Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) 43 (1815), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled that the Commonwealth of Virginia could not confiscate Episcopal church land.

It was "perhaps the most rigid and exclusive establishment of religion in America" from the colony's founding until just prior to the American Revolutionary War, according to the scholar Michael W. McConnell.

[2] Two years later, disestablishmentarian trends led the legislature to repeal the 1784 statute, which had incorporated the church (over objections from Presbyterians and Baptists) and replace it with a provision allowing all religious groups to maintain their property and to appoint trustees to manage it.

Still, non-Episcopalians viewed the situation as unfair: the Episcopal Church retained its substantial amounts of land, but other groups (which had formerly not been allowed to own property at all) had no such holdings.

[7] The historian Leonard Levy describes Terrett as "the first case and one of the very few in which the Supreme Court relied exclusively on upon the concept of a higher law as the sole basis for holding a state act unconstitutional",[6] although the historian David Garrow suggests that Story's reference to "natural justice" was "meant only to express his moral outrage along the way to his clear conclusion" that the law violated the Constitution.