Supreme Court decides not everyone deserves religious liberty
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/6/23/800059751/courts/supreme-court-decides-not-everyone-deserves-religious-liberty/
Supreme Court decides not everyone deserves religious liberty
The Supreme Court’s decision in Landor v. Louisiana is a perfect example of how conservatives strip rights from people by abstracting them away. The court’s conservative majority didn’t really want to talk about Damon Landor and how Louisiana corrections officials openly and flagrantly violated his religious liberty rights.
So, they buried that simple story in a sprawling monstrosity of a discussion about the Spending Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and contract law. All that verbiage, however, can’t obscure what happened here, which is that the court’s conservatives decided that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, passed by Congress to explicitly protect the religious rights of incarcerated people, doesn’t really apply to all religions.
The facts of the case are as simple as they are appalling.
Landor is a practicing Rastafari who has taken the Nazarite vow, which requires adherence to the Biblical requirements laid out in Numbers 6, particularly Numbers 6:5: “All the days of the vow of his separation no razor shall come upon his head; until the days are fulfilled for which he separated himself to the Lord, he shall be holy. Then he shall let the locks of the hair of his head grow.”
In keeping with his faith, Landor had grown his hair for nearly 20 years. During two previous incarcerations, the correctional facilities followed the law and did not force him to cut his locs.
When Landor was transferred to the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Louisiana, he brought with him state and federal forms explaining the requirements for religious accommodations and a copy of a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals case that specifically held that prohibiting locs in correctional facilities violated RLUIPA.
In an almost comically blatant violation of the law, the intake officer threw Landor’s documents in the trash and summoned the warden, who demanded Landor provide religious documentation from the sentencing judge. When Landor offered to get that documentation from his former lawyer, the warden said it was “too late for that,” and Landor was forcibly shackled and shaved bald.
Here’s where the procedural trickery comes in, a way to completely deprive Landor of the ability to get justice for a profound violation of his religious beliefs.
This incident happened when Landor had only three weeks remaining in his sentence. Upon his release, he sued the warden, the state corrections secretary, and the prison guards. Both the federal district court and the Fifth Circuit ruled that Landor’s right to relief under RLUIPA was limited to injunctive relief—a decision that would bar prison officials from taking a certain action. And since Landor was now no longer incarcerated, his claim was moot.
RLUIPA, the majority decided, doesn’t allow for a “private cause of action” for damages against individual officials, so Landor was out of luck.
You see the problem here, of course. Injunctive relief would only have been actual relief if somehow Landor had managed to file a lawsuit in the brief time before he was shackled and forcibly shaved. Since that was impossible, Landor’s recourse was to sue the prison officials in their official capacity.
Nope, said the conservative majority. Landor could only sue officials who have voluntarily agreed to be bound by RLUIPA. You get one guess as to whether any state officials would decide to voluntarily agree to be bound by a law they clearly despise
The court’s conservatives loved this loophole, saying that RLUIPA is really more like a contract than a law, and since the prison officials didn’t agree to be bound by that contract, they couldn’t be liable.
Who knew that one could simply opt out of being bound by laws?
This case was a rare one that united people across the religious and ideological spectrum. Hyperconservative organizations like the Becket Fund, ACLJ, and the religious liberty clinic at Notre Dame, where Justice Amy Coney Barrett taught for 15 years, filed amicus briefs on Landor’s side, along with groups such as a group of Rastafari scholars and the National Police Accountability Project.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent calls out the majority for its hypocrisy, a thing that is becoming a distressingly regular occurrence, by pointing out that a statute with identical language, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, allows for lawsuits seeking damages from individual government officials, a thing the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed just six years ago.
Her dissent also highlights that the majority basically gave permission to prison officials to just ignore the law: “Prisoners like Landor who suffer violations of their religious freedom in state prisons—no matter how blatant—will often be left remediless. And encroachments on prisoners’ statutory rights are likely to happen with fair frequency, as state-empowered prison officials will have little incentive to abide by federal law, even if it is handed to them on a piece of paper.”
One can presume the majority might not be so quick to throw away the rights of the religious litigants it likes—such as evangelical Christians—but making it nearly impossible for religious minorities to obtain relief is acceptable. Religious liberty for me but not for thee indeed.
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