In late June 2026, the Supreme Court issued a seemingly small opinion with broad implications for statutes enacted under the Spending Clause. Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections looks narrow, but its reasoning reaches well beyond the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), raising questions about how federal conditions operate when state employees violate them.
The Case
Damon Landor, a devout Rastafarian, had honored the Nazarite vow against cutting his hair for nearly twenty years. Incarcerated for a brief period in 2020, he received religious exemptions from Louisiana Department of Corrections’ grooming policy. Transferred to a new facility with three weeks left to serve, he asked to continue the exemption and gave intake officers the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Ware v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, holding that cutting Rastafarian inmates’ hair violated RLUIPA. Officers discarded it and shaved his head anyway. Released shortly afterward, he sued the Department of Corrections, the prison, and several officers individually. The lower courts dismissed his claims; he appealed only the individual capacity claims and the Court granted certiorari.
Legal Path to Landor
RLUIPA didn’t emerge in a vacuum. In Employment Division v. Smith, the Court held that neutral, generally applicable laws burdening religious exercise need only survive rational basis review. Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to restore strict scrutiny, but City of Boerne v. Flores held that RFRA could reach only federal action, exceeding Congress’s enforcement power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment as applied to the states. Congress then invoked its Spending Clause (and, in part, Commerce Clause) authority to pass RLUIPA in 2000, conditioning federal prison funding on accommodating religious exercise absent a compelling interest pursued through the least restrictive means, and creating a private cause of action for “appropriate relief against a government,” reaching states and officers acting under color of state law.
Under these two statutes, available remedies became an issue for the Court. Sossamon v. Texas held that taking federal money doesn’t make a state consent to damages under RLUIPA. Then Tanzin v. Tanvir held that RFRA permits individual-capacity damages, posing the question: does RLUIPA, on a different constitutional foundation, allow the same?
The Majority
Justice Gorsuch wrote for the majority, narrowing the case to a single question of Spending Clause construction: consent. Because RLUIPA operates through the Spending Clause, the Court reasoned, a state that accepts federal prison funding agrees both to accommodate religious exercise and to private suits seeking “appropriate relief.”
The Court applied a strict, almost contractual, lens to that consent, asking who gave it and who didn’t. Just as coerced or unclear assent can’t form a binding contract, conditions attached to federal funds bind a recipient only when it has knowingly and voluntarily agreed to them. Louisiana’s Department of Corrections had consented by taking federal funds; the individual officers, lacking any agreement of their own with the federal government, had not. Landor’s suit could not proceed against them “any more than a breach of contract action might proceed against a defendant who never formed a contract.”
Individual-capacity damages are therefore unavailable unless Congress amends the statute to secure personal consent from officers. Officers may be sued for injunctive relief but not damages, even when damages are the only remedy. Because Landor had already been released, injunctive relief was moot; RLUIPA left him no remedy at all.
The Dissent
Justice Jackson dissented. RLUIPA uses the same operative language as RFRA, she argued, and Tanzin already held that RFRA authorizes individual-capacity damages. More broadly, statutes routinely support damages without explicit authorization: Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools recognized them as appropriate relief under Title IX, and Sossamon barred damages only against a sovereign, not an individual. She rejected the consent requirement outright: the Spending Clause empowers Congress to condition federal funds, not to demand individualized assent from every state employee. And to the extent the Spending Clause alone is insufficient, the Necessary and Proper Clause lets Congress implement RLUIPA fully, including remedies against individual officers.
Implications
The holding creates an asymmetry: individual employees must still obey RLUIPA, and their conduct is imputed to the state in litigation, but the state’s consent to damages liability doesn’t transfer to them. Both opinions note possible solutions: requiring officers to enter separate agreements, or states to create their own causes of action against individual officers, for example.
What Comes Next
Landor shifts the Court’s Spending Clause jurisprudence from contract analogy toward contract reality. Individual defendants in RLUIPA suits can now invoke a rule that damages liability requires personal consent. Because the majority grounds this in constitutional principle, the reasoning will likely extend beyond RLUIPA to other Spending Clause statutes, producing a more transactional model of federal legislation, one in which statutory conditions bind only the parties who personally accept them.
The problem surfaces wherever individual rights are burdened by state employees’ conduct, forcing Congress to rethink how to keep federal conditions enforceable against the people whose conduct actually matters.
The framework also raises the cost of the bargain. A condition that requires mass individual consent may be impractical to administer or impossible to obtain. Divided statehouses may struggle to pass new legislation. States may decline federal funds altogether and self-fund instead, cutting the federal budget at the expense of those least able to absorb the loss.
Conclusion
Today, the Court’s consent framework governs. And if Congress amends RLUIPA to restore individual damages liability, Justice Jackson’s dissent supplies a warning: heavy reliance on contract principles risks converting Congress’s power to legislate into a mere power to negotiate. And parties to a negotiation, unlike the subjects of a law, remain free to decline the terms, a choice with real stakes given how much state programming federal funding underwrites.
Sources:
42 U.S.C. §§ 2000cc-1(a)–(b), 2000cc-2(a), 2000cc-5(4)(A).
City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997).
Employment Div., Dep’t of Hum. Res. of Or. v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).
Franklin v. Gwinnett Cnty. Pub. Schs., 503 U.S. 60 (1992).
Landor v. Louisiana Dep’t of Corr. & Pub. Safety, 609 U.S. ___ (2026).
Landor v. Louisiana Dep’t of Corr. & Pub. Safety, 609 U.S. ___ (2026) (Jackson, J., dissenting).
Landor v. Louisiana Dep’t of Corr. & Pub. Safety, 82 F.4th 337 (5th Cir. 2023).
Landor v. Louisiana Dep’t of Corr. & Pub. Safety, No. 21-733-SDD-SDJ, 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 176894 (M.D. La. Sept. 29, 2022).
Tanzin v. Tanvir, 592 U.S. 43 (2020).
Whitney K. Novak, Cong. Rsch. Serv., IF11490, The Religious Freedom Restoration Act: A Primer (Apr. 3, 2020), https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF11490/IF11490.1.pdf.
Patricia E. Salkin & Amy Lavine, God and the Land: A Holy War Between Religious Exercise and Community Planning and Development, 2 Alb. Gov’t L. Rev. viii (2009).