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<lastBuildDate>Sun, 11 May 2025 21:30:42 +0200</lastBuildDate>
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<title><![CDATA[The morning read for Friday, May 9]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKy9W4KEspKr2SuZukmJ4mr4</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/vVuChLKSq9nkbqqwyMbQQXn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="The morning read for Friday, May 9" title="The morning read for Friday, May 9"> The court announced this morning that Retired Associate Justice David Souter died yesterday at his home in New Hampshire. He was 85 years old.
Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Friday morning read:
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/09/supreme-court-david-souter-dies.html">Retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter dies at 85</a> (Dan Mangan, CNBC)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/us/david-souter-dead.html">David H. Souter, Republican Justice Who Allied With Court’s Liberal Wing, Dies at 85</a> (Linda Greenhouse, The New York Times)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/05/08/transgender-troops-hegseth-trump-supreme-court/">Hegseth initiates ban on transgender troops after Supreme Court ruling</a> (Alex Horton & Casey Parks, The Washington Post)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/412035/supreme-court-birthright-citizenship-nationwide-injunctions-trump-casa">The Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship case isn’t really about birthright citizenship</a> (Ian Millhiser, Vox)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.the74million.org/article/a-way-out-of-scotus-charter-school-ruling-mess-focus-on-mission-not-religion/">A Way Out of SCOTUS Charter School Ruling Mess: Focus on Mission, Not Religion</a> (Richard D. Kahlenberg, The 74)</li>
</ul>
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/the-morning-read-for-friday-may-2-2-2-2-2-2/">The morning read for Friday, May 9</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2025 17:19:46 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[David Souter, retired Supreme Court justice, dies at 85]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKz9aYaW7b1P0O9WSSr4-0sP</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/_WmGlu29T9A71aOT_yufGXn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="David Souter, retired Supreme Court justice, dies at 85" title="David Souter, retired Supreme Court justice, dies at 85"> Retired Justice David Souter, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by a Republican president but became a reliable member of the court’s liberal bloc during his 19 years there – so much so that the phrase “No more Souters” became a rallying cry when future Republican presidents had the opportunity to fill vacancies on the court – died on Thursday at his home in New Hampshire. He was 85 years old.
In a <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/press/pressreleases/pr_05-09-25">statement released by the court’s Public Information Office</a> on Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts remembered Souter, saying that he “brought uncommon wisdom and kindness to a lifetime of public service.” Souter, Roberts concluded, “will be greatly missed.” 

David Hackett Souter was born on September 17, 1939, in Melrose, Mass. He graduated from Harvard College in 1961. He was named a Rhodes Scholar, spending two years at Oxford University’s Magdalen College, from which he received a master’s degree in jurisprudence in 1963. 
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1966, Souter spent two years in private practice at Orr and Reno, a small firm in Concord. 
Souter then began a stint in state government, working for Warren Rudman, then the attorney general of New Hampshire. Over the next eight years, he served as an assistant attorney general and then a deputy attorney general before being appointed as the attorney general in 1976. He served in that role for two years before being named as a judge on a state trial court. In 1983, he was named to the state supreme court, where he served for seven years before he was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the United States Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit on May 25, 1990.
But Souter’s initial stay on the 1st Circuit was fleeting. In July 1990, when he was just 50 years old, Republican George H.W. Bush nominated Souter to replace liberal lion Justice William Brennan. Bush called him “extraordinarily bright” and cited his reputation for being “extraordinarily fair.” 
Souter notably lacked a “paper trail”: He had not written any articles or given any speeches that might shed light on his views on controversial issues like abortion. What he did have was the backing of powerful New Hampshirites within the Bush administration, such as John Sununu, a former New Hampshire governor and Bush’s chief of staff, who had named him to the state supreme court. In an interview with the New York Times, Sununu said that he ”was looking for someone who would be a strict constructionist, consistent with basic conservative attitudes, and that’s what I got.” Sununu added that he ”was able to tell the President that I was sure he would do the same thing when he encountered Federal questions.”
Rudman, then a U.S. senator, described Souter as “the single most intellectually brilliant mind I have ever met.” 
Questions and concerns about the possible effects of Souter’s confirmation on the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/113/">Roe v. Wade</a>, establishing a constitutional right to an abortion, dominated Souter’s confirmation hearing. Molly Yard, then the president of the National Organization for Women, said, “I tremble for this country if you confirm David Souter,” warning that he would “be the fifth vote to overturn” that decision.
Souter was eventually confirmed by a vote of 90-9 and began work on the court in Oct. 1990. 
