School Vaccination Mandates and Parental Free Exercise: Emerging Precedent Alone Does Not Justify an Injunction Pending Appeal

1. Introduction

This decision addresses the intersection of parental religious rights, school vaccination requirements, and the demanding standards governing emergency appellate relief. We The Patriots USA, Inc. and its member James Childs sought an injunction preventing Maine officials from enforcing school vaccination requirements against Childs’ son, G.C., and the children of an unspecified number of association members who objected to vaccination on religious grounds.

The defendants were Pender Makin, Maine’s Commissioner of Education, and Cari Medd, Superintendent of Maine School Administrative District #52, both sued in their official capacities. After the district court denied a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction, the plaintiffs requested an injunction pending appeal.

The central question was whether recent Supreme Court decisions protecting parents’ ability to direct their children’s religious development established a sufficiently strong likelihood that Maine’s vaccination requirements must undergo strict scrutiny. The plaintiffs advanced that argument even assuming that the requirements were generally applicable.

The First Circuit denied relief. Its ruling is narrow: the plaintiffs had not demonstrated that emerging parental-rights precedent extended clearly enough to vaccination requirements to satisfy the heightened showing necessary for an injunction pending appeal. The court did not finally decide the constitutional merits of Maine’s requirements.

2. Summary of the Opinion

The majority’s decision

The majority identified two principal obstacles to the plaintiffs’ request.

1. The parental-rights decisions were potentially distinguishable. The recent Supreme Court cases involved school-facilitated instruction or conduct allegedly interfering with children’s religious development. Maine’s vaccination requirement did not appear to require submission to school-facilitated instruction.
2. Established Supreme Court authority supported vaccination requirements. Earlier decisions recognized substantial state authority to impose public-health measures, including vaccination requirements for schoolchildren. The plaintiffs had not adequately shown that newer parental-rights decisions displaced or clearly altered that authority.

Because an injunction pending appeal would supply relief already withheld by the district court, the plaintiffs faced a particularly demanding likelihood-of-success threshold. Demonstrating an emerging, potentially relevant doctrinal development was insufficient.

The court also denied Brandon Michael Hayes’s motion for leave to file an amicus brief. It provided no separate explanation for that ruling.

Judge Dunlap’s dissent

Judge Dunlap would have granted the injunction. In her view, the relevant Supreme Court decisions were not confined to direct classroom instruction. They required strict scrutiny whenever government substantially interfered with parents’ religious upbringing of their children, including by effectively forcing parents to choose between public education and adherence to their faith.

The dissent regarded Childs’ beliefs as sincere and the vaccination requirement as substantially burdensome. It emphasized that the defendants had not argued that the requirement survived strict scrutiny. Without predicting the ultimate result of that analysis, Judge Dunlap concluded that the plaintiffs had established a substantial likelihood of success.

The dissent also found irreparable harm from G.C.’s exclusion from public school and considered the short-term public-health consequences of an injunction limited, particularly given existing vaccination grace periods and the requirement’s inapplicability to certain students who had previously asserted religious objections.

3. Precedents Cited and Their Influence

A. Parental religious upbringing and the scope of strict scrutiny

Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972)

This decision supplied the foundation for the plaintiffs’ argument. It held that Wisconsin’s compulsory school-attendance law, requiring public or private enrollment until age sixteen, violated the Free Exercise rights of Amish parents in the circumstances presented.

The disagreement concerned the level of generality at which that protection should operate. For the plaintiffs and the dissent, the controlling principle was protection against substantial interference with parents’ religious formation of their children. For the majority, extending that principle to vaccination requirements remained uncertain, especially because Wisconsin v. Yoder itself recognized earlier authority supporting broad public-health regulation.

The case therefore served both sides: it supported heightened protection for religious upbringing, but it did not establish an unrestricted parental entitlement to religious exemptions from child-protection or public-health laws.

Mahmoud v. Taylor, 606 U.S. 522 (2025)

As described in the order, this preliminary-injunction decision concerned a school board’s introduction of LGBTQ+-inclusive storybooks together with its refusal to provide parental notice or permit opt-outs. The Supreme Court held that those measures substantially interfered with children’s religious development and imposed the kind of burden condemned in Wisconsin v. Yoder.

The majority emphasized the instructional setting: students were required to encounter school-facilitated material alleged to threaten the religious beliefs their parents sought to instill. That feature supplied a possible distinction from a vaccination condition for school enrollment.

The dissent emphasized a broader proposition from the same decision: a state substantially burdens parental religious exercise when its policy effectively requires parents to forgo public education to raise their children in their faith. Applied at that level, the principle could encompass vaccination-based exclusion even without contrary classroom teaching.

Mirabelli v. Bonta, 607 U.S. 492 (2026)

This per curiam emergency-docket decision vacated a Ninth Circuit stay of a permanent injunction concerning California policies limiting parental notice about school-staff-facilitated gender transitioning. The Supreme Court stated that the policies likely triggered strict scrutiny because of their interference with parents’ direction of their children’s religious development.

