It’s hard to imagine a more clear-cut violation of a federal law than what happened to Damon Landor.
Landor is Rastafarian and does not cut his hair as part of his religious practice. While serving a five-month prison sentence on drug charges, however, Louisiana prison officials handcuffed him to a chair, held him down, and shaved his head. They did so, moreover, despite the fact that Landor brought a copy of a federal court decision establishing that he had a right, under federal religious liberty law, to keep his hair long while incarcerated.
And yet, it seemed very clear during oral arguments in Landor’s case on Monday — the case is known as Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections — that at least five, and possibly as many as six, justices will vote against Landor.
The reason why is that the specific legal issue before the Supreme Court is not whether Louisiana prison officials violated a law known as the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, or RLUIPA. Pretty much everyone concedes that Louisiana officials broke this law when they forcibly shaved Landor’s head.
Rather, the legal question before the Court is whether Landor may sue the officials who harmed him and collect money damages from them. While the Supreme Court’s Republican majority is typically very sympathetic to plaintiffs alleging violations of their religious rights — especially when those plaintiffs are conservative Christians — this case also presented two other issues where Republican judges tend to be much less sympathetic to plaintiffs seeking to vindicate their rights.
The first is a question of whether individuals who are injured by law enforcement officers may sue those officers directly. The Court’s Republican majority is often hostile to these suits and has basically shut down plaintiffs’ ability to sue federal law enforcement officers for money damages. Although the Landor case involves state prison officials, it is ultimately a case about whether law enforcement officers should be personally liable if they violate someone’s rights.
The second issue is that this case involved a federal spending program. RLUIPA requires state prisons that accept federal funds to afford certain religious liberties to the prison’s inmates. Congress has fairly broad authority to require states that accept federal grants to comply with conditions attached to those grants. But the Court’s Republican majority recently signaled that it wants to cut back that authority.
It appears likely, in other words, that the Republican justices’ commitment to Landor’s right to practice his faith will take a backseat either to their desire to shield law enforcement or their desire to limit Congress’s power. Depending on how far the Court goes in limiting federal power, this case could potentially have catastrophic consequences for many other individuals — especially Medicaid patients.
Why on earth did the justices agree to hear this case?
Now that Landor’s case appears doomed, the biggest mystery surrounding this lawsuit is why the Supreme Court agreed to hear it in the first place.
Although it is clear that Landor’s rights were violated, federal appeals courts have not been sympathetic to prisoners in Landor’s precise position. Indeed, according to a remark Justice Neil Gorsuch made during Monday’s argument, nine of these courts have considered whether prisoners whose rights under RLUIPA or similar laws were violated may sue the violators and collect money damages, and all nine of them have said that they cannot.
The reason stems from a fairly arcane difference between how the Supreme Court treats federal laws that regulate people directly and federal laws that impose conditions on grants to states. As the Supreme Court said in Printz v. United States (1997), “the Framers explicitly chose a Constitution that confers upon Congress the power to regulate individuals, not States.” So, Congress may often forbid a particular individual from acting in a certain way, but it cannot give orders to state governments.
Congress can get around this limitation, however, by imposing a limit on a federal grant. In South Dakota v. Dole (1987), for example, the Court held that Congress could require recipients of federal highway funds to raise their drinking age to 21, even though Congress may not command a state to change its own drinking laws. The Supreme Court’s cases involving federal grants to states often speak of these grants as akin to contracts, where the federal government agrees to pay money in return for states agreeing to certain conditions.
The federal appeals courts that ruled against people like Landor, however, have all concluded that a contract between the federal government and a state may only bind those two parties, and it cannot impose conditions on third parties — including prison officials who are employed by the state. As one federal court said, “RLUIPA cannot impose direct liability on Defendants, who were not parties to the contract created between [the state] and the federal government.”
All six of the Court’s Republicans appeared to believe that this reasoning is correct — although Justice Amy Coney Barrett did ask a few questions that seemed sympathetic to Landor, and she labeled the prison’s treatment of him “egregious.” As Chief Justice John Roberts summarized in a position seemingly shared by most of the Court, “the basis for state liability here is, of course, an agreement with the federal government…but there was no such arrangement with the” prison officials that Landor is suing.
Given the consensus among lower courts, as well as the fact that most of the justices appear to agree with that consensus, it is very strange that the Court decided to hear this case in the first place. Typically, the Court does not get involved in legal issues that the lower courts agree upon unless they intend to change the law. And the facts of Landor’s case are so shocking that it makes no sense politically for the justices to take up this case in particular if they simply want to reaffirm existing law. Why not wait for a less egregious case?
Based on the oral arguments, there is a plausible answer to this question.
The Republican justices may want to use Landor to rework the balance of power between Congress and the states
RLUIPA is hardly the only law that imposes conditions on states that accept federal funding. The biggest federal program that does so is Medicaid, which imposes pages and pages of conditions on states that accept federal funds to provide health care to their poorest residents.
Two years ago, in Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski (2023), the Court reaffirmed at least two decades’ worth of precedent that took a relatively expansive view of when Congress may authorize individual Medicaid patients to sue in order to enforce these conditions. Under Talevski, federal Medicaid law provisions typically may be enforced through private lawsuits if the text of that provision is “phrased in terms of the persons benefited.”
Last term, however, in a case called Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025), the Republican justices seemed to walk away from the Talevski framework. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion in Medina is difficult to parse and does not clearly state a new legal rule, but it’s clear that Gorsuch wants to impose new restrictions on Congress’s power to attach conditions to federal spending programs. “Spending power statutes like Medicaid,” Gorsuch wrote, are “especially unlikely” to be enforceable through lawsuits.
Medicaid law governs a wide range of patient rights, from the right of nursing home residents not to be drugged into a stupor (which was at issue in Talevski) to the right to choose your own doctor (which the Republican justices effectively eliminated in Medina). So, if the Court prevents Medicaid patients from enforcing their rights under federal Medicaid law, that could lead to terrible outcomes for these patients.
During the Landor argument, the three Democratic justices — and especially Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the author of Talevski — expressed concerns that a decision against Landor could further erode Talevski. And it is possible that the six Republican justices took an interest in Landor because they want that erosion to continue.
Gorsuch, meanwhile, offered a bit of a window into what he wants the new regime to look like. Suppose, he asked at one point — because Congress passed a law that allowed students to sue coaches at federally funded universities — if those coaches had a policy on transgender athletes that Congress disagreed with. Or suppose that Congress wanted to make employees of state agencies liable for having abortions. Would that be allowed?
Under existing law, the coach, at least, could be held liable. While existing law does require the conditions attached to federal grants to be germane to the purpose of that grant, a federal grant related to university sports programs could probably include a condition involving transgender athletes. But Gorsuch, and some of his fellow Republican justices, appeared to view this situation as untenable.
Liberals can, perhaps, take some comfort in the fact that Gorsuch does not want Congress to be able to effectively bar transgender athletes from sports or prohibit state employees from getting abortions. But the hypothetical laws Gorsuch brought up at oral arguments in Landor do not actually exist. Both RLUIPA and Medicaid, by contrast, are very much real.
And it appears likely that a majority of the Court wants to place limits on both of them.