Less than two years later, Souter would assuage the fears of abortion-rights advocates, and garner the ire of anti-abortion forces, when he joined Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor to reaffirm the fundamental right to an abortion in <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1991/91-744">Planned Parenthood v. Casey</a>.
After 19 years on the bench, Souter <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/press/DHSLetter.pdf">stepped down from the court</a> at the relatively young (for a Supreme Court justice) age of 69 in 2009. Only three justices on the court at the time (Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas) were younger than he was. Souter’s retirement was not entirely a surprise however, as he was long believed to have disliked Washington, D.C.: He had said once that he had “the world’s best job in the world’s worst city.”
After he had announced his intent to retire but before he officially left the bench, Souter penned a dissent in <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2008/08-205">Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission</a>, a lawsuit brought by a conservative nonprofit prohibited from showing a movie that criticized then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Souter’s draft was sharply critical of the majority opinion, which would have gone well beyond what the challengers requested to instead invalidate two major campaign-finance decisions. Writing in the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin described Souter’s draft dissent as an “extraordinary, bridge-burning farewell to the Court” that Chief Justice John Roberts feared “could damage the Court’s credibility.” Instead of deciding the case then, Toobin reported, the court heard oral argument in the case again the following term, instructing both sides to the dispute to brief the broader questions.
After his retirement from the Supreme Court, Souter became a regular fixture back on the 1st Circuit, hearing hundreds of cases. In one of those cases, <a href="https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca1/19-1746/19-1746-2020-10-29.html">Carson v. Makin</a>, Souter joined his colleagues in unanimously rejecting a challenge to a Maine program that paid tuition for some students to attend private schools, but barred the use of state funds for tuition at private schools that provide religious instruction.
In June 2022, <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/carson-v-makin/">the Supreme Court reversed the 1st Circuit’s ruling</a>. Writing for a six-justice majority, Chief Justice John Roberts made clear that when state and local governments opt to subsidize private schools, they must allow families to use those subsidies to pay for religious schools. Any other result, Roberts explained, would be “discrimination against religion.” 
The court’s ruling in Carson was the third of three decisions opening the door for the use of public funding for religious schools. The justices heard oral arguments last week in <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/oklahoma-statewide-charter-school-board-v-drummond/">a case seeking to extend that trio of decisions</a> to allow the establishment of the country’s first religious charter school. A decision in that case is expected by late June or early July. 
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/david-souter-retired-supreme-court-justice-dies-at-85/">David Souter, retired Supreme Court justice, dies at 85</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2025 16:31:15 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Venezuelan TPS recipients tell justices to let status stand]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKy2umdBZxHchixhxzpi7FpJ</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/trpnQWcR3IaW-B2GuuhHwXn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="Venezuelan TPS recipients tell justices to let status stand" title="Venezuelan TPS recipients tell justices to let status stand"> Lawyers for a group of Venezuelan nationals urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to keep in place a ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco that prohibits Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem from ending their designation under a special immigration program giving them temporary protection from deportation.
Granting the government’s request and putting the order by Senior U.S. District Judge Edward Chen on hold “would radically shift the status quo,” <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A1059/358400/20250508162539890_2025.05.08%20NTPSA%20-%20SCOTUS%20-%20Opposition%20to%20Stay.pdf">wrote Ahilan Arulanantham</a>, a UCLA law professor representing the Venezuelan citizens. It would mean that “nearly 350,000 people would immediately lose the right to live and work in this country,” Arulanantham emphasized.

The plaintiffs in this case are beneficiaries of the Temporary Protected Status program, which allows them to stay in the United States and work. Under federal law, the DHS secretary can designate foreign citizens under the TPS program when she determines that they cannot return safely to their home country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions in the foreign state.” When a country no longer meets those criteria, the law provides, the secretary should terminate the TPS designation.
The initial designation of Venezuela under the TPS program was made in 2021, by then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who subsequently extended the program. 
In February, Noem ended both the TPS designation and efforts to extend it for a particular group of Venezuelan nationals. The plaintiffs in this case then went to federal court in San Francisco, asking Senior U.S. District Judge Edward Chen to delay Noem’s termination. 
Chen issued an order on March 31 that prohibited Noem from ending the TPS designation, calling her conduct “unprecedented” and suggesting that the decision to revoke the designation had been based on negative stereotypes about Venezuelan migrants. 
When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit turned down the government’s request to pause Chen’s ruling while its appeal continued, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to intervene. He emphasized that the TPS program “implicates particularly discretionary, sensitive, and foreign-policy-laden judgments of the Executive Branch.” 
