In Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety, 609 U.S. ____ (2026), the U.S. Supreme ruled that officials at a Louisiana state prison could not be sued in their personal capacities for monetary damages for forcefully shaving the head of a prisoner, Damon Landor. Landor was a Rastafarian who had taken a Nazarite vow not to cut his hair and had informed wardens of his beliefs and of federal protections for them.
Case involved cutting a prisoner's hair against religious beliefs
The court’s 6-3 majority decision was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch. It rested on the view that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA), which in addition to protecting religious land use had sought to protect the rights of prisoners, only applied to individuals who had specifically contracted with the government under its Spending Clause.
The majority decision is highly technical and focused not on the First Amendment but on what it believed to be necessary limits on congressional spending powers lest they swallow up state police powers. Although the federal government had the right to attach strings to aid that it provided, any conditions had to be clearly established and agreed to as they would be in most contracts. Although the prisons that had accepted aid had agreed to the conditions Congress had imposed under RLUIPA, their employees had not and were hence not liable.
Dissenting justices worried that ruling would roll back protections
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Justice Jackson feared that this “severance of rights and remedies” might largely undercut the freedoms that Congress had sought to protect with the passage of RLUIPA, and which had been recognized in Holt v. Hobbs (2015), a case upholding the right of a Muslim prisoner to grow a short beard, and other cases.
Jackson believed that by requiring any party to “express consent” to being subject to lawsuits for violations of RLUIPA, the majority had applied the contract analogy to this case in a manner that contradicted its earlier precedents. She further argued that the decision might well undermine federal authority in other cases involving congressional legislation adopted under the Spending Clause. She believed that prison employees “know when they sign up to work at a state prison that they must obey the law or face the consequences the law prescribes” and that this is “simply “a consequence of their decision to accept employment.’”
Consequences
Journalist Justin Jouvenal has observed that Landor may still be able to pursue his claim in state courts.
The wider ramifications of this decision at the federal level will depend on subsequent rulings. Justice Jackson noted that the decision “might well land a serious blow to Congress’s effectiveness” or it might simply result in states requiring future employees to acknowledge their liability for violating the law,
Although the current Court had been relatively attentive to the First Amendment free exercise rights, it has sometime shown greater deference for individuals who are members of mainline religions rather than those who are not, and this case may fit that pattern.
John R. Vile is a political science professor and dean of the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University.