RETIRED — Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah (1993), duplicate record

RETIRED. Do not cite. Superseded by lukumi-babalu-aye-v-hialeah-1993.

Preserved, not deleted, per standing doctrine: retire is preserve-and-supersede.

This was a duplicate record for the same case. It carried no verbatim text, and its one substantive sentence contained the error that got it retired. It said the ordinances were:

“drafted for the purpose of suppressing Santería worship”

Purpose is the one word two Justices refused to sign. Scalia, joined by Rehnquist, expressly declined to join the section of the opinion addressing legislative motive, because it “departs from the opinion’s general focus on the object of the laws at issue to consider the subjective motivation of the lawmakers.”

All nine signed object. Two of nine declined purpose. A record asserting a unanimous finding of purpose overstates the Court by exactly two votes, and it was cited by the published anchor essay for six weeks.

The surviving record quotes the bound volume and preserves the distinction.

NOTE (2026-07-15): primary repointed from Justia to the LOC bound volume — U.S. Reports: Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993), https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep508520/ (verified HTTP 200; PDF at tile.loc.gov/…/usrep508520.pdf). The LOC bound volume is the corrected edition; earlier Justia-sourced text carried an ‘eastern Africa’ rendering the bound volume gives as ‘western’. The Justia URL 403s to automated fetchers.