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What is the significance of the Supreme Court case Murdock v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania?

The Murdock v.

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania case was a landmark decision that protected the right of Jehovah's Witnesses to engage in door-to-door religious solicitation without being required to pay a license tax.

The case was one of a series of "Jehovah's Witness cases" heard by the Supreme Court in the early 1940s that upheld the free speech and free exercise rights of minority religious groups.

The Court ruled unanimously that the city ordinance imposing a license tax on door-to-door solicitation by Jehovah's Witnesses violated the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech, press, and religion.

The Court rejected the city's argument that the Jehovah's Witnesses were engaged in commercial activity, stating that their distribution of religious literature was a form of religious exercise, not a sales technique.

The decision in Murdock was an important expansion of the Court's prior rulings in cases like Lovell v.

City of Griffin, which had protected the free press rights of Jehovah's Witnesses.

The Court's reasoning in Murdock laid the groundwork for its later decisions in cases like Follett v.

Town of McCormick, which extended First Amendment protections to the sale of religious literature.

Murdock was a key precedent in the Court's evolving jurisprudence on the separation of church and state, establishing that the government cannot impose special burdens on the exercise of religion.

The case was part of a broader pattern of the Court under Chief Justice Stone protecting the civil liberties of religious minorities and other unpopular groups during World War II.

Murdock represented a rejection of the "Gobitis" decision just a few years earlier, where the Court had upheld a school district's requirement that Jehovah's Witness students salute the flag.

The Murdock decision was an early example of the Court's use of the "incorporation doctrine" to apply the First Amendment's protections against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.

The case highlighted the Court's struggle to balance individual religious freedoms with the government's interests in regulating commercial activities and public order.

Murdock v.

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is considered a landmark victory for religious liberty and freedom of expression, helping to secure the rights of minority religious groups in the United States.

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