Supreme Court Empowers Prison Guards to Violate Religious Rights with Impunity

If you read the article up to the point where they describe the actual decision, it's quite different from the breathless outrage at the top. The reasoning is:

- In order to receive federal funds, state correctional institutions need to agree to certain standards, including the religious liberty protections.

- This agreement is between the federal government and the state institution; the prison guards and officials, in their personal capacity, never agreed to it.

- Therefore, the officials cannot be held liable in their personal capacity for violating the agreement.

- Notably, none of this shields the Louisiana Department of Corrections as an institution from legal liability.

The actual opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/23-1197_h3ci.pdf

The article gets six paragraphs in before starting to discuss the actual legal issue. No bueno! Better summary: https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/landor-v-louisiana-departme...

Here’s the missing context. Congress has chosen to confer on prisoners certain freedom to practice their religion freely. For federal prisons, Congress can do this directly. But Congress cannot directly regulate the machinery of state government, so it can’t tell state prisons what to do, as the Supreme Court held in a 1997 case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Boerne_v._Flores. Note a key point here is that these rights are statutory in nature, and go beyond the protection for religious liberty required by the constitution.

To work around that, Congress has imposed certain requirements as a condition of accepting federal prison funds. Among other things, it requires states to answer prisoner lawsuits for violations of these requirements. This is a common approach: Congress can’t directly regulate the states, but it can bribe them to agree to do things. But if the state doesn’t follow the conditions, then the only thing Congress can do is withdraw the money.

What this case holds is that the state’s consent to these lawsuits does not mean suits can be filed directly against prison guards who work for the state. This makes sense. A company might have a contract with another company that requires employees to follow various data security practices. The company might have rules requiring employees to follow data security practices. But if an employee doesn’t follow those practices, the other company can’t sue the employee directly. The employee isn’t a party to the contract. Similarly, the state may agree to certain requirements in return for federal funds. Prison guards may have to follow state policies to implement those requirements. But the prison guard is not a party to the contract between the state and federal government and cannot be sued for its breach.

As usual, the headline is hyperbolic and doesn't match the substance of the article, which is mostly correct.

RLUIPA governs the prison as an institution. The prison itself tacitly admits that the legal risk here was a matter of policy. As the article says:

    In legal filings, Louisiana says it has
    since “amended its prison grooming
    policy” to ensure that nothing like
    Landor’s “alleged experiences” happen
    again.

Option (1) is what he should have started with, and the fact that he didn't is indicative of bad legal advice for exactly the reason the Supreme Court explained: RLUIPA on its face clearly and textually only governs state institutions receiving federal funding, not individual employees in their personal capacities.

Option (2) is unlikely to prevail since there is probably no case law on point (most claims of this nature proceed under RLUIPA because it requires strict scrutiny of burdens on sincerely held religious belief, as opposed to the First Amendment analysis requiring mere rational basis for generally applicable state actions that incidentally burden religious free exercise).

The original title is:

> The Supreme Court Just Empowered Prison Guards to Violate Religious Rights With Impunity

>Landor experienced precisely the kind of harm that can only be remedied by money damages

I mean, if it's a violation of religious principle, and he's a Nazarite, his faith offers many forms of recompense, and none of them are monetary. His faith would say that those who have committed evil upon him will be met with similar or worse fates as assured by their God.