment Clause grounds.¹ The Supreme Court then took the case.

What the Supreme Court Held

The decision came down on December 13, 1982. Chief Justice Burger was joined by Justices Brennan, White, Marshall, Blackmun, Powell, Stevens, and O’Connor.¹

The Court applied the three-part test from Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), asking whether the statute had a secular purpose, whether its primary effect advanced or inhibited religion, and whether it created excessive government entanglement with religion. Protecting churches and schools from the “hurly-burly” of nearby liquor outlets, the Court agreed, was a valid secular purpose. Section 16C failed the other two prongs.²

On effects, the Court found the church’s veto power “standardless.” The statute required no reasons or findings and could be exercised for openly religious purposes, such as favoring license applicants who were members of the congregation. Even the “mere appearance of a joint exercise of legislative authority by Church and State” conferred a “significant symbolic benefit to religion.”²

On entanglement, the Court held that Section 16C “enmeshed” churches in the processes of government. It substituted “the unilateral and absolute power of a church” for “the reasoned decisionmaking of a public legislative body,” producing what Burger called a “fusion of governmental and religious functions” that invited “political fragmentation and divisiveness along religious lines.”¹

Underneath the Lemon analysis sat a broader principle. Section 16C, in the majority’s view, was not a normal zoning law. Ordinary zoning involves public agencies weighing competing considerations and making reasoned decisions; this statute handed a power “ordinarily vested in governmental agencies” directly to churches, with none of those safeguards. “The Framers did not set up a system of government in which important, discretionary governmental powers would be delegated to or shared with religious institutions,” the Court declared.³

The Court was careful to say what Massachusetts could still do. A flat legislative ban on liquor outlets within a set distance of a church would remain permissible. So would a system in which a public licensing body considered the concerns of nearby churches and schools, giving them “substantial weight,” so long as the final decision stayed with the public body.¹ What the Constitution forbids is placing the decision itself in the hands of the church.

Justice Rehnquist’s Dissent

Justice Rehnquist called the majority’s decision “silly” and defended Section 16C as a “sensible” zoning law. His central objection was one of logic: the majority had conceded that a flat ban on liquor outlets within 500 feet of a church would be constitutional, so a more flexible rule that only blocked licenses when a church actually objected should also survive. “Nothing in the Court’s opinion persuades me why the more rigid prohibition would be constitutional, but the more flexible not,” he wrote.¹

Rehnquist also rejected the majority’s worry that churches might use the veto for religious ends. The statute, he argued, did not sponsor or subsidize religion; it protected religious activities from incompatible surroundings, a state interest no different from protecting schools. The possibility of bad-faith use was not enough to strike down the law on its face.¹

What Changed After the Ruling

Massachusetts amended Section 16C in 1983. Under the revised statute, church and school officials may still object to a liquor license application for premises within 500 feet, but the final decision rests with the local licensing authority. If officials grant a license over an objection, they must issue a written determination that the establishment would not be “detrimental to the educational and spiritual activities” of the nearby institution, and a denied applicant has a right of appeal.⁴⁵

The decision reached beyond Massachusetts. At the time of the ruling, roughly two dozen states had laws restricting liquor sales near churches or schools in some form.⁴ Any of those statutes that gave a religious body itself the power to block a license was vulnerable under the Court’s reasoning; statutes that kept the decision with a public authority were not.⁶

Why the Case Still Matters

Larkin v. Grendel’s Den was the first time the Supreme Court struck down a statute for delegating legislative power to a church. It identified a form of Establishment Clause problem separate from the familiar concern with public funds flowing to religious institutions: the conferral of governmental decision-making authority on a religious body. It also reinforced the political-divisiveness component of the entanglement analysis.⁷

The most significant case built on Grendel’s Den is Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet (1994). There the Court struck down a New York statute that had drawn the boundaries of a public school district to match the exclusively Satmar Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel. Writing for the Court, Justice Souter relied on Grendel’s Den in finding an impermissible “fusion of governmental and religious functions.”⁸ Kiryas Joel extended the rule: even delegating civic power to the voters of a district drawn around a single religious community ran afoul of the same principle.⁹

Some questions the case raised have not been fully resolved, including whether the nondelegation-to-religious-bodies rule stands on its own or lives inside Lemon’s entanglement prong, and how it applies when religious bodies are one of many neutral recipients of delegated authority.¹⁰ The core holding, however, has held steady: a state may not vest discretionary governmental power in a religious institution.

1
Justia US Supreme Court. Larkin v. Grendel’s Den, Inc., 459 U.S. 116
2
Cornell Law Institute. Larkin v. Grendel’s Den, Inc., 459 U.S. 116
3
UMKC School of Law. Larkin v. Grendel’s Den
4
Christian Science Monitor. Massachusetts Legislative Response to Grendel’s Den Ruling
5
General Court of Massachusetts. General Laws, Part I, Title XX, Chapter 138, Section 16C
6
New York Times. Court Overturns Law Permitting Churches to Veto Liquor Licenses
7
Boston College Law Review. Larkin v. Grendel’s Den and the Establishment Clause
8
Justia US Supreme Court. Board of Ed. of Kiryas Joel Village School Dist. v. Grumet, 512 U.S. 687
9
FindLaw. Board of Ed. of Kiryas Joel v. Grumet
10
Columbia Law Review. The Nondelegation Doctrine and Religious Institutions