Freethought-Now

Back in October 2025, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case brought by a Rastafarian inmate whose First Amendment rights were violated by a Louisiana prison. I speculated in a previous blog whether the Roberts Court would find a way to rule for a religious minority the way it so often manages to rule in favor of Christian litigants. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority met expectations and issued a 6-3 decision in favor of the Louisiana prison’s employees. This ruling effectively slams the courthouse door in the face of inmates whose constitutional rights are genuinely violated by prison officers.

Before we dive into the Court’s opinion, let’s take a minute to review: The case, Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety, asked whether the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) permits inmates to sue prison officials and guards in their personal capacities for money after they’ve violated an inmate’s rights. The inmate at the heart of this case, Damon Landor, is a Rastafarian who took a religious oath to grow and maintain dreadlocks that he would never cut. After arriving at the Louisiana prison, Landor gave prison officials court documents explaining that prisons cannot constitutionally force Rastafarian inmates to shave or cut their dreadlocks. In clear defiance of the law, one of the guards threw the legal documents in the trash, guards handcuffed Landor to a chair, held him down, and forcibly shaved his head. After leaving prison, Landor sued the responsible officers in their personal capacities (rather than in their official capacities), seeking money damages. Because Landor is no longer in prison, he’s unable to sue for forward-looking remedies, like an injunction.

In some ways, this case presented a fairly technical question about whether RLUIPA — a federal statute — authorizes these kinds of lawsuits. To understand the majority’s opinion, we need to discuss RLUIPA a bit more. RLUIPA does two things: First, it prohibits prisons that accept federal funding from substantially burdening inmates’ religious exercises. Second, it requires state prisons to consent to lawsuits by inmates that assert that the prison violated their religious free exercise rights. If a state prison won’t accept these terms, it won’t receive federal funding. Congress has the power to pass legislation with certain funding conditions under a provision of the Constitution called the Spending Clause.

The prison officials here argued that while the prison system “consented” to being sued under RLUIPA (by accepting federal funds), the individual employees Landor sued for damages never did. Put another way, Landor could sue the prison itself, but not anyone who worked for the prison, even though it was the individual officers who actually held him down and shaved his head.

Side-stepping the actual constitutional violation that led to this lawsuit, the majority concluded: “Mr. Landor does not have a federal RLUIPA cause of action against the officers. Under the Spending Clause, Congress lacks regulatory authority to impose liability on them directly and must depend instead on consent. And because they never agreed to answer suits like this one, Mr. Landor’s case cannot proceed against them any more than a breach of contract action might proceed against a defendant who never formed a contract.” The majority largely analogizes this situation to contract law, as if this case were about a business deal gone awry rather than government officers knowingly violating someone’s constitutional rights.

If this argument feels pedantic to you, that’s because it is. It’s the kind of argument that makes people hate lawyers, and as a lawyer myself, I have nothing to say in defense of my profession in this instance. The prison officers who handcuffed Landor to a chair and shaved his locks off knew it was unconstitutional — Landor literally gave them a court opinion saying so; they just didn’t care. Any claims they didn’t know they were violating the law are tantamount to claiming they’re illiterate. Accepting a job as a state corrections officer should mean you agree to abide by the laws that regulate state corrections officers. Instead, the Supreme Court announced that the officers are beyond the reach of accountability under RLUIPA because their employer struck a deal with the government, not them. This is Olympic-level mental gymnastics. Yet, here we are.

In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson fired back, calling the majority’s reasoning “a sleight of hand; it comes by way of the majority’s full-throated endorsement of a contract analogy even though what secures the rights at issue is not a contract but a law. Today’s decision magically transforms a federal statute into an invitation to be accepted or declined, deemed binding only if each particular defendant has explicitly agreed to be penalized. No matter that laws, as opposed to contracts, don’t ordinarily work this way.” The conservative majority’s argument that “Oops, the officers didn’t agree to this non-existent contract so they can’t be held accountable under the law” falls apart if you don’t accept the contract analogy in the first place.

In an academic sense, the majority’s view is one of several plausible legal interpretations. The problem is that we all know that if Landor had been an evangelical Christian (and maybe white as well), the Supreme Court would’ve waved its magic gavel and found a way to rule in his favor. Time and again, Christian litigants in front of the Supreme Court’s current majority receive favorable rulings, relaxed standards, and an overall assumption that they’ll prevail no matter how good (or bad) their legal arguments actually are.

In fact, the list of SCOTUS rulings favoring Christian litigants just keeps growing. To name a few: In 2022, the Court ruled in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that an assistant high school football coach could constitutionally kneel and pray on the 50-yard line after games even though the record was replete with evidence that the coach had long been coercing student athletes to join him in prayers. Coach Kennedy, of course, is a white Christian, and the Court bought into a false narrative to rule in his favor.

A year later, in 303 Creative v. Elenis, the Court let a would-be wedding website designer deny services to same-sex couples on the basis of her Christian beliefs even though she’d never designed a single wedding website before. That same summer, the Court issued its decision in Groff v. DeJoy, ruling for a Christian postal worker who refused to work on Sundays, even though his job required him to do so. Groff makes it easier for employees to claim religious accommodations in the workplace, even if the requested accommodation appears to conflict with what they were hired to do.

Even more recently, in March 2026, the Court ruled in favor of a Colorado talk therapist who also happens to be a Christian, holding that Colorado’s conversion therapy ban unconstitutionally infringed on the therapist’s free speech rights even though there was no evidence that the therapist was violating the conversion therapy ban or planned to violate the ban. The ruling in Chiles v. Salazar makes it more difficult for states to protect vulnerable patients from the dangers of conversion therapy.

If Landor was a Christian and the prison had somehow forcibly prevented him from practicing his faith, would the Supreme Court have agreed that he could sue the officers personally for damages? I’d place my money on “yes.” And that’s a problem. Non-Christian litigants are second-class citizens at the Supreme Court, and that should concern everyone who believes in true freedom of (and from) religion.

Disclaimer: The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

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