The Venezuelan nationals told the justices that putting Chen’s order on hold “would cause more harm than it would prevent, inflicting massive injury on” them “through lost employment and widespread deportations to an unsafe country.” By contrast, they suggested, the government has not pointed to any “harm it has suffered or will suffer between now and when the Ninth Circuit decides its appeal, which is set for argument on July 16.” Indeed, they noted, the government did not even ask the Supreme Court to step in for “nearly two full weeks after” the 9th Circuit declined to do so.
Moreover, the group added, they are likely to win on the merits of their claim – one of the key criteria the justices consider in determining whether to grant temporary relief – because although federal immigration law gives the DHS secretary significant discretion in deciding whether to designate a country for TPS or to redesignate it, she has substantially less discretion once those designations are made, “both as to the timing of the review process and what criteria the Secretary must use in deciding whether to extend or instead terminate TPS protection.” And federal law does not give her any power to vacate or rescind an extension, the plaintiffs emphasized.
The Venezuelan nationals’ filing in this case came on the same afternoon that <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A1079/358354/20250508121118618_Kristi_Noem_v_Svitlana_Doe_et_al_%20application_stay.pdf">the Trump administration asked the court</a>to intervene in another immigration dispute, involving a ruling by a federal district judge in Massachusetts that blocked the Department of Homeland Security from revoking the Biden administration’s grant of parole – that is, permission to temporarily stay in the United States for humanitarian or public interest reasons – to more than 500,000 noncitizens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/venezuelan-tps-recipients-tell-justices-to-let-status-stand/">Venezuelan TPS recipients tell justices to let status stand</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2025 00:17:22 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Government asks justices to allow DHS to revoke parole for a half-million noncitizens]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKxNVg_C19mdBp8v71dCn6bG</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/TVYPwtfZnQaxBO3z6qoqjnn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="Government asks justices to allow DHS to revoke parole for a half-million noncitizens" title="Government asks justices to allow DHS to revoke parole for a half-million noncitizens"> The Trump administration returned to the Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon, once again seeking emergency relief from the justices. This time Solicitor General D. John Sauer, asked the court to pause a ruling by a federal district judge in Massachusetts that blocked the Department of Homeland Security from revoking the Biden administration’s grant of parole – that is, permission to temporarily stay in the United States for humanitarian or public interest reasons – to more than 500,000 noncitizens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Sauer told the justices that the order by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani “has nullified one of the Administration’s most consequential immigration policy decisions,” blocking a decision by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem “and maintaining parole for up to two years for 532,000 aliens whose continued presence in the United States the Secretary deems contrary to U.S. interests.” 

Under federal immigration law, noncitizens who arrive in this country and cannot show that they are entitled to enter normally must either leave the country or stay in immigration custody. However, the DHS secretary also has the discretion to allow immigrants to enter the country and to revoke that permission. 
During the Biden administration, then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas granted two-year terms of parole to a large group of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The policy, known as the CHNV special-parole programs, rested on the theory that allowing the mass parole of citizens from those countries would deter illegal migration through the U.S.-Mexico border. 
In March, DHS ended the parole of noncitizens through the CHNV special-parole programs while retaining the discretion to grant parole on a case-by-case basis. It reasoned that the programs had “at best traded an unmanageable population of unlawful migration along the southwest border for the additional complication of a substantial population of aliens in the interior of the United States without a clear path to a durable status.” 
A group of immigrants who had been admitted to the United States under the special-parole programs went to federal court in Boston to challenge the March 2025 termination of the programs. 
Talwani barred DHS from ending the special-parole programs without providing case-by-case review of the decision to end parole for noncitizens. Talwani rejected the government’s argument that she did not have the power to review Noem’s decision to end the programs because another provision of federal immigration law prohibits judges from weighing in on such discretionary decisions. Talwani agreed that courts cannot review the DHS secretary’s decision to revoke individual parole determinations. But that ban does not apply, Talwani reasoned, because Noem did not have the power to revoke an entire category’s worth of parole determinations, and therefore she did not have any discretion to exercise.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit declined to put Talwani’s order on hold, prompting the government to come to the Supreme Court on Thursday. 
Sauer contended that Talwani’s order “creates a perverse one-way rachet”: Although Mayorkas “granted CHNV parole categorically,” the order “faulted only Secretary Noem’s decision to restore the traditional case-by-case process by undoing the prior categorical grant of CHNV parole. The INA, however, prescribes the exact opposite.” As a result, he wrote, the government would be required to make “individualized parole determinations for every one of the 532,000 parolees under the CHNV programs—a colossal undertaking.”
The court instructed lawyers for the immigrants to file their response by 4 p.m. on Thursday, May 15. 