The majority again regarded school-facilitated activity as potentially distinguishing the decision from Maine’s vaccination requirements. The dissent instead relied on the Supreme Court’s rejection of narrow readings of parental Free Exercise precedent. In the dissent’s view, requiring direct inculcation of contrary values improperly restricted the governing protection.

The disagreement thus concerned the reach of the precedent, rather than whether parental religious development receives constitutional protection.

B. Vaccination, child welfare, and public-health authority

Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905)

The majority cited this decision upholding an adult vaccination requirement against a federal constitutional challenge. It supplied longstanding support for state authority to undertake broad vaccination initiatives.

Its significance was not that it directly resolved the plaintiffs’ modern parental Free Exercise theory. Rather, it showed that vaccination requirements operate within an established constitutional tradition that the newer cases had not clearly displaced.

Zucht v. King, 260 U.S. 174 (1922)

This decision upheld school vaccination requirements against Due Process and Equal Protection challenges. Its school-enrollment setting made it particularly relevant to the regulatory context before the First Circuit.

Its doctrinal limits nevertheless matter: the constitutional claims identified in the order were not the same parental Free Exercise claim advanced here. The majority used the decision as part of the established foundation supporting vaccination requirements, not as a direct adjudication of every possible religious objection.

Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158 (1944)

This case upheld the application of child-labor laws despite a parent’s religious objection. The majority described it as applying the balancing approach later adopted in Wisconsin v. Yoder.

Its especially relevant language stated that parental religious freedom does not include liberty to expose a child or the community to communicable disease. The order expressly identified the vaccination discussion as dictum: influential judicial reasoning, but not the holding necessary to resolve the child-labor dispute.

For the majority, that discussion helped connect parental religious-rights doctrine with the established legitimacy of vaccination regulation. For the dissent, the decision supported the possibility that the state possessed a compelling interest, without eliminating the need to apply strict scrutiny.

Perry v. Marteney, 172 F.4th 315 (4th Cir. 2026)

The Fourth Circuit had relied on Prince v. Massachusetts and Jacobson v. Massachusetts to reverse a preliminary injunction in a parental Free Exercise challenge to West Virginia’s school vaccination law. The First Circuit majority cited that decision as persuasive support for its approach.

Judge Dunlap, however, cited Judge Niemeyer’s dissent in the same case to support applying strict scrutiny. The competing citations reveal an emerging disagreement over how older vaccination authority fits with newer parental-rights decisions.

The order noted that a petition for certiorari had been filed on September 4, 2026. That notation identified a request for Supreme Court review; it did not indicate that review had been granted or that the Fourth Circuit’s decision had been disturbed.

C. Emergency relief, irreparable harm, and public interest

Bos. Parent Coal. for Acad. Excellence Corp. v. Sch. Comm. of City of Bos., 996 F.3d 37 (1st Cir. 2021)

This precedent supplied the majority’s central procedural rule. An injunction pending appeal faces a higher bar because it does not merely suspend a lower court’s alteration of the status quo. It affirmatively grants judicial intervention that the lower court has declined to provide.

That distinction was decisive. The plaintiffs needed more than a plausible constitutional theory or evidence of developing law; they needed a sufficiently strong showing to justify immediate appellate intervention.

Together Emps. v. Mass General Brigham, Inc., 19 F.4th 1 (1st Cir. 2021)

Judge Dunlap cited this decision for the standard governing injunctions pending appeal. Her analysis considered likelihood of success, harms to the parties, and the public interest. The dissent therefore did not rely on constitutional merits alone, but assessed whether temporary relief was justified during the appeal.

Does 1-6 v. Mills, 16 F.4th 20 (1st Cir. 2021)

The dissent cited this decision both for the possibility of a compelling state interest supporting vaccination requirements and for the state’s legitimate interest in protecting residents’ health.

Those references demonstrate that Judge Dunlap did not discount public-health concerns. Her position was that acknowledging such concerns did not substitute for demonstrating that this requirement survived strict scrutiny, if that standard applied.

Sindicato Puertoriqueño de Trabajadores v. Fortuño, 699 F.3d 1 (1st Cir. 2012)

The dissent cited this decision in support of irreparable harm. Together with the parental-rights authority, it supported the conclusion that excluding G.C. from school under a requirement not shown to satisfy the applicable constitutional standard warranted immediate protection.

That conclusion depended on the dissent’s merits analysis. The majority’s refusal to find the necessary likelihood of success prevented the asserted constitutional injury from carrying the motion.

4. Legal Reasoning

A. Procedural posture controlled the breadth of the ruling

The majority’s reasoning is best understood as a decision about the plaintiffs’ burden at an interim stage. Its language was deliberately qualified: the recent cases did not “obviously” govern, and the vaccination requirement did not “appear” to require school-facilitated instruction.

