Arguing for the former teachers, Stanford law professor Jeffrey Fisher said the court should limit the employer’s legal immunity to those who are “spiritual leaders” at school.

“Lay teachers are not ministers,” he said in his brief to the court. “While a slice of their classroom time involved instruction about the Catholic religion, [the two teachers] performed this duty strictly from workbooks, not as preachers of the faith. And they spent the overwhelming majority of their time teaching secular subjects.”