Opinion ID: 2634701
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: How to apply Frank's second part

Text: Before they discuss Larson's claims under the free exercise clause of the Alaska Constitution, Cooper and Armstrong address at length the standard governing such claims. They ultimately ask us to adopt a compelling interest/narrow tailoring standard most commonly found in First Amendment jurisprudence governing time, place, and manner restrictions and commercial speech restrictions, rather than the compelling interest/least restrictive means standard applied in federal free exercise cases predating Employment Division, Department of Human Resources v. Smith . [31] Defendants argue that we have never clearly articulated the second part of the standard we adopted in Frank. Frank made it clear that only compelling state interests could justify burdens on the exercise of religion. [32] Frank and our subsequent Alaska free exercise cases have not explained exactly what degree of fit is required between the interest and the means used to achieve it to satisfy the second part of the Frank analysis. Nonetheless, this case does not require the elaboration defendants seek. Frank explained that the appropriate question, after a court determines that the claimed exemption implicates a compelling government interest, is whether that interest, or any other, will suffer if an exemption is granted to accommodate the religious practice in issue. [33] This test adequately addresses the closeness of the fit between the state's interest and the means used to achieve it. If an exemption would not harm the government's interest, the means chosen to achieve the interest were probably neither narrowly tailored nor least restrictive. For purposes of this case, Frank and its Alaska progeny adequately state the dispositive standard. Moreover, it is not obvious why Frank's analysis must coincide with either of the two formulations discussed in the defendants' brief. The concepts of narrow tailoring and least restrictive means no longer apply to prisoners' federal constitutional claims or federal free exercise claims generally. [34] We therefore see no reason to determine which of these formulations best characterizes the Frank test in the context of prisoner free exercise claims brought under Alaska's free exercise clause. Finally, in the context of prisoner free exercise claims we think it appropriate to temper our application of the Frank test in recognition of the Supreme Court's observation that [r]unning a prison is an inordinately difficult undertaking, [35] and its statement that `prison administrators ..., and not the courts, [are] to make the difficult judgments concerning institutional operations.' [36] This statement indicates that the federal courts apply a highly deferential standard in reviewing the decisions of prison administrators. Larson's case does not require us to consider whether Alaska courts should apply an equally deferential standard. Rather, we simply acknowledge, as we did in Mathis v. Sauser , that [s]ubjecting the day-to-day judgments of prison officials to an inflexible strict-scrutiny analysis would seriously hamper their ability to anticipate security problems and to adopt innovative solutions to the intractable problems of prison administration. [37]