Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1997

City of Boerne v. Flores

521 U.S. 507 | 117 S. Ct. 2157 | 138 L. Ed. 2d 624 | 1997 U.S. LEXIS 4035 | 65 U.S.L.W. 4612 | 97 Daily Journal DAR 7973 | 1997 Colo. J. C.A.R. 1329 | 97 Cal. Daily Op. Serv. 4904 | 11 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 140

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Takeaway

In short, City of Boerne established the "congruence and proportionality" test for Fourteenth Amendment enforcement legislation and held that Congress may enforce constitutional rights, but may not redefine them by statute.

Background

St. Peter Catholic Church in Boerne, Texas, had become too small for its growing congregation. After the Archbishop of San Antonio approved plans to enlarge the 1923 mission-style church, the City adopted a historic-preservation ordinance requiring approval for construction affecting designated landmarks or buildings in a historic district. City officials denied the church's building-permit application on the ground that the church lay within the historic district.

The Archbishop sued, relying in part on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). RFRA required federal, state, and local governments to justify a substantial burden on religious exercise under strict scrutiny, even when the burden resulted from a neutral and generally applicable law. The federal district court held that Congress had exceeded its Fourteenth Amendment enforcement power by applying RFRA to the States. The Fifth Circuit reversed and sustained RFRA. The Supreme Court granted review and reversed the Fifth Circuit.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Congress's power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment permits it to define the substantive scope of the Free Exercise Clause more broadly than the Court had defined it in Employment Division v. Smith.

Holding

No. Section 5 permits Congress to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantees through remedial or preventive legislation, but it does not permit Congress to redefine those guarantees or alter the Court's interpretation of the Constitution.

Reasoning

The Court accepted that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Free Exercise Clause against the States through the Due Process Clause. Congress therefore may enact appropriate legislation to prevent or remedy state violations of free-exercise rights. But Section 5 grants a power to "enforce," not a power to determine independently what the Fourteenth Amendment means or what conduct violates it.

The text, history, and structure of the Fourteenth Amendment supported a remedial understanding of Section 5. The Court emphasized that an early Reconstruction-era proposal would have given Congress broad authority to legislate directly concerning life, liberty, and property, but that proposal was rejected because it threatened to centralize power at the expense of the States. The ratified Amendment instead imposed self-executing constitutional limits on States and gave Congress power to make those limits effective.

The Court's precedents likewise distinguish valid enforcement legislation from an impermissible substantive revision of constitutional rights. Congress may sometimes prohibit conduct that is not itself unconstitutional in order to deter or remedy actual constitutional violations, as the voting-rights cases demonstrate. But Congress cannot use Section 5 to change the meaning of the constitutional right it purports to enforce; otherwise, ordinary legislation could effectively amend the Constitution without following Article V, and Congress would displace the Judiciary's role in deciding constitutional cases.

Issue #2

Whether RFRA, insofar as it applies to state and local governments, is valid Section 5 enforcement legislation.

Holding

No. RFRA's application to state and local governments exceeded Congress's Section 5 power because its sweeping strict-scrutiny regime lacked congruence and proportionality to any demonstrated pattern of unconstitutional religious discrimination.

Reasoning

The Court announced that Section 5 legislation must exhibit "congruence and proportionality" between the constitutional injury Congress seeks to prevent or remedy and the legislative means it adopts. This inquiry permits Congress substantial latitude, but it prevents Congress from labeling a substantive change in constitutional law as enforcement legislation.

RFRA's legislative history did not reveal a modern pattern of state laws enacted from religious hostility or a widespread pattern of unconstitutional discrimination against religious exercise. Congress's central concern was instead the incidental burdens that neutral, generally applicable laws—such as zoning, landmark-preservation, and autopsy laws—can impose on religious practice. Under Smith, those incidental burdens generally are not constitutional violations.

RFRA was extraordinarily broad. It applied to every state and local law, regulation, official, and agency; covered laws enacted before and after RFRA; authorized challenges whenever a person alleged a substantial burden on religion; and contained no geographic limits, temporal limits, or termination mechanism. This nationwide and permanent coverage differed sharply from voting-rights measures sustained under Section 5, which targeted particular practices and jurisdictions with documented histories of constitutional violations and included mechanisms to limit their reach.

