Updated on June 23 at 2:51 p.m.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections that a Louisiana man cannot sue prison officials who shaved his head even after he showed them a copy of a court ruling that allowed him to keep his long hair for religious reasons. By a vote of 6-3, the justices agreed with the prison officials that a federal law intended to protect the religious rights of prisoners does not authorize Damon Landor’s lawsuit seeking damages from the officials.
Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that under the Constitution’s spending clause (pursuant to which the federal law protecting such religious rights was enacted), “Congress’s power to spend money does not include the power to regulate. Spending Clause statutes can bind only those who voluntarily and knowingly undertake obligations by agreement with the federal government” – an “essential element” missing from Landor’s case.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented. She argued that, as a result of the majority’s ruling, “[p]risoners 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.”
The haircut at the center of the dispute took place in December 2020, when Landor, with three weeks left in his sentence, was transferred to the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center. Landor is a devout Rastafarian who, as part of his faith, had grown his hair for nearly 20 years without cutting it. During his time in two previous prisons, he had been allowed to keep his hair long or under a “rastacap.”
When Landor arrived at the RLCC, he told the prison guard conducting the inmate intake procedures that he was a practicing Rastafarian, and he gave the guard a copy of a ruling by a federal appeals court holding that Louisiana’s policy of cutting Rastafarians’ hair violates the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, as well as federal and state provisions regarding religious accommodations for Rastafarians. The guard took the papers from Landor, threw them in the trash, and called the warden. When the warden arrived, he ordered corrections officers to take Landor to another room, where they handcuffed him to a chair and held him down while his head was shaved bald.
Landor went to federal court in Louisiana in 2021, relying on a provision of RLUIPA that allows individuals to bring lawsuits against the government and government officials for “appropriate relief.” But the lower courts threw out his lawsuit, holding that RLUIPA does not allow private individuals to bring claims for money damages.
Landor then appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed last summer to review his case. On Tuesday, the court upheld the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in favor of the prison officials.
In his 18-page opinion for the majority, Gorsuch explained that Congress enacted RLUIPA pursuant to its power under the spending clause, which gives it the power to spend money to provide for the “general Welfare of the United States.” But although that power allows Congress to put conditions on the funds that it distributes, Gorsuch reasoned, it can only impose sanctions – other than terminating the funds – for violations of those conditions if the recipients of the funds have knowingly and voluntarily consented to those sanctions.
In this case, Gorsuch continued, the Louisiana Department of Corrections “does not dispute that it is a recipient of federal funds” and “that it has agreed” to be sued by private plaintiffs under RLUIPA “as a condition of accepting those funds.” But Landor does not contend that the prison officials who are the defendants in his lawsuit have “voluntarily and knowingly consented to answer private suits under RLUIPA,” Gorsuch noted, and therefore his lawsuit against them cannot go forward. Gorsuch wrote, for example, that it did not matter that the prison officials received paychecks from the Louisiana Department of Corrections, which in turn received federal funding, so that they “should be deemed to have implicitly consented to RLUIPA liability.”
Accepting such an argument, Gorsuch suggested, would give Congress “an effectively unbridled police power,” allowing it to regulate a private individual’s conduct as long as that person received some money from the recipient of federal funds who had consented to a condition. This would, Gorsuch said, allow Congress to “require coaches at universities that receive federal funds to permit transgender athletes to play women’s sports” or “bar doctors at medical practices that accept federal funds from administering certain vaccines to children” – with the prospect that they could face lawsuits if they did not comply with those conditions.
Gorsuch also rebuffed Landor’s invocation of the Constitution’s necessary and proper clause, which gives Congress the power to use “necessary and proper” means to carry out its other powers outlined in the Constitution. Applying that provision, Landor (and Jackson in her dissent) reasoned, Congress could allow prisoners to sue individual prison officials even if they did not specifically consent because doing so would be “necessary and proper” to carry out RLUIPA’s goal of protecting religious freedom. That theory, Gorsuch countered, focuses on the wrong question, which “is not … whether a personal-capacity cause of action is incidental to RLUIPA’s policy protecting religious exercises” but “instead … whether their proposed cause of action is a necessary and proper incident to Congress’s constitutionally enumerated power to spend money” – which, Gorsuch concluded, it is not.
In her 29-page dissent, Jackson argued that Tuesday’s decision imposed a “novel consent requirement.” “On the majority’s view,” she wrote, “no matter how clearly Congress speaks, all that matters is the response it elicits: Spending Clause legislation may not make anybody liable without their express consent. And because prison officials (as opposed to their state-prison employers) have not directly accepted federal funds, they have not consented to being sanctioned for their failure to follow federal law.”
In establishing such a rule, Jackson contended, Gorsuch’s opinion “jettisons ‘a long line of this Court’s precedents.’ We have lived for decades,” she said, “in a world in which Congress has been able to use its spending power to reach beyond direct recipients of federal funds. And it has done so repeatedly.”