Rights and Responsibilities is a recurring sequence by Richard Garnett on authorized training, the position of the courts in our constitutional construction, and the regulation of non secular freedom and free expression.
It’s nonetheless (very) early within the Supreme Court docket’s new time period, and its calendar is much from full. The justices and their regulation clerks will contemplate hundreds extra requests for evaluate and, however the current development of declining caseloads, will in all probability grant a couple of dozen extra. That stated, and unlike the last few years, it doesn’t seem that the story of what court-watchers name October Time period 2025 will function landmark, lead-the-news religious-freedom controversies. Actually, to this point, there is only one church-state case, Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety, which is about for oral argument subsequent month.
Landor includes compelling details and bad-acting jail officers, however it’s not the type of “tradition warfare” case that, for higher or worse, captures social-media clicks. The query introduced is a technical one, involving the interpretation of a federal statute identified by the awkward acronym RLUIPA. In a 12 months of disputes over birthright citizenship, voting rights, presidentially imposed tariffs, and – don’t overlook! – misdelivered mail, controversies about whether or not this specific regulation authorizes cash damages in fits towards authorities workers would possibly effectively get neglected. Nonetheless, Landor is necessary, and it’ll inform us so much in regards to the state, and future, of the American experiment in non secular liberty below regulation.
In a nutshell: Damon Landor is a Rastafarian and, as a part of his non secular train, he didn’t lower his hair for almost 20 years, as a substitute rising lengthy dreadlocks. Originally of his five-month jail time period in Louisiana, jail officers accommodated him and his hair and, certainly, the related federal appeals courtroom had beforehand dominated that Rastafarian inmates are legally entitled to such solicitude. However then, with only a few weeks left earlier than his launch, he was transferred to a brand new facility, the place a guard and warden threw Landor’s copy of the courtroom resolution “within the trash,” handcuffed him to a chair, and shaved him bald.
This abusive conduct clearly violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (once more, RLUIPA), a bipartisan religious-freedom statute that Congress handed by unanimous consent in 2000 and that, amongst different issues, prohibits governments from imposing pointless “substantial burden[s]” on prisoners’ “non secular train.” After his launch, and armed with a robust courtroom precedent in his favor, Landor sued the jail officers for cash damages. In keeping with the lower courts, although, RLUIPA doesn’t authorize this treatment as a result of it doesn’t rely as “applicable reduction.” A number of judges on the courtroom of appeals wrote highly effective dissents, and the Supreme Court docket agreed to take the case.
Landor ought to and virtually definitely will win. (Disclosure: The creator joined a number of different authorized students in submitting a “buddy of the courtroom” brief in assist of Landor.) For starters, the court has already ruled, unanimously, only a few years in the past, that RLUIPA’s elder-sibling and role-model statute, the Spiritual Freedom Restoration Act, does authorize such a treatment and that cash damages might be “applicable reduction.” Opposite to the decrease courtroom’s reasoning, there may be nothing about the truth that Congress relied on its so-called “spending power” to enact RLUIPA that compels a distinct rule or outcome right here. What’s extra, to say that prisoners whose legally protected religious-freedom rights are violated can not pursue money-damages cures is, in the true world, mainly to say they can’t safe reduction in any respect. The decrease courtroom’s cramped studying of RLUIPA, which makes apparent and deliberate violations cost-free, would undermine – certainly, it might intestine – the statute’s goals and results.
So, Landor ought to serve up one other religious-freedom win on the Supreme Court docket, even whether it is unlikely to ship the drama, or match inside the narrative, most well-liked by the commentariat. However what’s that narrative? Usually talking, they’ve embraced, and doggedly push, a story in regards to the Supreme Court docket’s religious-freedom docket and church-state choices: They’re, the story has it, polarized and partisan, shut and contentious, divided and divisive. Generally, like damaged clocks, this account is correct. Current rulings in hot-ticket disputes about praying football coaches, religious-school funding, and sex-and-gender lessons in younger youngsters’ school rooms tracked the usual storyline, and mirrored – like so many issues at this time – the acquainted Purple v. Blue cut up.
