Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Supreme Court rules that government employees who infringe religious liberty can be held personally liable

The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that people can obtain monetary damages directly from employees of the federal government when suing over infringement of the First Amendment right to religious liberty.

The ruling responds to a case filed by several Muslim men who said that FBI officers placed them on a no-fly list because they refused to inform on their religious community. Those men can now legally win damages from those specific FBI officers.

Being placed on the no-fly list led the men to lose “precious years with loved ones, plus jobs and educational opportunities,” Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told the justices during oral arguments in October, according to The Washington Post.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the 8-0 opinion. The case was argued before Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court.

The plaintiffs sued under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed nearly unanimously by both the House and Senate in 1993, which prohibits the government from placing a “substantial burden” on a person’s religious practice.

The law allows citizens to seek “appropriate relief” from the government. Politicians who helped pass the law said at the time that it did not mean for individual federal employees to be personally subject to damages, but the court ruled that the law nevertheless allows for that consequence. However, Thomas also wrote that government officials can argue that they have qualified immunity, meaning that they are not liable for damages in civil cases when following the law in their role as federal employees.

Mark Joseph Stern, who covers the court system for Slate, suggested on Twitter that the ruling could lead to federal officials not enforcing nondiscrimination laws for fear of being personally sued in civil court. For example, there have been instances in which people who courts have found to be violating nondiscrimination laws against LGBTQ people have claimed religious liberty as a defense.

Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aefeldman

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.