Also known as: neutral generally applicable laws · neutral law · generally applicable law · Smith doctrine
Written by attorneys · grounded in primary & secondary sources — see below
A statutory or regulatory rule that regulates conduct without reference to religion or a protected class and applies uniformly to all persons or entities subject to its terms. Such a law triggers only rational basis review under the Free Exercise Clause or Equal Protection Clause even when it produces incidental burdens on religious practice or disparate impacts on a protected group. Disparate impact alone does not establish a constitutional violation absent proof of discriminatory purpose.
Select any source to read its text and confirm it supports the definition.
State personnel rules grant an absolute hiring preference to all honorably discharged veterans for civil service posts. Blake, a qualified female applicant with ten years of experience, loses a position to a lower-ranked male veteran. The preference was enacted to reward military service and contains no gender classification on its face.
Oregon criminalizes the possession of peyote for any purpose. Alfred Smith and another employee of a drug rehabilitation center ingest peyote during a Native American Church ceremony and are fired. The state denies unemployment benefits because the conduct violated a generally applicable criminal prohibition.
California Penal Code section 261.5 makes it a crime for a male to have sexual intercourse with a female under eighteen. Michael M., a seventeen-year-old male, is prosecuted after consensual intercourse with a sixteen-year-old female. The statute contains no parallel prohibition on female conduct with underage males.
Colorado requires businesses open to the public to serve customers without regard to sexual orientation. Masterpiece Cakeshop refuses to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple on the ground that doing so would violate the owner's religious beliefs. The Civil Rights Commission enforces the statute against the bakery.
New York creates a special school district whose boundaries coincide exactly with the village inhabited by members of a single religious sect. The district provides public education only to children within those boundaries. Residents of neighboring districts challenge the arrangement as a religious preference.
Texas criminalizes deviate sexual intercourse between persons of the same sex. Police officers arrest John Lawrence and Tyron Garner after observing them engaging in private consensual conduct. The statute applies equally to all persons regardless of sexual orientation but reaches only same-sex activity.
A law is neutral when its text and purpose do not single out religious conduct for adverse treatment. It is generally applicable when it applies across the board to comparable secular and religious conduct without a system of individualized exemptions that disfavors religious claims. The hours rule, vaccination requirement, lease form mandate, and hard-hat rule in the exam questions each satisfied these criteria because they regulated all retail stores, hospital employees, landlords, or machinery operators without reference to religion.
Rational basis review applies. The government need only show that the law is rationally related to a legitimate interest. Strict scrutiny is reserved for laws that target religion or combine a free exercise claim with another fundamental right. The MC explanations confirm that neutral rules such as the vaccination mandate and safety training requirement satisfy rational basis review even when they incidentally burden religious practice.
…religious activities more difficult). The only decisions in which we have held that the First Amendment bars application of a neutral, generally applicable law to religiously motivated action have involved not the Free Exercise Clause alone, but the Free Exercise Clause in conjunction with other constitutional protections, such as freedom of…
…Id. , at 6, 11. A racially discriminatory purpose is always sufficient to subject a law to strict scrutiny, even a facially neutral law that makes no mention of race. See Washington v. Davis , 426 U. S. 229, 241-242 (1976). No purpose to discriminate against men or women as a class can be gleaned from the Texas law, so…
…law. There we have recognized that an individual's rights are not violated when his religious practices are prohibited under a neutral law of general applicability. For example, in Employment Div., Dept. of Human Resources of Ore. v.
…for wearing a jacket bearing an epithet, we did not apply O’Brien . See id. , at 16, 18. Instead, we recognized that the generally applicable law
…rape law is potentially a greater deterrent of sexual activity than a gender-based law, for the simple reason that a gender-
No. Disparate impact alone does not prove discriminatory purpose. The preference is valid when enacted to reward military service rather than to disadvantage women. The Feeney primary authority and the essay model answers establish that awareness of the impact is insufficient without evidence that the legislature acted because of that impact.
Yes, when the training rule is neutral and generally applicable. The rule applies to every farmworker and addresses documented hazards. Because the requirement does not target religious conduct, the Free Exercise Clause does not compel an exemption or invalidate the denial of benefits.