Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court issued its opinion in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety. In this case, Damon Landor, a practicing Rastafarian whose religious beliefs require him to leave his hair uncut, was an inmate in a Louisiana state prison. Despite providing prison guards with a copy of a federal court precedent stating that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA) prohibits prisons from cutting Rastafarians’ hair, prison officers threw the paperwork away and forcibly shaved his head. Mr. Landor brought a lawsuit under RLUIPA seeking money damages against the individual prison officers in their personal capacities. The Fifth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of his suit, ruling that RLUIPA does not allow for individual-capacity claims.
The Question Before the Court
Can a plaintiff bring an RLUIPA prisoner lawsuit for money damages against individual state employees in their personal capacities, given that the statute was enacted under Congress’s Spending Clause power and the individual employees were not direct parties to any funding agreement with the federal government?
The Court’s Holding
In a 6–3 decision delivered by Justice Gorsuch, the Supreme Court affirmed the Fifth Circuit, holding that individuals cannot be held personally liable under a Spending Clause statute unless they have voluntarily and knowingly consented to face such liability. Because the individual prison officers never entered into an agreement with the federal government to accept RLUIPA liability, the suit against them could not proceed.
The Court held that it was not addressing or deciding if damages are available under RLUIPA (“And for reasons we outline, the constitutional question here is readily resolved by our precedents. It is also narrower than the statutory question in an important respect: It does not require us to address whether RLUIPA ever authorizes money damages.”) Landor, Slip Op. p. 4, fn. 1.
Joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, Justice Gorsuch emphasized that Congress’s power under the Spending Clause (Art. I, §8, cl. 1) does not grant it direct authority to regulate personal conduct. Instead, Spending Clause legislation operates like a contract: in return for federal funds, recipients voluntarily agree to abide by certain conditions. While the Louisiana Department of Corrections (LDOC) accepted federal funds and agreed to answer RLUIPA suits, its individual employees did not. Under blackletter agency and contract law, agents are not liable for their principal’s contract breaches. The Court rejected the notion that because officers receive paychecks derived from federal funds, they implicitly consented to federal regulation. Accepting this logic would grant Congress an unbridled police power over any citizen who indirectly touches a federal dollar. And the Court clarified that while Sabri v. United States allows Congress to criminally punish non-consenting individuals under the Necessary and Proper Clause to protect federal money from graft/theft, a personal-capacity civil lawsuit does not safeguard federal funds and cannot be used to bypass the consent requirement.
In dissent, Justice Jackson, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, argued that RLUIPA is a public federal law, not a mere private commercial contract, and that the majority’s “direct-consent-to-liability” requirement reduces landmark civil rights legislation to basic transactional deal-making. The dissent pointed out that the Court previously interpreted identical text in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to permit individual damages (Tanzin v. Tanvir), and that blocking damages here leaves wronged prisoners completely remediless once they are released from custody. The dissent maintained that because the state prison system voluntarily accepted the funds knowing RLUIPA’s terms, and the officers accepted state employment knowing federal law, Congress has the clear constitutional power to impose personal civil penalties to ensure its funding conditions are actually enforced.
Summary
In Landor, the court clarified that RLUIPA does not alter the law; rather, it bars prison litigants from seeking monetary damages from individuals who infringe their rights under the Act. This means Landor’s case is more about procedure than substantive law. The court may sympathize with Landor’s situation but still conclude that, as RLUIPA is currently drafted, he has no legal recourse for damages.
