City of Boerne v. Flores
The Supreme Court struck down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as it applied to state and local governments, ruling that Congress had exceeded its power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment when it tried to impose a stronger religious-liberty standard than the Court's own case law required.
The decision drew a sharp line between Congress's power to remedy constitutional violations and its lack of power to redefine what the Constitution means, a distinction that continues to shape how far Congress can go when legislating in the name of enforcing constitutional rights.
“There must be a congruence and proportionality between the injury to be prevented or remedied and the means adopted to that end.”
The Court's core test for whether Congress has properly enforced, rather than rewritten, constitutional rights.
How it got here: A federal trial court ruled RFRA unconstitutional; the Fifth Circuit reversed and upheld the law; the Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutional question.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A Catholic parish in Boerne, Texas outgrew its historic 1923 church building and sought a permit to enlarge it, but the city's historic-preservation ordinance blocked construction because the church sat in a designated historic district. The Archbishop of San Antonio sued, invoking the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, a federal law requiring governments to justify substantial burdens on religious exercise with a compelling interest.
The question before the Court
Could Congress use its power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment to force states to apply a stricter religious-liberty test than the Supreme Court itself had adopted?
Why it matters
Religious believers who felt burdened by neutral laws like the Boerne zoning ordinance lost a powerful federal legal tool against state and local governments, though RFRA remained valid against federal action. The ruling also narrowed Congress's ability to use its enforcement power to expand constitutional rights beyond what the courts have recognized, affecting future civil-rights legislation aimed at the states.
What changes now
The ruling is a final decision on the merits reversing the Fifth Circuit. RFRA remains valid as applied to the federal government but can no longer be enforced against state and local governments, leaving the Boerne church without that statutory claim. Congress later enacted narrower religious-liberty statutes, such as the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, to address some of the concerns raised by this ruling.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Smith was correctly decided as a matter of Free Exercise Clause interpretation — several justices explicitly wanted to reconsider Smith but the majority simply applied it as the existing legal standard. The ruling also does not affect RFRA's application to the federal government, only to the states.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Stevens
Justice Stevens agreed RFRA was invalid but on a different ground: he argued the law itself violated the Establishment Clause because it gave religious property owners, like the Catholic Church here, a legal advantage unavailable to secular or nonreligious property owners facing the same zoning rules.
Concurrence in part — Justice Scalia
Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Stevens, agreed with almost all of the majority opinion but wrote separately to rebut Justice O'Connor's historical argument that the Free Exercise Clause was originally understood to require religious exemptions from neutral laws. He argued the historical sources she cited actually support the Smith framework rather than undermine it.
Dissent — Justice O'Connor
Justice O'Connor argued the Court used the wrong yardstick by measuring RFRA against Smith without first reconsidering whether Smith was correctly decided. Reviewing colonial and founding-era sources, she concluded the Free Exercise Clause was originally understood as an affirmative right to religious accommodation even from neutral, generally applicable laws, and she would have ordered the case reargued on that question.
Dissent — Justice Souter
Justice Souter expressed serious doubts about whether Smith was correctly decided, especially given the historical arguments raised by Justice O'Connor, but he was unwilling to either accept or reject Smith without full briefing and argument on the point. He would have dismissed the writ of certiorari as improvidently granted and ordered reargument.
Dissent — Justice Breyer
Justice Breyer agreed the case should be reargued on whether Smith was correctly decided, joining most of Justice O'Connor's dissent, but he declined to reach the separate question of whether Congress could enforce RFRA against the states even if Smith were assumed correct, and so did not join the first paragraph of Part I of her opinion.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began with the text of Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which gives Congress power only 'to enforce' the Amendment's guarantees, not to define or expand what those guarantees mean.
- Drawing on the drafting history of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court noted that an earlier, broader version of Section 5 was rejected by Congress in 1866 specifically because it would have given Congress power to legislate generally on rights rather than merely to correct state violations, showing the Amendment was designed to be remedial, not substantive.
- The Court set out a test requiring 'congruence and proportionality' between the constitutional injury Congress seeks to prevent or remedy and the means it chooses, contrasting this with the Voting Rights Act, which the Court had approved because it targeted specific regions and practices with well-documented histories of discrimination.
- Applying that test, the Court found RFRA's legislative record contained little evidence of modern, deliberate religious persecution through generally applicable laws, unlike the extensive record of voting discrimination that supported the Voting Rights Act.
- Because RFRA applied nationwide, indefinitely, and to virtually all government action regardless of any showing of discriminatory intent, the Court concluded it was not a proportionate remedy but an attempt to substantively redefine free-exercise rights beyond the standard the Court had set in Employment Division v. Smith.
- The Court held that this mismatch between RFRA's sweeping scope and any documented pattern of unconstitutional conduct meant Congress had exceeded its enforcement power under Section 5.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Limits Katzenbach v. Morgan (384 U. S. 641)
The Court rejected the broad reading of this case that would let Congress expand constitutional rights by statute.
Reaffirms South Carolina v. Katzenbach (383 U. S. 301)
The Court relied on this voting-rights case as the model of proportionate, well-documented remedial legislation.
Reaffirms Employment Div., Dept. of Human Resources of Ore. v. Smith (494 U. S. 872)
The Court treated Smith's free-exercise standard as the controlling benchmark RFRA improperly tried to override.