Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-123_g3bi.pdf
Page Number: 80.0

58 

FULTON v. PHILADELPHIA 

ALITO, J., concurring in judgment
ALITO, J., concurring in judgment 

result would be a (barely) sufficient hybrid claim.  Such a 
scheme is obviously unworkable and has never been recog-
nized outside of Smith. 

And then there is the problem that the hybrid-rights ex-
ception would largely swallow up Smith’s general rule.  A 
great  many  claims  for  religious  exemptions  can  easily  be
understood  as  hybrid  free-exercise/free-speech  claims. 
Take the claim in Smith itself.  To members of the Native 
American Church, the ingestion of peyote during a religious
ceremony is a sacrament.  When Smith and Black partici-
pated in this sacrament, weren’t they engaging in a form of
expressive  conduct?  Their  ingestion  of  peyote  “communi-
cate[d], in a rather dramatic way, [their] faith in the tenets
of the Native American Church,” and the State’s prohibition 
of that practice “interfered with their ability to communi-
cate this message” in violation of the Free Speech Clause.
McConnell, Free Exercise Revisionism 1122.  And, “if a hy-
brid claim is one in which a litigant would actually obtain
an exemption from a formally neutral, generally applicable
law  under  another  constitutional  provision,  then  there 
would have been no reason for the Court in [the so-called] 
hybrid cases to have mentioned the Free Exercise Clause at
all.”  Lukumi, 508 U. S., at 566–567 (opinion of Souter, J.);
see  also  Laycock,  8  J.  L.  &  Religion,  at  106  (noting  that 
Smith “reduces the free exercise clause to a cautious redun-
dancy, relevant only to ‘hybrid’ cases”).  It is telling that this
Court has never once accepted a “hybrid rights” claim in the 
more than three decades since Smith. 

In addition to all these maneuvers—creating special cat-
egories  for  unemployment  compensation  cases,  cases  in-
volving 
individualized  exemptions,  and  hybrid-rights 
cases—Smith  ignored  the  multiple  occasions  when  the
Court  had  directly  repudiated  the  very  rule  that  Smith 
adopted.  See supra, at 13–14. 

Smith’s rough treatment of prior decisions diminishes its 

own status as a precedent.