(RNS) — In 2020, Damon Landor, a Rastafarian who had taken the Nazarite vow promising not to cut his hair, was held down and shaved by guards at the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Louisiana. When Landor handed the guards a copy of a federal court decision holding that Louisiana’s policy of cutting Rastafarians’ hair violated federal law, they threw it in the garbage, according to court records.
On Tuesday (June 23), the Supreme Court ruled that Landor has no right to sue the prison officials and potentially receive compensation for what he endured — a decision that gives state jail and prison employees nationwide a free pass to commit similar violations of incarcerated people’s religious freedom without consequence.
It shows that no matter how robustly our laws may appear to protect religious liberty, these rights are mediated, shaped and limited by a larger legal system that frequently fails to protect the most vulnerable.
The lawsuit, Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, was brought under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a federal law passed in 2000 that protects the religious rights of incarcerated people. The legal issue before the Supreme Court was not whether Landor’s RLUIPA rights had been violated — everyone agreed they had been — but whether anyone would be held accountable.
Damon Landor with long hair prior to his incarceration. (Photo courtesy of Weil, Gotshal & Manges)
The case asked whether the federal law allows suits for money damages to be brought against prison employees in their personal capacity, i.e., as private individuals rather than representatives of the state. The Supreme Court had already held in 2011 that such employees may not be sued under RLUIPA for money damages in their official capacity. But in the 6-3 opinion on Tuesday, the court dramatically narrowed any remaining avenue to compensation for even the most egregious RLUIPA violation.
The opinion, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, held that in order to be subject to suit, prison employees must “voluntarily and knowingly consent to answer lawsuits under” RLUIPA — something employees are unlikely to agree to.
Without any threat of financial punishment, employees of state jails and prisons can trample inmates’ religious rights with impunity. And while courts may still order prisons to accommodate incarcerated people’s religious beliefs — such as by providing halal meals — this means little in cases like Landor’s, when the damage has already been done. Moreover, even this nonfinancial relief can be avoided, as prisons frequently move incarcerated people between facilities to evade liability for rights violations. Landor himself was transferred between three different facilities in the course of six months.
In this way, the case highlights an important but often overlooked aspect of religious liberty law: the ways in which religious rights are deeply but often invisibly shaped by race, class, status, nationality and other factors seemingly unrelated to faith.
While religious rights on the books may be exceptionally broad, they are subject to a host of intersecting laws and doctrines that can undermine claims, typically for the disempowered. The doctrines of sovereign and qualified immunity can make it difficult to sue state actors, and the Prison Litigation Reform Act restricts litigation by the incarcerated. Overwhelming judicial deference on national security issues has stymied challenges to Islamophobic laws and policies, and complex jurisdictional rules have barred some religious claims brought by immigrants. One need not fully understand these intricate legal principles to appreciate how, altogether, they confine who can bring a successful religious freedom claim. And, of course, limited financial resources prevent many claimants from bringing suit no matter how strong their legal claim.
Other than those on the Christian right, many increasingly see religious liberty doctrine as overly broad — a tool being used to undermine LGBTQ, reproductive and labor rights. This is certainly understandable in the wake of recent Supreme Court cases that have granted opt-outs from reading books with LGBTQ characters in schools, provided public funding to nonprofits that deny services to same-sex couples, and undermined employees’ access to contraception. What this narrative misses, however, is the ways in which religious liberty protections have simultaneously been underenforced for some, including those in prison.
In 2024, the Law, Rights and Religion Project, which I direct, released the Black Religious Liberty Curriculum — a public video series of interdisciplinary conversations that explores how racism has shaped the right to religious liberty, both historically and today. Refusing to consider religious liberty law in a vacuum, as it is usually taught, the curriculum instead examines how our legal system has left some communities out of the (often ascendant) narrative of American religious freedom — for example, the enslaved people who were subject to laws regulating how they could gather, worship, preach and bury their dead; people in prison who until the mid-20th century were considered “slaves of the state”; and groups like the Nation of Islam and MOVE that were considered political agitators rather than legitimate religious movements.
Rather than being a deviation from the Supreme Court’s broad view of religious liberty rights, Tuesday’s Landor decision is part of a long-standing pattern. While religious liberty claims have been brought and won by people from many different backgrounds and walks of life — including people in prison — the path is often far harder for those who face obstacles within our larger judicial system. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent, after this latest decision limiting access to justice for the incarcerated, “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.”
(Elizabeth Reiner Platt is director of the Law, Rights & Religion Project, a law and policy center that promotes freedom of religion, religious pluralism and social justice. LRRP is based at Union Theological Seminary, a globally recognized seminary and graduate school of theology in Manhattan, where faith, spirituality and scholarship meet to reimagine the work of justice. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
