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Plaintiff Tabari Strong, a Muslim prisoner in Beeville, Texas, filed a lawsuit alleging that the prison's grooming policy requiring all inmates to be clean-shaven violated his statutory rights under RLUIPA. He also claimed that the policy violated his right to exercise his religion under the First Amendment, and that enforcement of the policy violated his right to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. The plaintiff filed a motion for summary judgment, claiming that he is entitled to a declaratory judgment. The District Court refused to grant the plaintiff's request for injunctive relief as an "extraordinary remedy," but maintained that it would be contrary to justice not to grant the relief requested by the plaintiff to have a quarter-inch beard.

Xinjiang, officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is a region in Central Asia and home to several ethnic groups, including the Uyghur, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, in addition to a large Han Chinese population. In recent years, the conflict between Uyghurs and the Beijing government has intensified due to the government’s policies of mass surveillance, increased arrests, and a system of “re-education camps,” which reportedly held more than a million Muslim ethnic groups. The 2017 Regulation was introduced as providing legal justifications for the government’s mass detention policies on anti-terrorism grounds. It was enacted on March 29, 2017 by the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the region’s legislature. Article 14 of the 2017 Regulation authorized the government to effectuate “education and transformation” through “individual and collective” education programs. Article 48 further authorized criminal penalties for violation.

Plaintiff Jeffrey Coleman filed an action against the Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) alleging violations of his constitutional rights under the First Amendment, the Eighth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, and RLUIPA. The Plaintiff claimed that these rights had been violated in over 12 policies, including the policy that limited his purchase of prayer oil to once a week, a grooming policy that prevented him from growing a beard, and a CD policy limiting inmates’ purchase of spoken religious word CDs to a single vendor. The District Court dismissed all claims against the Respondent except for claims related to the CD policy, which the District Court determined was not related to any legitimate penological interest.

A new 114-page law with 35 articles has been enacted by the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which has drawn condemnation from the UN as part of the Taliban's "regressive agenda." The law significantly impacts various aspects of daily life, targeting both men and women but particularly restricting the freedoms of women. Key provisions include requiring women to have a male chaperon (mahram) when traveling, prohibiting them from singing or speaking loudly in public, and mandating that they wear a burqa while forbidding "transparent, tight, or short" clothing. Additionally, men and women are prohibited from making eye contact in public, and men are banned from trimming their beards or getting "unIslamic" haircuts. The law also forbids mimicking "infidels." The country's morality police is tasked with enforcing the law.