Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah

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Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. and Ernesto Pichardo v. City of Hialeah

Supreme Court of the United States

Argued November 4, 1992
Decided June 11, 1993


Full case name:	Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. and Ernesto Pichardo v. City of Hialeah

Prior history:	Church of Lukumi v. City of Hialeah, 936 F.2d 586 (11th Cir. 1991)

Holding

Court membership

Chief Justice: William Rehnquist
Associate Justices: Byron White, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Clarence Thomas

Case opinions

Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993)^[1], was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held ...

At issue in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993), a United States Supreme Court case, was an ordinance passed in Hialeah, Florida that forbade the "unnecessar[y]" killing of "an animal in a public or private ritual or ceremony not for the primary purpose of food consumption." The law was enacted soon after the city council of Hialeah learned that the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, which practiced Santería, was planning on locating in the city. Santeria is a religion practiced in the Americas by the descendants of Africans; many of its rituals involve animal sacrifice. The Church filed a lawsuit in federal court, seeking for the Hialeah ordinance to be declared unconstitutional.

Following Employment Division v. Smith, the lower courts deemed the law to have a legitimate and rational government purpose and therefore upheld the enactment. The Supreme Court, however, held that because the law was targeted at this religion it is not subject to an undemanding rational basis test: rather, it must be justified by a compelling governmental interest, and must be narrowly tailored to advance that interest. Because the ordinance did not meet this standard, it was unconstitutional.