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/government-asks-justices-to-allow-dhs-to-revoke-parole-for-a-half-million-noncitizens/">Government asks justices to allow DHS to revoke parole for a half-million noncitizens</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Thu, 08 May 2025 21:06:33 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[The morning read for Thursday, May 8]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKxQXJP8OBKRns4HQhe4ZUzd</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/UFyT_DgSkZ4ga3yriwnKmHn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="The morning read for Thursday, May 8" title="The morning read for Thursday, May 8"> Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Thursday morning read:
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/07/supreme-court-chief-justice-john-roberts-trump/83494003007/">Called out by Trump for how he leads the Supreme Court, John Roberts is fine keeping a low profile</a> (Maureen Groppe, USA Today)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.newsweek.com/supreme-court-chief-justice-roberts-sends-new-message-trump-2069405">Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts Sends New Message to Trump</a> (Anna Commander, Newsweek)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/05/08/one-of-the-most-controversial-executive-orders-will-shortly-land-at-scotus">One of the most controversial executive orders will shortly land at SCOTUS</a> (The Economist) </li>
<li><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/07/supreme-court-cameras-cspan-00333293">C-SPAN asks the Supreme Court to televise arguments for Trump’s birthright citizenship case</a> (Amanda Friedman, Politico) </li>
<li><a href="https://blog.dividedargument.com/p/the-universal-injunction-cases-part">The Universal Injunction Cases, Part 1: The Origins Debate</a> (Samuel Bray, Divided Argument) </li>
</ul>
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/the-morning-read-for-friday-may-2-2-2-2-2/">The morning read for Thursday, May 8</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Thu, 08 May 2025 16:57:33 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[The morning read for Wednesday, May 7]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKwZ3jvujCaYhioxzwoq1nFt</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/Gd477owmmIaSetEp91y_nHn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="The morning read for Wednesday, May 7" title="The morning read for Wednesday, May 7"> Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Wednesday morning read:
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/us/politics/supreme-court-transgender-troops.html">Supreme Court Lets Trump Enforce Transgender Troop Ban as Cases Proceed</a> (Adam Liptak, The New York Times)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/06/supreme-court-trump-transgender-military/83408713007/">In win for Trump, Supreme Court allows ban on transgender troops to take effect</a> (Maureen Groppe, USA Today)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/trumps-deportees-to-el-salvador-are-now-ghosts-in-us-courts">Trump’s Deportees to El Salvador Are Now “Ghosts” in U.S. Courts</a> (Jonathan Blitzer, The New Yorker)</li>
<li><a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/shadow-docket-workload-threatens-to-delay-supreme-court-opinions">Shadow Docket Requests Threaten to Delay High Court Opinions</a> (Lydia Wheeler & Kimberly Strawbridge Robinson, Bloomberg Law) </li>
<li><a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-says-i-dont-know-when-asked-if-he-must-uphold-the-constitution-da6fd937?st=YTVCP6&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink">Trump Says ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked if He Must Uphold the Constitution</a> (Jess Bravin, The Wall Street Journal)</li>
</ul>
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/the-morning-read-for-friday-may-2-2-2-2/">The morning read for Wednesday, May 7</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Wed, 07 May 2025 16:27:06 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Supreme Court allows Trump to ban transgender people from military]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKw5vDr3mdyggX-fx8LWuXng</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/Obw695ncoIEMCUlP9Uo27Xn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="Supreme Court allows Trump to ban transgender people from military" title="Supreme Court allows Trump to ban transgender people from military"> The Supreme Court on Tuesday afternoon cleared the way for the Trump administration to enforce a Department of Defense policy prohibiting transgender people from serving in the U.S. military. With the court’s three Democratic appointees indicating that they would have denied the Trump administration’s request, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/050625zr_6j37.pdf">the justices paused an order</a> by a federal judge in Washington state that had barred the government from implementing the policy anywhere in the United States.
Shortly after taking office in 2021, then-President Joe Biden signed an executive order that allowed transgender troops to serve openly in the military. On Jan. 20 of this year, President Donald Trump revoked Biden’s order and issued another order requiring Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to put into effect a ban on “individuals with gender dysphoria” – the medical term for the psychological distress caused by a conflict between the sex someone is assigned at birth and that person’s gender identity.

On Feb. 26, the Department of Defense <a href="https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Spotlight/2025/Guidance_For_Federal_Policies/Prioritizing_Military_Excellence_and_Readiness_P&R_Guidance.pdf">issued that ban</a>, which generally disqualifies anyone who either has gender dysphoria or has undergone medical interventions to treat gender dysphoria from serving in the military. The department explained that “the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service.”
