A Virginia college student who lost her state tuition grant after switching to a worship-related major is asking the Supreme Court to strike down the 2004 precedent that lets states deny aid to students pursuing religious degrees.

Bethany Hall enrolled at Liberty University as a music education major and qualified for Virginia's Tuition Assistance Grant Program, a state-funded scholarship available to students at eligible private institutions. When she changed her major to music and worship, Virginia pulled the grant, not because her grades slipped or her enrollment changed, but because the state deemed her new course of study too religious to fund.

Hall sued. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against her, citing the Supreme Court's 2004 decision in Locke v. Davey, which held that states may exclude students pursuing religious degrees from otherwise generally available tuition programs without violating the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause. Now her attorneys have filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, a formal request for Supreme Court review, asking the justices to take her case and overturn Locke entirely.

The legal team behind the petition is substantial. The Alliance Defending Freedom, First Liberty Institute, the law firm Troutman Pepper Locke, and the National Legal Foundation all joined the filing, The Christian Post reported.

Virginia funded music but not music and worship, and the Constitution allows that?

The core absurdity of Hall's situation is difficult to miss. Virginia was willing to pay for her to study music. It refused to pay for her to study music and worship. The only variable was the word "worship." The state drew a line between secular instruction and religious instruction and made funding contingent on which side of that line a student's degree fell.

Steven Fitschen of the National Legal Foundation framed the constitutional problem in blunt terms in a statement published the day after the petition was filed:

"It is odious to our Constitution for a state to fund a degree in music but refuse to fund a degree in music & worship. The Free Exercise clause is meant to encourage and even prefer religion."

Fitschen added that "Virginia's decision to deny funding based upon religious use is the type of hostility toward religion rejected by the First Amendment." John Bursch, senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, called it "religious discrimination" and said it is unconstitutional for the government to deny publicly available benefits "because a student's major is too religious."

The Supreme Court's upcoming term already features several major religious liberty disputes, and Hall's petition could add another landmark case to the docket if the justices agree to hear it.

Three rulings since 2017 have gutted Locke's reasoning

Hall's attorneys are not simply asking the Court to revisit a close call. They argue that the Court's own subsequent decisions have already dismantled the legal foundation on which Locke v. Davey rested.

In Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017), the Court ruled that Missouri could not exclude a church from a secular grant program that helped nonprofits resurface their playgrounds, solely because the applicant was a religious organization. In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), the Court struck down Montana's exclusion of religious schools from a state tax-credit scholarship program. And in Carson v. Makin (2022), the Court held that Maine could not bar families from using tuition-program funds at religious schools.

Each case chipped away at the same principle: that states enjoy broad discretion to single out religion for exclusion from public benefit programs. Yet Locke v. Davey, the original case blessing that exclusion, still stands as binding precedent. Lower courts, including the Fourth Circuit in Hall's case, continue to rely on it.

The petition itself makes this tension explicit. Hall's filing argues that Locke "was wrong when it was decided, and this Court's subsequent caselaw has further eviscerated its fatally flawed foundation." It continues: "Yet Locke remains the law of the land, so many States' education-funding programs continue to treat disfavored religious degrees worse than all secular studies, unconstitutionally marginalizing people of faith."

As previously covered on this site, the case represents one of the most direct challenges to state authority over religious-studies funding exclusions in years.

Josh Davey lost the original case, now he represents the next student fighting the same battle

One of the most striking details in the case is the identity of one of Hall's attorneys. Josh Davey, now a lawyer at Troutman Pepper Locke, was the student plaintiff in Locke v. Davey more than two decades ago. Washington state denied his tuition assistance because he intended to pursue religious studies. He took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost, 7-2.

Now Davey is on the other side of the counsel table, representing a student facing the same kind of exclusion he experienced.

Davey put it plainly:

"Twenty-two years ago, the Supreme Court's decision allowed states to single out students like me because our course of study related to our religious calling. I am hopeful that the Court will correct that decision and treat students like Bethany equally."

The original Locke majority, written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, held that Washington's exclusion did not impose "criminal nor civil sanctions on any type of religious service or rite" and did not "deny to ministers the right to participate in the political affairs of the community." Rehnquist wrote that the program "does not require students to choose between their religious beliefs and receiving a government benefit. The State has merely chosen not to fund a distinct category of instruction."

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented. Scalia's dissent argued that "when the State makes a public benefit generally available, that benefit becomes part of the baseline against which burdens on religion are measured." He continued: "When the State withholds that benefit from some individuals solely on the basis of religion, it violates the Free Exercise Clause no less than if it had imposed a special tax."

Religious liberty cases have continued to reach the Court from multiple directions and traditions, suggesting the justices face sustained pressure to clarify the boundaries of government neutrality toward faith.

Only the Supreme Court can fix what the Supreme Court broke

Hall's petition makes a jurisdictional argument that is hard to dispute on procedural grounds: "Only this Court can overrule Locke." Lower courts are bound by Locke regardless of how much the legal landscape has shifted since 2004. The Fourth Circuit ruled against Hall not because it necessarily agreed with the outcome, but because it had no authority to depart from existing Supreme Court precedent.

That leaves the justices with a clean question. If Trinity Lutheran, Espinoza, and Carson all stand for the proposition that states cannot exclude religious organizations and religious families from generally available public benefits, does it still make sense to let states exclude religious students from generally available tuition grants?

The petition is filed and pending. The Court has not yet indicated whether it will take the case. But the legal organizations behind the filing, ADF, First Liberty, Troutman Pepper Locke, and the National Legal Foundation, represent some of the most experienced religious liberty litigators in the country. They chose this case, and this moment, deliberately.

Other petitions before the Court this term raise related questions about the intersection of government authority and individual rights of conscience. A Washington state case involving a Korean spa's female-only policy tests similar tensions between state mandates and constitutional protections for private conduct rooted in deeply held beliefs.

Meanwhile, not every state court shares the current Supreme Court's trajectory on these questions. At least one state supreme court justice has publicly declared an intent to chart a different course from the Roberts Court's recent direction, a stance that makes federal clarity on cases like Hall's all the more urgent.

A government that funds every degree except the religious one is not neutral. It is picking sides. If the Court's own precedents since 2017 mean what they say, Locke v. Davey is a relic that punishes students for taking their faith seriously, and it is past time for the justices to say so.