RFRA also imposed the most demanding constitutional test: once a claimant showed a substantial religious burden, the government had to prove a compelling interest and use the least restrictive means. That standard subjected vast areas of ordinary state regulation to searching judicial review and possible invalidation, even where the law was neutral, generally applicable, and not motivated by religious animus. The burden imposed on state regulatory authority was far out of proportion to the constitutional wrong Congress had identified.

Because RFRA attempted to replace Smith's constitutional rule with a broader statutory right applicable against the States, it was substantive rather than remedial in operation. The Court therefore held RFRA unconstitutional as applied to state and local governments; the Court did not decide RFRA's validity as applied to the federal government.

Concurrences

Justice Stevens

Reasoning

Justice Stevens agreed that RFRA could not be enforced against Boerne, but rested on a separate First Amendment ground. In his view, RFRA gave religious property owners a potential exemption from neutral civil laws that comparable secular owners, including atheists and agnostics, could not claim. That governmental preference for religion over irreligion was itself a law respecting an establishment of religion and therefore unconstitutional.

Justice Scalia

Reasoning

Justice Scalia joined the Court's judgment and all but the historical discussion in Part III-A-1. He wrote separately to answer Justice O'Connor's claim that the original understanding of free exercise undermined Smith's rule that neutral, generally applicable laws ordinarily may be enforced despite religious objections.

In Justice Scalia's view, colonial and early state guarantees of religious liberty commonly protected against actions taken because of religion or included provisos requiring religious believers to preserve peace and order. Read in their historical context, those provisos generally required obedience to ordinary law, making the provisions more consistent with Smith than with a constitutional right to exemptions from neutral laws.

Early legislatures sometimes accommodated Quakers, pacifists, and other religious objectors, but Justice Scalia considered legislative accommodation evidence of political choice rather than judicially enforceable constitutional command. He also stressed the absence of early state or federal cases invalidating generally applicable statutes because they lacked religious exemptions. The practical question, he concluded, was whether courts or elected lawmakers should decide when religious exemptions are warranted; Smith properly left that choice principally to the people through their representatives.

Dissents

Justice O'Connor

Reasoning

Justice O'Connor agreed with the majority's general account of Section 5: Congress cannot independently define or expand the substantive meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, and valid enforcement legislation requires congruence and proportionality between the injury and the remedy. But she could not assess RFRA against Smith because she believed Smith had incorrectly defined the Free Exercise Clause.

In her view, the Free Exercise Clause is an affirmative guarantee of religious liberty, not merely an antidiscrimination rule. Before Smith, the Court generally required the government to justify a substantial burden on religiously motivated conduct with a compelling interest and narrowly tailored means, even where the burden came from a neutral, generally applicable law. Smith's contrary rule, she argued, had led lower courts to deny meaningful free-exercise protection in cases involving autopsies, zoning restrictions, landmark laws, and other regulatory burdens.

Justice O'Connor maintained that history favored reconsidering Smith. Colonial charters, state constitutions, early legislative accommodations, and statements by figures such as Madison, Jefferson, and Washington reflected an understanding that religious practice should ordinarily be accommodated unless important public interests required otherwise. Although historical sources did not yield a perfectly precise formula, they showed that free exercise was understood as a substantive liberty with special constitutional protection.

Because Smith was recent, insufficiently reasoned, and inconsistent with precedent and historical tradition, Justice O'Connor would have ordered reargument on Smith's validity. If Smith were overruled and strict scrutiny restored as the constitutional standard, Congress's effort to enforce that right through RFRA could then be evaluated under the proper constitutional baseline. Justice Breyer joined this dissent except for the first paragraph of Part I.

Justice Souter

Reasoning

Justice Souter believed that the Court could not soundly decide RFRA's validity while treating Smith as an unquestioned benchmark. He had already expressed serious doubts about Smith's consistency with prior free-exercise law, and Justice O'Connor's historical analysis reinforced those doubts.

Because neither Smith nor this case had received full adversarial briefing and argument on the proper meaning of the Free Exercise Clause, Justice Souter would not either reaffirm Smith or reject it immediately. He would dismiss the writ of certiorari as improvidently granted so that the Court would not resolve Congress's enforcement authority while the underlying constitutional right remained unsettled.

Justice Breyer

Reasoning

Justice Breyer agreed that the Court should order briefing and reargument on whether Smith was correctly decided. He did not think it necessary to decide whether Section 5 would authorize RFRA even if Smith remained valid, and he therefore joined Justice O'Connor's dissent except for its first paragraph of Part I.