Supreme Injustice
Landor and the Focus of Textualism
Emblazoned at the top of the courthouse at One First Street are the words “equal justice under law.” On a cold morning last November, I sat through two hours of oral argument in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections (2026) in that building. The case involved Damon Landor, an incarcerated Rastafarian in Louisiana who had undertaken the Nazarite Vow, a tenet of his religion requiring him to grow out his hair. The Court’s ultimate ruling against Landor surprised many commentators, and demonstrates the limits that overly strict textualism can place on constitutional liberties, and illustrates why Western principles of religious liberty and legal remedies must receive higher consideration.
Damon Landor was convicted of possessing meth in 2018. When he was transferred to a state correctional center, he planned ahead and brought a printed copy of a Fifth Circuit’s decision ruling that state policy of cutting prisoners’ hair violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), the companion statute to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Despite coming prepared with evidence of his legal rights, Landor had his paperwork thrown in the trash, was handcuffed to a chair, shaved bald, and spent five months in prison. After his release, Landor sued the department and the guards under RLUIPA and §1983. The Fifth Circuit, though sympathetic to Landor for his mistreatment, affirmed that damages suits could not be brought against officials acting in their individual capacities under RLUIPA. During oral argument last fall, the Supreme Court also appeared sympathetic to Landor for the abuse. However, the conservative majority expressed concern that the prison guards were given insufficient notice of their vulnerability to personal lawsuits under the Spending Clause, Congress’s power to attach conditions to federal money given to the states.
RLUIPA’s remedial language mirrors RFRA’s: “A person may assert a violation of this chapter as a claim or defense in a judicial proceeding and obtain appropriate relief against a government.” Despite the identical phrasing, the Court distinguished the statutes based on their sources of congressional power. While RFRA rests on Congress’s authority to regulate federal officers, RLUIPA operates through the Spending Clause when applied to state prisons. Treating those statutes as contracts between the federal government and the states, the majority held that Congress must provide unambiguous notice of any conditions or liabilities attached to federal funds. In the Court’s view, states accepting funding would not understand RLUIPA to expose individual prison guards to personal damages suits.
However, this creates a roadblock for realizing RLUIPA’s goal of remedying religious discrimination and providing “appropriate relief against a government.” If this provision is broad enough in RFRA, 2why is it not broad enough in RLUIPA? While drifting far from the proper textualist analysis, the dissent from Justice Jackson raises a question demanding an answer: If there is no remedy for Landor’s violated rights, what prevents government officials from continuing to violate fundamental rights? State prison officials, as the dissenters argue, will have little incentive to follow federal law if they are shielded from personal liability.
After oral argument, I expected a strong ruling in Landor’s favor, much like the Court’s ruling in Ramirez v. Collier (2022). Following the decision, Professor Josh Blackman at the Volokh Conspiracy shared this expectation and explained how the Court’s ruling may have shifted during deliberations. He suggested the majority originally assigned Justice Jackson the opinion, with Justice Gorsuch in dissent, only for the vote to flip after the transgender sports cases were argued. Gorsuch’s opinion linked the case to Title IX, warning that “on Mr. Landor’s theory, Congress could require coaches at universities that receive federal funds to permit transgender athletes to play women’s sports—or face personal liability in suits for damages.” Blackman presents this as evidence that concerns over expanding causes of action influenced the outcome, especially since Landor marks the first significant limit on Congress’s Spending Clause powers since the Obamacare case.
Two dissenting views exist in Landor. First, the typical leftist take finds itself expressed by the left-wing Balls and Strikes: the Roberts Court ruled against Landor as a “Black Rastafarian,” and as a neo-confederate body, the Roberts Court does not care about his rights. Disparaging the Court as “racist” when it has ruled for countless minority plaintiffs is irresponsible and absurd. However, another view expresses concern for protecting Landor’s rights and providing him a cause of action. When there is a violation of the law, there must be a remedy. As Blackstone wrote, “where there is a legal right, there is also a legal remedy.”
Several avenues remain for providing a remedy to plaintiffs like Landor. The most direct solution is for Congress to amend RLUIPA to explicitly authorize damages suits against individual officials, curing the lack of clear notice identified by the Court. Injunctive relief, the most common remedy under RLUIPA, is also available for ongoing violations, but it offers little help once a harm like Landor’s forced haircut has already occurred. Other options include state-law tort claims for negligence or intentional harm, as well as suits under Section 1983 for violations of federal rights committed under color of state law, though courts remain hesitant to imply enforceable rights through RLUIPA. Finally, the historical “officer-suit” model offers a unique route. At the Founding, government officials who violated the law could often face personal liability through common-law actions even absent a statutory regime. This doctrine casts significant doubt on modern doctrines of sovereign immunity and statutory clarity that have strayed from the Anglo-American tradition of holding officials accountable for unlawful acts.
Justice Gorsuch’s majority opinion applied a focused and faithful textualist interpretation of federalism that ultimately failed to protect religious liberty, a principle enshrined in our constitutional order since before the Founding. The majority feared granting Congress a general police power through the Spending Clause, a natural concern for legal conservatives. If Congress could use vague Spending Clause legislation to impose personal liability on state officials, it would diminish the power of the states. While the Founders feared centralized power, their fear was not of the power itself, but the consequent infringements on individual rights. A power that expands protections for religious free exercise does not squarely fall within that framework. While Justice Gorsuch identifies a legitimate structural concern, the Court may have gone too far in protecting its view of federalism, at the expense of providing effective remedies for the most fundamental rights.
At its core, Landor presents a difficult constitutional question: How do we balance the limits of federal power with the need to protect individual liberty? The Constitution was designed both to restrain government and to preserve the rights of individuals against government abuse. Each proposition finds expression in the text of the Constitution, and the Court’s textualist reading of one to the detriment of the other undermines its mission of ensuring “equal justice under law.”
Religious liberty cannot exist as an abstract principle alone, nor as a merely statutory protection. Rights are meaningful because the law provides remedies when those rights are violated. If those rights are not properly recognized, the Constitution deteriorates into a mere “parchment guarantee.”
David Lindeman is a Political Science and Pre-Law student at BYU-Idaho with an interest in constitutional law and American political thought. He previously interned with the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill. His research interests include civil liberties, civil rights, religious liberty, free speech, separation of powers, and federalism.
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