Those qualifications matter. The court did not announce that vaccination laws can never implicate the parental-rights principles identified by the plaintiffs. It held that the existing record and submissions did not establish that connection strongly enough to justify extraordinary relief.

B. The dispute concerned the trigger for strict scrutiny

The plaintiffs’ principal theory assumed that Maine’s requirement was generally applicable. They nevertheless argued that its substantial burden on parental religious upbringing independently triggered strict scrutiny.

The majority did not conclusively reject that theory. Instead, it found the proposed extension of the parental-rights cases insufficiently established at this stage. The dissent accepted the extension because the practical consequence—exclusion from public education unless parents accepted conduct contrary to their religious beliefs—was itself a substantial interference with religious upbringing.

The dividing line was therefore whether the protected interest should be understood primarily through the instructional features of the recent cases or through their broader concern with government interference in parental religious formation.

C. Older and newer precedents were read together

The majority did not treat the recent decisions as silently displacing the vaccination cases. Instead, it required the plaintiffs to explain why those newer decisions clearly reached a field supported by longstanding Supreme Court authority.

The dissent proposed a different reconciliation: vaccination requirements may remain constitutionally permissible, but a substantial burden on parental religious upbringing should require the state to justify them under strict scrutiny. On that view, the older cases principally inform the strength of the government’s interest rather than foreclose heightened review.

D. Strict scrutiny was not actually resolved

The majority never reached a full assessment of whether Maine’s requirement served a compelling interest through sufficiently narrow means. Judge Dunlap likewise declined to predict the ultimate outcome of that inquiry.

The dissent’s reliance on the defendants’ failure to argue strict scrutiny was therefore conditional: if strict scrutiny governed, their presentation did not justify denying interim protection. It was not a determination that Maine could never defend its vaccination requirement successfully.

E. Existing exceptions mattered differently to the dissent

Judge Dunlap relied on vaccination grace periods and the continued exclusion of certain previously objecting students from the requirement to assess the practical harm of temporary relief. These features suggested to her that a short injunction would not significantly undermine public health.

The order did not hold that those arrangements made the law non-generally applicable or automatically unconstitutional. Their express role in the dissent was to inform the balance of harms and public-interest analysis.

5. Potential Impact

Emergency challenges require more than doctrinal possibility

The decision reinforces that litigants seeking an injunction pending appeal must closely connect their claim to controlling precedent. A developing constitutional argument may warrant further merits consideration without warranting immediate suspension of an existing requirement.

The reach of parental-rights doctrine remains contested

The majority’s distinction between school-facilitated instruction and enrollment-related health requirements provides a potential framework for future disputes. The dissent offers a competing framework focused on the practical choice imposed on religious families. Whether later courts adopt either approach more definitively will affect the reach of parental Free Exercise claims beyond classroom content.

Public-health precedent remains important but does not answer every question

The order preserves the force of longstanding vaccination authority at the interim stage. It should not be read as a categorical ruling that all vaccination requirements survive every religious challenge, or that strict scrutiny can never apply.

Future litigation may turn on a more developed record

If the merits proceedings reach strict scrutiny, the government’s supporting evidence, the operation of existing exceptions, and the availability of less restrictive alternatives may become important. Those questions were not resolved by this order.

6. Complex Concepts Simplified

Free Exercise rights

Constitutional protection for religious exercise. Here, the claimed protection concerned parents’ religious decisions about vaccination and their children’s upbringing.

Generally applicable law

A law applying across relevant conduct rather than selectively burdening religious activity. The plaintiffs argued that strict scrutiny applied even assuming Maine’s requirement met this description.

Substantial burden

A serious interference with religious exercise. The judges disagreed over whether the alleged burden clearly fell within the parental-rights precedents.

Strict scrutiny

A demanding standard requiring the government to justify a restriction through a compelling interest and narrow tailoring. Applying the standard does not itself decide that the law is invalid.

Injunction pending appeal

A temporary appellate order protecting a party while an appeal proceeds. Here, it would have supplied relief the district court had refused.

Likelihood of success

A preliminary assessment of whether a party is likely to win—not a final judgment. The majority found the plaintiffs’ showing insufficient for the relief requested.

Irreparable harm

Injury that cannot adequately be repaired later. The dissent treated G.C.’s exclusion from public school, in the constitutional circumstances it identified, as such an injury.

Dictum

A judicial statement not necessary to the decision’s holding. Such statements may be persuasive, but their legal role differs from a binding holding.

7. Conclusion

We the Patriots USA, Inc. v. Makin establishes a restrained interim principle: emerging parental Free Exercise precedent, without a sufficiently clear application to vaccination requirements, does not satisfy the heightened burden for an injunction pending appeal where established Supreme Court authority supports state vaccination measures.

The dissent exposes the unresolved substantive issue—whether forcing religious parents to choose between vaccination and public schooling triggers strict scrutiny independently of school-facilitated instruction. The order leaves that broader constitutional question open while emphasizing the difference between a potentially viable claim and an entitlement to immediate appellate relief.