Cengage Advantage Books: Business Law Today, The Essentials 10th Edition by Roger LeRoy Miller

تمرين 5

Mitchell County v. Zimmerman
FACTS Members of the Old Order Groffdale Conference Mennonite Church generally use horses and buggies for transportation. About forty years ago, they started using tractors, particularly for hauling their agricultural products to market. To ensure that the tractors are not used for pleasure purposes (thereby displacing the horse and buggy), their tires have to be fitted with steel cleats that slow down the tractors. Thus, it is a religious requirement of the Mennonites that any motorized tractor driven by a church member be equipped with steel cleats. To minimize road damage, over time the steel cleats have been made wider and are mounted on rubber belts to provide cushioning. Nevertheless, in 2009, finding that the Mennonites' steel cleats tended to damage newly resurfaced roads, Mitchell County adopted a road protection ordinance: "No tire on a vehicle moved on a highway is allowed to have any block, stud, flange, cleat, or spike, or any other protuberances of any material other than rubber." Eli Zimmerman, a Mennonite, received a citation for violating this ordinance. Zimmerman filed a motion to dismiss, which the trial court denied. Zimmerman appealed.
ISSUE Was Mitchell County's ordinance a violation of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment?
DECISION Yes. The reviewing court reversed the trial court's decision and remanded the case for entry of an order of dismissal.
REASON The First Amendment states, in part, that Congress shall make no law "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. The First Amendment was made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. Consequently, "laws that are not neutral or of general applicability require heightened scrutiny. They must be justified by a compelling governmental interest and must be narrowly tailored to advance that interest." The court first observed that the ordinance's language on the use of steel cleats was nonreligious and therefore neutral. Nevertheless, the court found that the ordinance was not operationally neutral because it was adopted specifically to address the Mennonites' use of steel cleats despite their forty-year religious practice of using such cleats. Finally, the ordinance was not generally applicable because it contained exceptions for tire chains for snowy weather and steel-studded snow tires. In other words, Mitchell County chose "to prohibit only a particular source of harm to the roads that had a religious origin." The ordinance was not clearly tailored to achieve the stated objective of road preservation. "The question here is whether the County's goal of road preservation can be accomplished less restrictively without banning the tractors' use by the Mennonites. On the record, we believe it can." The court therefore concluded that the application of the ordinance to Zimmerman violated his right to free exercise of religion.
WHAT IF THE FACTS WERE DIFFERENT? Suppose that Mitchell County had passed an ordinance that allowed the Mennonites to continue to use steel cleats on the newly resurfaced roads provided that the drivers paid a $5 fee each time they were on the road. Would the court have ruled differently? Why or why not ?