Court Opinion

ID: 9431259
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:31:49.54258+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:27.694384
License: Public Domain

Justice Brennan,
with whom
Justice Marshall and Justice Blackmun join, dissenting.
Respondents Smith and Black were fired for practicing their religion. The Employment Division of the Oregon Department of Human Resources deemed respondents’ worship “misconduct connected with work,” Ore. Rev. Stat. § 657.176(2)(a) (1987), and accordingly denied them unemployment benefits. Citing a “compelling state interest . . . in the proscription of illegal drugs,” the Employment Appeals Board rejected the assertion that the Free Exercise Clause prohibited the denial of unemployment benefits to an employee discharged for religious use of peyote. App. to Pet. for Cert. in No. 86-946, p. A20. The Oregon Supreme Court, disavowing any state interest in enforcing its criminal laws through the denial of unemployment benefits, found the State’s interest indistinguishable from those asserted in Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U. S. 398, 403 (1963), and Thomas v. Review Bd., Indiana Employment Security Div., 450 U. S. 707 (1981). On the authority of those cases it held that the denial violated respondents’ First Amendment right to exercise their religion freely. Smith v. Employment Division, 301 Ore. 209, 212, 721 P. 2d 445, 446 (1986); Black v. Em*675ployment Division, 301 Ore. 221, 721 P. 2d 451 (1986). This Court today strains the state court’s opinion to transform the straightforward question that is presented into a question of first impression that is not.
A generation ago, we established that a State may not deny unemployment benefits to an employee discharged for her adherence to religious practices unless the “incidental burden on the free exercise of [her] religion [is] justified by a ‘compelling state interest in the regulation of a subject within the State’s constitutional power to regulate ....’” Sherbert, supra, at 403 (citation omitted). In Thomas, supra, and again as recently as last Term, see Hobbie v. Unemployment Appeals Comm’n of Fla., 480 U. S. 142 (1987), we reaffirmed Sherbert’s holding that, where the “ ‘state . . . denies ... a benefit because of conduct mandated by religious belief,”’ the resultant burden on the free exercise of religion “must be subjected to strict scrutiny and could be justified only by proof by the State of a compelling interest.” 480 U. S., at 141 (quoting Thomas, supra, at 717-718) (emphasis omitted). Where the burden on religion is imposed pursuant to a statute, we have an independent obligation to ascertain that the legislature in fact intended to advance the asserted interest through the statutory scheme. Cf. Sherbert, supra, at 407. We may not, particularly when engaging in strict scrutiny, blindly accept the interest that the State asserts in court. See, e. g., Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, 458 U. S. 718, 730 (1982) (all-women state university fails intermediate scrutiny because, “although the State recited a ‘benign, compensatory purpose,’ it failed to establish that the alleged objective is the actual purpose underlying the discriminatory [statutory] classification”) (footnote omitted); Hampton v. Mow Sun Wong, 426 U. S. 88, 103-104 (1976) (“When the Federal Government asserts an overriding national interest as justification for a discriminatory rule . . . , due process requires that there be a legitimate basis for presuming that the rule was actually intended to serve that *676interest”); Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U. S. 636, 648, n. 16 (1975) (under rationality review, “[t]his Court need not . . . accept at face value assertions of legislative purposes, when an examination of the legislative scheme and its history demonstrates that the asserted purpose could not have been a goal of the legislation”).
Smith and Black — like Sherbert, Thomas, and Hobbie— were discharged from their employment because their religious practices conflicted with their employer’s interests. The only difference between the cases before us and the situations we faced in Sherbert, Thomas, and Hobbie is that here the Employment Division has asserted in court a “‘compelling state interest ... in the proscription of illegal drugs,”’ not merely the interest in avoiding the financial “‘burden upon the Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund’” that we found not compelling in Sherbert. Smith, supra, at 212, 721 P. 2d, at 446 (quoting opinion of Employment Appeals Board). Such an interest in criminal law enforcement would present a novel issue if it were in fact an interest that Oregon had sought to advance in its unemployment compensation statute.