It’s value remembering, although, what number of necessary religious-liberty instances have defied this script and that the justices are repeatedly unanimous, or almost so, in upholding each the constitutional and the statutory proper to the free train of faith. Not solely have among the extra progressive justices occasionally declined to join colleagues’ stricter-separationist opinions, the courtroom has typically introduced a united entrance in protection of what President Invoice Clinton referred to as “our First Freedom.” Simply final 12 months, the Catholic Charities case – which invalidated a Wisconsin tax provision that discriminated amongst non secular denominations – was unanimous. So was 2023’s Groff v. DeJoy ruling, which rejected a longstanding, however cramped, studying of the workplace-religious-accommodation provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As was 2022’s resolution in Shurtleff v. City of Boston, holding that town violated the First Modification’s free speech clause by censoring Christian expression; and Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, determined the 12 months earlier than, wherein the justices agreed that officers had unlawfully focused an adoption company due to its non secular commitments. The Roberts Court docket’s physique of labor offers many more examples.
One other prevalent false impression of the commentariat is that the protections for non secular freedom offered in our statutes and constitutions are there to learn the “majority” and overlook or neglect the wants and pursuits of “minorities.” And, to make sure, there are examples in our historical past of detached or hostile majorities ignoring and even persecuting these with unfamiliar, esoteric, or difficult beliefs or practices. Some protection of the Landor case has proceeded on the premise that there’s something uncommon or shocking about the truth that the case is prone to end in a court-consensus vindication of a Rastafarian, versus a Methodist or Baptist. However, once more, the true story of America’s longstanding and ongoing religious-liberty experiment isn’t one in all majority-service or of defending the actual and parochial pursuits of, say, the Protestant institution. In spite of everything, usually talking, in a democracy, the bulk can handle itself. The important thing gamers within the related Supreme Court docket instances and political advocacy campaigns have been Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, and Native Individuals; Sikhs, Santeria, and Latter-Day Saints. What’s extra, even when – as has been the case in some current instances – the claimants are “conservative” or “conventional” Christians, it’s removed from clear that they’re a part of, or benefit from the assist of, a supposed Christian majority. America at this time is much too pluralist, numerous, and divided for that.
Yet one more mistake that’s too frequent amongst journalists and partisans is pondering, and complaining, that religious-freedom claimants are merely “conservative” foot-soldiers in our numerous “tradition wars.” Too typically, non secular freedom will get the “scare quote” therapy in protection and commentary, suggesting that the author and the anticipated readers suspect that claimants’ invocations of their elementary proper to spiritual freedom is disingenuous or tactical, that it’s actually about one thing else, about “weaponizing” a proper to advance discriminatory animus or financial self-interests. However current controversies a couple of authorities mandate that Catholic nuns provide abortion-drug coverage to their employees, or a conflict between laws that ban sexual-orientation discrimination and folks within the enterprise of promoting artistic merchandise, or dad and mom’ objections to public-school lessons about gender fluidity are the outliers. Way more frequent than instances about neuralgic “social points” are low-temperature, however nonetheless crucially necessary, disputes about, say, whether or not Amish folks can drive their horse-drawn buggies on public roads, or whether or not an observant Muslim or Sikh can put on a head masking in a driver’s-license picture, or whether or not a prisoner may be accommodated with Halal or Kosher meals. As a workforce of outstanding legal scholars have shown, the “conservatives and tradition wars” account of religious-liberty regulation is flawed.
What’s extra, even in these instances that do appear to be skirmishes in our ongoing and sometimes heated arguments about intercourse, gender, life, alternative, and training, it’s removed from apparent that it’s the Little Sisters of the Poor, Catholic Charities, and Masterpiece Cakeshop who’re the aggressors. Because the state’s attain expands, as governments’ ideological goals grow to be extra bold, and as progressive political authorities’ tolerance for pluralism and dissent recedes, it’s hardly shocking that these resisting these developments would invoke a elementary and deeply rooted proper. Opposite to the uncharitable hyperventilating of some, religious-freedom claimants and advocates aren’t constructing a theocracy; they’re reminding all of us, believers and non-believers alike, that there are “things that are not Caesar’s.”
And so, Landor does greater than increase a merely technical query about statutory cures. It’s a reminder that non secular freedom means non secular freedom for all, and that it’s a foundational human proper that each individual, exactly as a result of she or he is an individual, enjoys and that our legal guidelines and our Structure do effectively in recognizing.