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The Supreme Court’s campaign to expand religious liberty now has a glaring exception

Why the Court just ruled against a Rastafari man whose rights were violated in the most blatant way imaginable.

A Louisiana prison committed one of the most obvious violations of a man’s religious liberty that has ever made its way to the Supreme Court.

Damon Landor is a Rastafari who, for religious reasons, does not cut his hair — according to his lawyers, he kept this vow for more than two decades, until his dreadlocks grew nearly long enough to reach his knees. But then, in 2020, while he was serving a five-month sentence for a drug-related offense, prison officials handcuffed him to a chair, held him down, and shaved his head.

Incredibly, when Landor was transferred to the prison where this forced shaving occurred, he brought with him a copy of a federal appeals court decision, which held that it violates federal religious liberty law for Louisiana prisons to cut the hair of Rastafari prisoners, at least when those prisoners wish to keep it long for religious reasons. But, when Landor presented this decision to prison guards, they threw it in the trash and shaved his head anyway.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

And yet, in its 6-3 decision in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety, which the Supreme Court handed down on Tuesday, the Court’s Republican majority held that Landor has no remedy against these prison officials, despite their clear cut violation of federal religious liberty law.

The Court’s Republican majority is normally very sympathetic to religious liberty plaintiffs, especially when those plaintiffs are Christian. So Landor is a break from this Court’s broader efforts to read religious liberty law expansively. It’s unclear why the Republican justices broke from their ordinary pattern of favoring religious plaintiffs, though one explanation is that Landor could undermine civil rights and public health statutes that Republicans oppose.

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s decision for himself and his fellow Republicans rests on a hypertechnical distinction between how the federal law at issue in this case, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA), was actually drafted, and how it could have been drafted to protect people like Landor. In theory, Landor does little to limit Congress’s ability........

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