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Page Number: 78

56 

FULTON v. PHILADELPHIA 

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

it did not require work on Saturday), id., at 606,76 and on 
the other side of the balance, the Court accepted the Com-
monwealth’s  view  that  the  public  welfare  was  served  by
providing a uniform day of rest, id., at 608–609; see Sher-
bert, 374 U. S., at 408–409 (discussing Braunfeld).

When Smith came to post-Sherbert cases, the picture did 
not improve.  First, in order to place Sherbert, Hobbie, and 
Thomas in  a special category  reserved for cases involving 
unemployment compensation, an inventive transformation 
was required.  None of those opinions contained a hint that
they were limited in that way.  And since Smith itself in-
volved the award of unemployment compensation benefits 
under a scheme that allowed individualized exemptions, it
is hard to see why that case did not fall into the same cate-
gory.
  The Court tried to escape this problem by framing Alfred
Smith’s and Galen Black’s free-exercise claims as requests
for exemptions from the Oregon law criminalizing the pos-
session of peyote, see 494 U. S., at 876, but neither Smith
nor Black was prosecuted for that offense even though the 
State was well aware of what they had done.  The State had 
the discretion to decline prosecution based on the facts  of 
particular cases, and that is presumably what it did regard-
ing Smith and Black.  Why this was not sufficient to bring
the  case  within  Smith’s  rule  about  individualized  exemp-
tions is unclear.  See McConnell, Free Exercise Revisionism 
1124. 
  Having  pigeon-holed  Sherbert,  Hobbie,  and  Thomas  as 
unemployment  compensation  decisions,  Smith  still  faced 
problems.  For one thing, the Court had previously applied 
the  Sherbert  test  in  many  cases  not  involving  unemploy-
ment compensation, including Hernandez v. Commissioner, 
490  U. S.  680  (1989)  (disallowance  of  tax  deduction);  Lee, 

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76 “The  clear  implication  was  that  a  ‘direct’  interference  would  have

been unconstitutional.”  McConnell, Free Exercise Revisionism 1125.