Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990)

The rule that Lukumi is written against.

Why this record is cited by an essay that never names it. unnecessary.mdx does not argue in Smith’s vocabulary and should not be read as doing so. It never uses the words neutral, general applicability, free exercise, strict scrutiny or compelling interest. Verified by exact-string search across the file. Its argument is narrower, made in a different register: a city decided which killings were necessary, the list of exceptions did the work, and the instrument survived the ruling that struck the ordinances down.

This record is cited as the doctrinal ground the essay’s own primary source stands on. Lukumi is unintelligible without Smith. It does not overrule Smith. It applies Smith’s test and finds Hialeah failed it. A reader who follows unnecessary.mdx to the Lukumi record and asks why targeting mattered needs this case to answer the question. That is a background citation, and it is filed as one deliberately.

Built from the bound volume (Library of Congress scan of 494 U.S.), not from a slip text or a secondary database. That is the discipline the Lukumi record had to be corrected into.

The rule, verbatim (at 879): “Subsequent decisions have consistently held that the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a ‘valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes).’”

The phrase is a quotation, and the attribution matters. “Valid and neutral law of general applicability” is not Scalia’s coinage. The opinion is quoting United States v. Lee, 455 U.S. 252, 263, n. 3 (1982) (Stevens, J., concurring in judgment). A footnote in a concurrence. The sentence the whole rule rests on is not Scalia’s. It is Stevens’s, from a footnote. Do not attribute the phrase to Smith without noting where Smith got it.

The syllabus form of the holding: the Clause “does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a law that incidentally forbids (or requires) the performance of an act that his religious belief requires (or forbids) if the law is not specifically directed to religious practice and is otherwise constitutional as applied to those who engage in the specified act for nonreligious reasons.”

THE LINEUP, VERBATIM, AND IT IS NOT A CLEAN 5-4. “SCALIA, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which REHNQUIST, C. J., and WHITE, STEVENS, and KENNEDY, JJ., joined. O’CONNOR, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in Parts I and II of which BRENNAN, MARSHALL, and BLACKMUN, JJ., joined without concurring in the judgment, post, p. 891. BLACKMUN, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which BRENNAN and MARSHALL, JJ., joined, post, p. 907.”

Read that twice. Three Justices joined parts of O’Connor’s opinion while refusing her judgment and dissenting outright. Five made the judgment. Writing “5-4” flattens a split that ran in two directions at once. Writing that O’Connor “dissented” is wrong. She concurred in the judgment and disagreed with the reasoning.

Kennedy joined Smith. The same Justice wrote the opinion of the Court in Lukumi three years later, applying Smith’s own test rather than overruling it. That is why unnecessary.mdx can argue the ordinances were targeted without arguing for a religious exemption from a general law. The essay lives inside Smith’s framework, not against it.

The facts. Respondents Smith and Black were fired by a private drug rehabilitation organization for ingesting peyote sacramentally at a ceremony of the Native American Church. Oregon denied them unemployment compensation under a law disqualifying employees discharged for work-related “misconduct.” The case reached the Court on unemployment benefits, not on a criminal prosecution. Oregon had never prosecuted them.

What this record does not claim. Nothing here assesses whether Smith was rightly decided, and nothing here tracks its later statutory history (RFRA, Boerne, and after). Those are separate records if the archive ever needs them.