Justices to hear Pleasant Grove tablets case: Top court to decide city's monument dispute

Pleasant Grove has treated donated items as private speech for decades, said Summum, a Latin term meaning the sum total of all creation, which was founded in 1975 and is headquartered in Salt Lake City.

Summum's attorney, Brian Barnard of the Utah Legal Clinic, said the group is trying to pair its monument with one promoting the Ten Commandments.

"Summum says, 'Our Seven Aphorisms are comparable and complementary to the Ten Commandments, so please let us put ours up,"' Barnard said. "It's a matter of simple fairness."

The Seven Aphorisms refer to a Summum belief that when Moses received stone tablets on Mount Sinai inscribed with writings made by a divine being, he actually received two separate sets of tablets — the Seven Aphorisms and the Ten Commandments.

Legal experts are hesitant to predict how the court might decide the case because some public-forum cases are a bit murky.

"The U.S. Supreme Court precedent is not clear enough to tell what way this case will turn out," said John Fee, a law professor at Brigham Young University.

Besides no set precedent for cases such as this, Fee said the case was controversial while it was in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Several of the justices voted to have the case reheard, but the vote failed, and those justices filed dissenting opinions. Fee said the Supreme Court will take a fair look at the case and there is a chance it could be reversed, but it's hard to predict.

"We can't really predict," he said. "I doubt the justices themselves know. I think it's almost certain to produce a divided opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court."

Fee said that historically the Supreme Court has sought to have a sensible balance in public-forum cases.

"With these First Amendment cases where precedent is mushy, it really is a gut decision based on broader principles, not mechanical rules they've laid down," he said.

While this could be a landmark case, Fee said subtleties in the case may not apply to others, and whether the court will lay out clear rules in the written opinion will remain unknown until the opinion is written.

Pleasant Grove Mayor Michael W. Daniels said the city's objection is not with the content or placing of the monument but with the precedent it could set.

"It's about not letting just anyone walk in and say, 'Because you have this, we have a right to put this up,"' Daniels said. "Summum was pretty much demanding — and by law, trying to sue us — to allow their particular monument to come into our park."

The Seven Aphorisms

The Seven Aphorisms of Summum are the principles of:
• Psychokinesis
• Correspondence
• Vibration
• Opposition
• Rhythm
• Cause and effect
• Gender

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E-mail: csmith@desnews.com