By Wayland Post Staff
Massachusetts’s Dover Amendment is often invoked as shorthand for a simple idea: some land uses are so central to statewide public policy that towns cannot use zoning to keep them out. But the statute’s real origin is narrower, and its court-shaped boundaries matter as much as its broad reputation.
The amendment traces to a postwar-era conflict between local zoning power and religious land uses. In 1950, the legislature adopted a law making it unlawful for municipalities to use zoning to restrict religious uses of land, including religious education. In Dover, a dispute between the town and a religious organization quickly became the test case. Attorney General Charles Cabot (then the Commonwealth’s chief law officer) sued to enforce the new law against the Town of Dover, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld the legislature’s authority to curb municipal zoning power and struck down Dover’s bylaw to the extent it conflicted with state law. That 1951 case, Attorney General v. Inhabitants of the Town of Dover, gave the exemption its enduring nickname.
Over time, lawmakers expanded the concept. What began as a protection for religious uses grew to cover secular educational uses and, later, additional state priorities listed elsewhere in the same section of the Zoning Act.
The core Dover sentence that communities most often confront today is in the second paragraph of G.L. c. 40A, § 3. That bars local zoning from prohibiting, regulating, or restricting land or structures used for religious or educational purposes when owned or leased by the Commonwealth, a religious sect or denomination, or a nonprofit educational corporation, while still allowing certain “reasonable” dimensional regulations.
The purpose behind that carveout has been stated bluntly by the courts: prevent municipalities from picking and choosing which religious or educational uses they prefer. In the Attorney General’s 2025 guidance summarizing decades of case law, the policy aim is described as foreclosing “local exercise of preferences” about which religious or educational uses are welcome, while still preserving a zone of legitimate municipal regulation. Put differently, Dover is designed to stop exclusion through zoning, not to eliminate all local oversight.
That distinction is where Massachusetts adjudication has done the most work by clarifying what the Dover Amendment is not.
First, it is not a blanket exemption from all laws, even when a use qualifies for Dover protection. The Attorney General’s guidance emphasizes that Dover does not exempt religious or educational uses from state laws (including health and safety codes) or from municipal rules that are independently authorized by, or intended to enforce, state law. Courts have applied that principle in concrete settings, including wetlands regulation, where municipal authority flows from state environmental law rather than zoning discretion.
Second, it is not an all-purpose escape hatch from zoning’s dimensional controls. The text itself preserves municipal authority to impose “reasonable” regulations in a limited set of categories: bulk and height, yard sizes, lot area, setbacks, open space, parking, and building coverage. The legal fight is usually not over whether a town may regulate at all, but whether a particular requirement is truly “dimensional,” applies evenhandedly to similar uses in the district, and does not, in purpose or effect, nullify or excessively burden the protected use.
Third, Dover is not a guarantee that any project proposed by a nonprofit with an “educational” charter automatically qualifies. Massachusetts appellate courts have imposed “commonsense” limits: the protected goal must be “educationally significant,” and that goal must be the “primary or dominant” purpose for which the land or structures will be used.
In Regis College v. Weston, the SJC reaffirmed both limits and treated them as the key test for separating a genuinely educational land use from one where education is secondary, incidental, or a veneer. Earlier, in Whitinsville Retirement Society v. Northbridge, the SJC rejected Dover protection where the findings did not support that the primary or dominant purpose of the proposed facility would be educational. The Attorney General’s guidance adopts this two-part framework as the standard way to evaluate Dover claims.
Fourth, Dover is not a license for municipalities to impose discretionary permitting regimes that function as de facto vetoes. Special permit requirements and site plan processes can become unlawful if they introduce discretion over whether the use may proceed, rather than limiting review to the narrow class of permissible “reasonable” dimensional regulations.
The 2025 guidance says towns may use site plan review only if it is confined to those eight allowable categories and does not prohibit or unduly burden the use; review that ranges beyond those factors, or introduces discretion over the use itself, crosses the line.
Finally, Dover is not simply a “developer’s tool,” even if its effects sometimes shape private development outcomes. The protected categories in the “religious and educational” paragraph are tied to ownership or leasing by the Commonwealth, a religious sect or denomination, or a nonprofit educational corporation. That structure reflects the original legislative judgment: certain institutional missions, religion and education, should be insulated from local exclusion, even when neighbors object.
In practice, the Dover Amendment’s real-world impact turns on the same questions again and again: Who owns or leases the land? What exactly is the primary purpose of the proposed use? And are local requirements limited to the statute’s narrow list of reasonable dimensional controls, rather than being used to stop or strangle the use? The law’s origin story, born from a direct clash between the Commonwealth and a single town, still echoes in that modern balancing act: statewide priorities protected from parochial vetoes but not placed beyond every form of regulation.
