The Freedom From Religion Foundation is proud to announce the awarding of a total of $10,000 to the three winners (and two honorable mentions) of the Diane and Stephen Uhl Memorial Essay Competition for Law Students.
Law school students were asked to write an essay on this topic: Analyze how the principle of “parental rights” has changed. In 2025, the Supreme Court extended Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), citing it repeatedly in Mahmoud v. Taylor, where the court sided with religious parents who objected on religious grounds to public school instruction that included books with LGBTQ themes or characters. Analyze how the principle of “parental rights” changes from Yoder to Mahmoud. What other constitutional or societal interests might conflict with this expanded understanding of parental rights in the First Amendment context? Discuss how the court could or should balance these competing interests in future cases.
Winners are listed below, including the law school they are attending and the award amount:
First place
Sam Foer, Washington & Lee University School of Law, $4,000.
Second place
Zoe Schacht, Brooklyn Law School, $3,000.
Third place
Ashni Verma, New York University School of Law, $2,000.
Honorable mentions ($500 each)
Wesley Michael Harris, Florida A&M College of Law.
Maya Gardner, University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law.
FFRF thanks attorneys Jennifer Green, Monica Toole, Tyler Steeb and Sammi Lawrence for grading and selecting the winners. The state/church watchdog has offered essay competitions to college students since 1979, high school students since 1994, grad students since 2010, one for students of color since 2016 and a fifth contest for law students since 2019.
“FFRF firmly believes that the backbone of our democracy is a strong judicial system — and the legal minds that ensure it runs smoothly and secularly,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “It is an honor to continue to support the next generation of freethinkers.”
The major winning essays will appear in the upcoming (April) issue of FFRF’s newspaper, Freethought Today and may be read online.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 42,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
