Religious Freedom Restoration Act Exposes Officials to Personal Liability, Supreme Court Rules
This case law update was written by James P. Garay Heelan, an attorney at the law firm of Shaw Bransford & Roth, where he has practiced federal personnel and employment law since 2012. Mr. Heelan represents federal personnel across the Executive Branch, including career senior executives, law enforcement officers, foreign service officers, intelligence officers, and agencies in matters of federal personnel and employment law.
Government officials may be sued in their personal capacity for alleged violations of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), the Supreme Court held in the case of Tanzin v. Tanvir, issued at the end of last year. While Tanzin occurred in a law enforcement context, some legal commentators believe the Court’s decision may have a “chilling effect” on officials who enforce nondiscrimination laws.
The RFRA provides a right of action to “persons whose religious exercise is substantially burdened by government.” That right of action enables a person to “obtain appropriate relief against a government.” A “government” is defined to include “a branch, department, agency, instrumentality, and official (or other persons acting under color of law) of the United States.”
The Tanzin plaintiffs were three men who filed suit claiming three FBI agents violated their rights under the RFRA, by placing them on the “No Fly List” in retaliation for refusing to become FBI informants against fellow Muslims.
More than one year after the plaintiffs filed their case in federal court, the Department of Homeland Security informed them they could fly. The District Court then dismissed Plaintiffs’ individual-capacity claims for money damages, ruling the RFRA does not permit monetary relief.
Plaintiffs appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which reversed the District Court. The Second Circuit held the RFRA’s clearly stated provision for relief against the “government,” combined with the statute’s expansive definition of “government,” authorized Plaintiffs’ claims against federal officials in their individual capacities. The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently granted the Defendants’ petition to hear the case.
On Oct. 6, 2020, the parties argued the case by telephone to the Supreme Court. The Department of Justice argued that by enumerating a cause of action in the RFRA against “the government,” Congress did not intend to subject to subject federal employees to suit in their personal capacities. The various Justices were skeptical of the government’s argument.
Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the opinion of the Court, in which all other justices joined, except the recently confirmed Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who abstained.
“As usual, we start with the statutory text,” the opinion’s analysis began. The statutory language at issue permits a person whose exercise of religion has been unlawfully burdened to “obtain appropriate relief against a government.” The opinion then addressed the quoted text in two parts.
“We first have to determine if injured parties can sue Government officials in their personal capacities,” Justice Thomas wrote, “RFRA’s text provides a clear answer: They can.” The opinion then addressed the Justice Department’s contrary argument, that the statute expressly limits causes of action to those against “a government.” This “otherwise plausible argument” fails, the Court held, because Congress expressly defined “a government” to include officials as persons, not only as the office they hold.
The opinion then turned to what “appropriate relief” entails under the RFRA. Because the term is “open ended” and “inherently context dependent,” Justice Thomas examined what “appropriate relief” means in the context of other suits against Government officials. The Court found “particularly salient” the availability of monetary relief against officials in their personal capacity under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, a statute that permits individual-capacity suits against officials acting under color of state law. Moreover, the Court held monetary relief is the “only form of relief that can remedy some RFRA violations.” For example, “wasted plane tickets” could only be remedied through monetary relief.
Given the RFRA’s “textual cues,” the Court declined to adopt any of the Justice Department’s policy-based arguments against interpreting the RFRA to allow suit for monetary damages against public officials in their personal capacities. The Supreme Court therefore affirmed the Second Circuit’s judgment in favor of allowing Plaintiffs’ suit to proceed.
Read the Supreme Court’s full opinion in Tanzin v. Tanvir.
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