Heytens, Toby J. "School Choice and State Constitutions," 86 Virginia Law Review
117-162 (2000).

This article examines the history and constitutionality of Blaine Amendments as potential legal barriers to possible state legislative initiatives to extend school tuition voucher schemes to sectarian as well as nonsectarian private schools. Blaine Amendments are provisions which appeared in roughly 30 state constitutions towards the end of the 19th century, after James G. Blaine, an influential Reconstruction era Republican Congressional Representative, failed to secure a federal constitutional amendment which would have explicitly applied the First Amendment religion clauses to the states ("No State shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."), and incorporated an additional provision proscribing the use of state tax revenues to support sectarian education.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has tacitly, and sometimes explicitly, acknowledged the States’ right to draft more stringent restrictions on state support of religious institutions than are called for under the federal courts’ various interpretations of the First Amendment’s establishment clause. With respect to Blaine Amendments in particular, this policy was emphasized in the Supreme Court’s 1989 decision to deny cert. in Witters v. State Commission for the Blind, a case in which the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that the plaintiff’s desire to secure state funding for his seminary training under a state program providing financial assistance to disabled students (Witters was blind) violated Washington State’s version of the Blaine Amendment. The cert. denial came after the U.S. Supreme Court had already acknowledged, under an earlier appeal in the same case, that Witters’ claim did not violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause.