A Right Without a Remedy: What the Supreme Court Actually Took From Damon Landor

Strip the case to its facts and it is not complicated. In 2020, Damon Landor was three weeks from the end of a Louisiana sentence. He is a Rastafarian who had kept the Nazarite vow for nearly two decades, the one drawn from Numbers 6:5, to "let the locks of the hair of his head grow." His hair reached his knees. Two Louisiana facilities had housed him without incident.

Then he was transferred a third time, and he came prepared. He carried a printed copy of Ware v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, the 2017 Fifth Circuit decision holding that federal law bars Louisiana prisons from cutting Rastafarians' hair. He handed it to the intake guard.

The guard, in the words of the court record, "threw Landor's papers in the trash." The warden demanded documentation from Landor's sentencing judge. When Landor could not produce it on the spot, two guards "carried him into another room, handcuffed him to a chair, held him down, and shaved his head."

On June 23, the Supreme Court ruled against him, six to three. Before you decide what that means, understand precisely what the Court decided, because both the celebration and the alarm depend on getting it wrong. The Court did not say what happened to Landor was legal. It said something stranger: the law he invoked gives him no one to sue.