When Damon Landor arrived at Louisiana’s Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in July 2020, he brought two things that mattered to him: waist-length dreadlocks grown for his Rastafarian faith and a copy of Ware v. Louisiana Department of Corrections (2017), a Fifth Circuit decision holding that RLUIPA protects religious hair. Guards tossed the opinion in the trash, pinned Landor down, and shaved his head. Landor sued, naming the officers and administrators in their personal capacities and citing RLUIPA. The Fifth Circuit labeled the shaving “egregious” yet dismissed the damages claim, holding—as every other circuit has—that RLUIPA authorizes relief only against the government, which may itself claim sovereign immunity. scotusblog.com
On June 23 2025 the Supreme Court agreed to review Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections (No. 23-1197). The case will be argued during the 2025-26 Term and likely decided by June 2026. supremecourt.gov
An earlier post here mistakenly made the claim that this would require prison guards to pay the legal fees and penalties, but in reality the state or its insurer almost always pays the bill.
What personal-capacity suits really mean inside a prison
Supporters of Landor stress the Court’s 2020 ruling in Tanzin v. Tanvir, which allowed damages against federal officers under the nearly identical wording of RFRA. Yet experience inside the prison system complicates the picture. Officers sued as individuals are almost always defended—and, if necessary, indemnified—by the state or its insurer. In reality, the line officers virtually never write a personal check to satisfy a judgment. A state will refuse coverage only when an employee flagrantly violates explicit orders, an exception that is rare and usually obvious.
Qualified immunity adds another layer of protection: unless the officer’s conduct violated clearly established law, the suit ends early. That doctrine did not save the defendants here because Ware had spelled out the right three years before Landor’s haircut, but it shields the ordinary mishap.
Statutory brakes already in place
Even if the Court were to recognize personal-capacity suits, two provisions of the Prison Litigation Reform Act keep awards modest:
Physical-injury threshold. A prisoner may not recover damages “for mental or emotional injury … without a prior showing of physical injury or the commission of a sexual act.” 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(e). Courts may disagree on whether a forced haircut counts as “physical,” but the rule undoubtedly bars damages for many purely spiritual or symbolic injuries such as access to religious garments or diet. law.cornell.edu
Attorney-fee cap. Attorney fees are capped in these kinds of cases, and § 1997e(d). those limits deter contingency counsel from chasing nuisance cases although public interest firms may be more willing to pursue them. law.cornell.edu
Taken together, the indemnification practice, qualified immunity, and PLRA caps mean that adopting the Tanzin reading of RLUIPA would seldom ruin a guard’s finances or unleash a cottage industry of inmate litigation.
The Spending Clause objection
Louisiana’s primary argument is that RLUIPA rests on Congress’s Spending Power and binds only the entity that accepted federal money—the state. The guards, it says, never consented to personal risk. But Congress has long attached criminal consequences to misconduct by officials of federally funded entities. In Sabri v. United States (2004) and Salinas v. United States (1997), the Court upheld bribery prosecutions of state and local officers whose agencies received federal dollars, reasoning that such enforcement is “necessary and proper” to safeguard the funds. supreme.justia.comsupreme.justia.com If bribery statutes may reach the individual without her express assent, it is hard to see why RLUIPA could not.
Why the case still matters
Personal-capacity claims serve a purpose even when states indemnify: they reach the application of policy. Most religious-liberty violations stem from an employee’s misapplication of an otherwise lawful rule—precisely what happened to Landor who was not offered a religion-based exception to the rule. If damages are available only against the state for an uncotional policy, many day-to-day infringements will never see court.
Contracts with private prison operators can (and usually do) mirror the indemnity arrangements that already cover municipal police. So the parade of horribles about officers bankrupted by meritless inmate suits is largely theoretical. The deeper question is whether Congress meant RLUIPA to provide a tangible remedy when a guard discards a court order along with a prisoner’s hair.
The Court’s answer will decide whether the statute functions as a real deterrent or remains, in Justice Gorsuch’s phrase from another context, a “dead letter” when it matters most.