Employment Div., Dept. of Human Resources of Ore. v. Smith

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that laws of general applicability that incidentally burden religious conduct do not offend the First Amendment
• holding that neutral, generally applicable law must implicate some other constitutional right in addition to Free Exercise Clause before compelling state interest standard applies
• holding that neutral laws of general applicability do not burden free exercise whether or not they are supported by a compelling interest
• holding that if burdening the exercise of religion is “merely the incidental effect of a generally applicable and otherwise valid provision, the First Amendment has not been offended.”
• holding that, under the First Amendment, “the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a valid and neutral law of general applicability”
• holding that free exercise clause did not prohibit application of Oregon drug laws to ceremonial ingestion of peyote and, thus, state could deny claimants unemployment compensation for dismissal for work-related misconduct based on ingestion of the drug

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).