Texas RFRA

[Douglas Laycock]

The Supreme Court of Texas has unanimously given the Texas RFRA its intended meaning to provide real protection for exercises of religion.  Barr v. City of Sinton, Link to opinion below.  The case involves a religious halfway house in a small town in South Texas.  The city made no serious effort to prove a  compelling interest in closing the halfway house; its main argument seemed to be that there was no burden because the halfway house could leave town, and that that Texas RFRA should not apply to zoning anyway. 

Most of the opposition to Texas RFRA was from neighborhood associations worried about land use.  The lead sponsor in the House told me that if people got the idea that this meant that black churches could locate in white neighborhoods, the bill would be dead.  The compromise was to provide that cities would have no less land use authority than they had had under federal law on March 17, 1990 (the day before Smith.)  The land use folks claimed that Sherbert and Yoder had never applied to them; the bill's supporters claimed that Sherbert and Yoder had been a generally applicable test that applied to all regulation, including land use regulation.  The state supreme court just resolved that argument in favor of the bill's supporters. 

http://www.supreme.courts.state.tx.us/historical/2009/jun/060074.htm[1]

Douglas Laycock
Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law
University of Michigan Law School
625 S. State St.
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1215
  734-647-9713

Links:
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[1] http://www.supreme.courts.state.tx.us/historical/2009/jun/060074.htm
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