Docket 23-1197
Landor v. Louisiana Dept. of Corrections and Public Safety
DecidedJun 23, 2026
6-3decision
Source: CourtListener.
Court bars personal-capacity damages suits against state prison officials under federal religious freedom law
Impact7/10
What it does
The Court held that Spending Clause statutes — federal laws that attach conditions to federal funding — can only impose legal liability on those who voluntarily and knowingly agreed to those conditions by accepting federal funds. Because individual state prison officers never personally entered any such agreement with the federal government, they cannot be sued in their personal capacities for money damages under RLUIPA. This rule applies broadly: any Spending Clause statute can bind only those who consented to its terms, not third parties who merely work for a consenting institution.
Who benefits
Individual state and local government employees — such as prison guards, wardens, and other public workers — who work for institutions that receive federal funding but who have not personally agreed to federal funding conditions, and who now cannot be personally sued for money damages under RLUIPA.
Who is affected
Prisoners in state prisons who believe their religious practices were violated by individual prison staff, and who now cannot seek personal money damages from those staff members under RLUIPA in federal court.
Practical impact
State prisoners who believe individual prison staff violated their religious rights under RLUIPA can no longer sue those staff members personally for money damages in federal court — meaning that even if a prison officer knowingly violates a prisoner's federally protected religious practice, the prisoner's only federal remedy may be an injunction (a court order to stop the behavior), which is often unavailable once the prisoner is released or transferred. State prison systems themselves remain bound by RLUIPA and can still be sued in their institutional capacity, and prisoners housed in local jails run by municipalities (rather than states) may still have a damages path because municipalities are not protected by sovereign immunity. Congress could potentially restore personal liability by restructuring future Spending Clause laws to require individual employees to separately agree to be bound, or by conditioning funding on states passing their own laws creating such liability.
Majority — Gorsuch
Joined by: Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Barrett
The majority held that the Spending Clause gives Congress the power to spend money and attach conditions to that spending, but does not give Congress the power to directly regulate people's conduct or impose liability on them without their consent. The Court reasoned that Spending Clause statutes work like contracts: they bind only those who voluntarily and knowingly agree to their terms by accepting federal funds, and just as a contract cannot bind someone who never signed it, a Spending Clause law cannot impose personal liability on someone who never agreed to it. While the state prison system (LDOC) agreed to answer certain lawsuits as a condition of receiving federal money, the individual prison officers never made any such agreement — and under basic contract law, an employer's agreement does not automatically make its employees personally liable. The majority rejected the argument that officers' paychecks — which are partly funded by federal dollars — made them indirect recipients who had implicitly consented, warning that this logic would give Congress an essentially unlimited power to regulate anyone who ever receives money that traces back to federal spending. The Court also rejected the argument that the Necessary and Proper Clause (which lets Congress pass laws needed to carry out its other powers) could fill the gap, because allowing suits against nonconsenting individuals would not protect federal funds from misuse — it would simply expand Congress's regulatory reach far beyond what the Constitution permits.
Dissent reasoning
The dissent argued that the majority fundamentally mischaracterizes how Spending Clause legislation works: these are laws passed by Congress through the full constitutional process, not mere private contracts, and they carry the force of law like any other federal statute. Justice Jackson wrote that the Court's own most important Spending Clause precedent — South Dakota v. Dole — never required individual, direct consent as a condition of liability, and that the majority invented a new rule with no basis in the Constitution's text or the Court's prior decisions. The dissent pointed to multiple existing federal laws — including anti-bribery statutes, nursing home regulations, and emergency medical treatment rules — that already impose personal liability on employees of federally funded institutions, all of which the Court has previously upheld. The dissent further argued that the Necessary and Proper Clause independently gives Congress the power to enforce its valid spending laws by imposing consequences — including damages — on the individuals whose conduct those laws govern, since a law without an effective remedy is no law at all. In the dissent's view, the majority's ruling leaves prisoners who suffer violations of their religious freedom with no practical remedy, because injunctive relief is often unavailable to prisoners who have been released, and the decision creates an arbitrary patchwork where the same conduct may be actionable in some jails but not others depending on technical funding structures.
Constitutional question
When Congress passes a law under its Spending Clause power — conditioning federal money on certain behavior — can individual state employees be personally sued for damages under that law, even though they never personally agreed to be bound by it?