Far from validating any such state interest, however, the State’s highest court has disavowed it. In the paragraph that this Court quotes at length, ante, at 666, the Oregon Supreme Court could scarcely have been clearer. The state court understood that the Employment Division may not overcome the burden on religion by invoking a theoretically plausible interest that in fact the state legislature had no intention of furthering when it enacted the unemployment compensation statute: “The state’s interest in denying unemployment benefits to a claimant discharged for religiously motivated misconduct must be found in the unemployment compensation statutes, not in the criminal statutes proscribing the use of peyote.” Smith, supra, at 219, 721 P. 2d at 450 (footnote omitted); see also Black, supra, (relying on Smith’s analysis). The state court could find no legislative *677intent expressed in the unemployment statute to reinforce criminal drug-abuse laws. Although we are not bound by a state-court determination that a state legislature was actually motivated by a particular validating purpose, see Stone v. Graham, 449 U. S. 39, 41 (1980), we have never attributed to a state legislature a validating purpose that the State’s highest court could find nowhere in the statute. To do so would be inconsistent with our responsibility to scrutinize strictly state-imposed burdens on fundamental rights. At any rate, this Court offers no reason to discount the Oregon Supreme Court’s disavowal of the validating purpose. Nor has the Employment Division asserted any further interest other than those that Sherbert, Thomas, and Hobble have rejected. I would therefore affirm the Oregon Supreme Court.
The Court avoids this straightforward analysis, proclaiming instead that it has difficulty discerning “[w]hether the state court believed that it was constrained by Sherbert and Thomas to disregard the State’s law enforcement interest, or did so because it believed petitioner to have conceded that the legality of respondent’s conduct was not in issue,” ante, at 666. The difficulty, however, is entirely of this Court’s own making, for it poses two entirely implausible interpretations of the opinions below and overlooks the only natural one.
The Oregon Supreme Court both introduced and concluded the relevant passage by stressing the similarity between the state interests asserted here and those asserted in Sherbert and Thomas. See Smith, 301 Ore., at 218, 721 P. 2d, at 450 (the “state’s interest in this case [is no] more ‘overriding’ or ‘compelling’ . . . than in Sherbert and Thomas”)', id., at 219-220, 721 P. 2d, at 450-451 (“The state’s interest is simply the financial interest in the payment of benefits from the unemployment insurance fund to this claimant and other claimants similarly situated,” which “Sherbert and Thomas did not find . . . ‘compélling’ when weighed against the free exercise rights of the claimant”). At no point in the comparison did *678the state court suggest, as this Court’s first alternative interpretation does, that it could discern an additional state interest (namely, the interest in enforcing criminal drug-abuse laws) that Sherbert and Thomas “constrained” it to “disregard.” Moreover, the state court did not so much as suggest why Sherbert and Thomas would so constrain the State. Even the State’s attorney could not in good conscience offer the interpretation that this Court adopts, without the caveat “that it is not entirely apparent from the face of the opinion,” Tr. of Oral Arg. 7.
Nor is it accurate to read the passage, as this Court’s second alternative interpretation does, as merely binding the Employment Division to a concession “that the legality of respondent’s conduct was not in issue.” The Employment Division conceded only the patently obvious point that the asserted interest in criminal law enforcement is nowhere to “be found in the unemployment compensation statutes,” 301 Ore., at 219, 721 P. 2d, at 450, and that the legality of peyote use was therefore irrelevant to the determination whether the statute purported to deny benefits. The Employment Division hotly disputed the proposition that it could not answer respondents’ free exercise challenge by asserting an interest that appears nowhere in its unemployment compensation scheme. The very passage that the Court quotes demonstrates as much: “The Board found that the state’s interest in proscribing the use of dangerous drugs was the compelling interest that justified denying the claimant unemployment benefits.” Id., at 218-219, 721 P. 2d, at 450. The remand in these cases thus rests on a purported ambiguity that has no basis in the opinions below.
Perhaps more puzzling than the imagined ambiguity is the Court’s silence as to its relevance. The Court merely remands these cases to the Oregon Supreme Court for further proceedings after concluding that a “necessary predicate” to its analysis is a pronouncement by the state court on whether respondents’ conduct was criminal. Ante, at 672. It seems *679to me that the state court on remand could readily resolve these cases without reaching that issue. The Court has expressed no intention to depart from the longstanding rule that, in strictly scrutinizing state-imposed burdens on fundamental rights, courts may not assert on a State’s behalf interests that the State does not have. See supra, at 675-676. Accordingly, I must assume that the Court has tacitly left the Oregon Supreme Court the option to dispose of these cases by simply reiterating its initial opinion and appending, “and we really mean it,” or words to that effect.
A slot on this Court’s calendar is both precious and costly. Inevitably, each Term this Court discovers only after painstaking briefing and oral argument that some cases do not squarely present the issues that the Court sought to resolve. There is always the temptation to trivialize the defect and decide the novel case that we thought we had undertaken rather than the virtual clone of precedent that we actually undertook. Here, however, the Court’s belated effort to recoup sunk costs is not worth the price. Today’s foray into the realm of the hypothetical will surely cost us the respect of the State Supreme Court whose words we misconstrue. That price is particularly exorbitant where, as here, the state court is most likely to respond to our efforts by merely reiterating what it has already stated with unmistakable clarity.
I dissent.