The State Won by Amending Its Own Religious Freedom Act While the Case Was Pending, and the Speaker Said Why.
On September 14 a Stamford judge dismissed the last claim against Connecticut's repeal of the religious exemption from school vaccines. The state won because the legislature amended its own religious freedom act in April, mid case, after the Attorney General said it might lose.
Strip the case to its principle and it is not complicated. A legislature may pass a law. A legislature may also pass a second law that tells the courts how to read the first one. Connecticut did the second thing this spring, while a lawsuit against the first law was still alive.
On Monday, September 14, a Superior Court judge in Stamford dismissed the final claim in Spillane v. Lamont, the case two mothers from Orange and Greenwich filed in 2022 after the state ended the religious exemption from school vaccination requirements. Their constitutional claims died in 2024. What survived was a claim under Connecticut's own Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 statute older than the federal one.
The Attorney General's motion explains in one sentence why that claim died too. The statute the plaintiffs relied on, it says, "has been amended to clarify and exempt from its reach school vaccination requirements." The amendment passed the House on April 21 by 89 to 60, it applies to lawsuits already pending, and the motion followed about a month later.
The plaintiffs' lawyer, Lindy Urso, said the state "changed the rules in the middle of the game." The Speaker of the House, asked before the vote why the measure was needed, said the Attorney General's office had told him the state might lose. So the question is not whether Connecticut may require vaccines. It is what a religious freedom act is worth once a legislature has shown it will amend the act the moment it might have to lose under it.
