The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) is a federal law, 42 U.S.C.S. § 2000cc-1 et seq., that provides substantial protections for the sincere religious practices of incarcerated people. The standard it establishes is that if the government imposes a “substantial burden” on a religious practice, it must have a “compelling” governmental interest for doing so and must use the least restrictive means of advancing that interest. Effectively, RLUIPA creates a form of “strict scrutiny” for substantially burdening the religious practices of the incarcerated.
That RLUIPA standard that is considerably more favorable to the incarcerated plaintiff than a claim related to religious practices brought under the First Amendment, since First Amendment claims are reviewed under the deferential standard of Turner v. Safley, 487 U.S. 78 (1987) which lets restrictions remain in place as long as they are “reasonably related to a legitimate penological interest.”
But even under RLUIPA, it can be tricky to make out a case. The plaintiff has to meet that “substantial burden” standard, which has been interpreted as meaning the creation of "a significantly great restriction or onus upon such exercise” of religious practice. Warsoldier v. Woodford, 418 F.3d 989, 995 (9th Cir. 2005) (internal quotations omitted). Merely being offensive to a religious belief is not a substantial burden to that belief. Navaho Nation v. U.S. Forest Service, 535 F.3d 1058, 1070 (9th Cir. 2008).
The forms of religious practice that are potentially protected under RLUIPA are fairly broad. The statute defines “religious practice” as "any exercise of religion, whether or not compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief." § 2000cc-5(7)(A).
Courts are also allowed to consider whether an individual’s commitment to a given religious practice is sincere or is based on “some other motivation.” Holt v. Hobbs, 574 U.S. 352, 361 (2015).
RLUIPA is somewhat unusual, compared to most other civil rights causes of action, in that it only authorizes suits against “a government,” and thus “does not authorize suits against a person in anything other than an official or governmental capacity.” Wood v. Yordy, 753 F.3d 899, 904 (9th Cir. 2014). That is the reverse of the way most civil rights actions are pled, namely against individual actors in their individual capacity. Note, moreover, that this requirement to proceed against “a government” means that a RLUIPA claim brought by an inmate of CDCR (the California state prison system) is very likely to run directly into the Eleventh Amendment if the case is brought in federal court, since suits against an individual correctional officer in his or her official capacity are treated as suits against CDCR itself, and CDCR is protected by the Eleventh Amendment. See, e.g., Holley v. CDCR, 599 F.3d 1108 (9th Cir. 2010). So not only does a RLUIPA claim need to be pled against defendants in their “official capacities,” but if it is being brought against state correctional officers for money damages, it also needs to be asserted in state court in order to avoid that Eleventh Amendment bar. See Williams v. Beltran, 569 F.Supp.2d 1057, 1065 (C.D.Cal. July 30, 2008).
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