SUTTON, Chief Judge. Four employees of the J.M. Smucker Company sought religious exemptions from the company’s vaccine requirements. When the company refused, they filed this free-exercise claim under the First Amendment against Smucker’s. Constitutional guarantees conventionally apply only to entities that exercise sovereign power, such as federal, state, or local governments, and, in some other instances, tribal governments. Smucker’s may be a big company. But it is not a sovereign. Even so, did Smucker’s become a federal actor—did it exercise sovereign power?—for purposes of this free-exercise claim when it sold products to the federal government and when it imposed the vaccine mandate because the federal government required it to do so as a federal contractor? No, as the district court correctly held. We affirm.

CHAD A. READLER, Circuit Judge. District courts, it is broadly accepted, enjoy tremendous freedom in managing their caseload. That flexibility stems in part from the fact that no two district courts are the same. Nor do any two courts employ the same exact practices in overseeing their dockets. Those practices can reflect more art than science, given the unique demands each court faces. But at times, art must yield to science, so to speak. That is the case with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. As an overarching goal, the Rules seek to promote procedural uniformity across the federal courts. As a result, the conventions those Rules set out may cede only so much to the whims of a particular district court. Sometimes, a district court can deviate so far from the Rules that its practices amount to an abuse of discretion.

This is such a case. The district court utilized an “administrative closure” to suspend and ultimately dismiss this suit. That practice comes from judicial fiat, not the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which articulate different procedures for dispensing with a case. In this instance, the district court’s deployment of local practices is irreconcilable with the requirements set forth in the Rules. Accordingly, we reverse the district court and remand the case for further consideration.