Seven current transgender members of the armed forces, along with one transgender person who would like to join the military and a nonprofit with members who either are transgender troops or would like to be, went to federal court to challenge the new policy. The lead plaintiff in the case, Commander Emily Shilling, has been a naval aviator for nearly two decades, and she estimates that the Navy has spent $20 million on her training. 
U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle agreed with the plaintiffs that the ban violated (among other things) the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. He called the policy a “de facto blanket ban on transgender service.” 
After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected the government’s request to freeze Settle’s order while the government’s appeal went forward, the Trump administration came to the Supreme Court on April 24. 
Without the Supreme Court’s intervention, the Trump administration told the justices, the district court’s order will stay in place while litigation continues in the 9th Circuit and, if necessary, the Supreme Court. That is, the Trump administration said, “a period far too long for the military to be forced to maintain a policy that it has determined, in its professional judgment, to be contrary to military readiness and the Nation’s interests.” 
The challengers countered that if the Supreme Court were to pause Settle’s order, it would “upend the status quo by allowing the government to begin discharging thousands of transgender servicemembers, including” them, “thereby ending distinguished careers and gouging holes in military units.” 
In a brief unsigned order issued on Tuesday afternoon, the court granted the Trump administration’s request to pause Settle’s order while the government’s appeal proceeds in the 9th Circuit and, if necessary, the Supreme Court. As is often the case for emergency appeals, the court did not provide any explanation for its decision. 
The court’s three Democratic appointees – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – indicated that they would have denied the government’s request. But they too did not explain their reasoning. 
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/supreme-court-allows-trump-to-ban-transgender-people-from-military/">Supreme Court allows Trump to ban transgender people from military</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Tue, 06 May 2025 20:32:03 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[The morning read for Tuesday, May 6]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKxXwOjqKfIyubG7Iy_4u0x9</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/V8Do6inyMrkDr3fTnZbOw3n9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="The morning read for Tuesday, May 6" title="The morning read for Tuesday, May 6"> Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Tuesday morning read:
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://apnews.com/article/abortion-medication-mifepristone-e5a89a12e98fc4c529d487daba81606a">Trump administration asks judge to toss suit restricting access to abortion medication</a> (Lindsay Whitehurst & Rebecca Boone, The Associated Press)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/trump-continue-bidens-court-defense-abortion-drug-mifepristone-2025-05-05/">Trump to continue Biden’s court defense of abortion drug mifepristone</a> (Daniel Wiessner, Reuters) </li>
<li><a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/constitution-supreme-court-due-process-trump-deportees-analysis/story?id=121485100">What the Constitution, Supreme Court say about ‘due process’ for Trump deportees</a> (Devin Dwyer, ABC News)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/411687/supreme-court-trans-case-maine-voting-rights-libby-fecteau">An anti-trans lawmaker brings a Supreme Court case that she absolutely must win</a> (Ian Millhiser, Vox)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/06/trump-justice-department-trust-supreme-court-00329222">Trump’s Justice Department Is Squandering Its Biggest Asset </a>(Ankush Khardori, Politico)</li>
</ul>
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/the-morning-read-for-friday-may-2-2-2/">The morning read for Tuesday, May 6</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Tue, 06 May 2025 16:01:30 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Additional briefing filed in HHS task force case]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKz0nch9g5xERNaXKMm36c-X</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/9J3IfYOcRESxuZO4h3Qn-Xn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="Additional briefing filed in HHS task force case" title="Additional briefing filed in HHS task force case"> U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices on Monday afternoon that Congress has given the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services the power to appoint members of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, while the lawyer for a group of individuals and small businesses challenging the constitutionality of that group’s structure countered that Congress failed to do so. The arguments came in relatively rare supplemental briefs filed at the justices’ request two weeks after the oral arguments in <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/becerra-v-braidwood-management-inc/">Kennedy v. Braidwood Management</a>.
Under the Affordable Care Act, the task force – an independent panel of experts – makes recommendations about which “preventive health services” private insurers and group health plans must cover at no additional cost to the patient. One such recommendation, made in June 2019, was for the HIV prevention medicine pre-exposure prophylaxis, known as PrEP.

A group of individuals and small businesses with religious objections to the requirement that insurers and health plans provide coverage for PrEP, which they say promotes gay sex, drug use, and extramarital sex, went to federal court. They contended (among other things) that the task force violates the Constitution’s appointments clause, which requires “principal officers” of the United States to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. 
When the lower courts agreed, the Biden administration came to the Supreme Court, which agreed to weigh in. 
At the oral argument on April 21, several justices appeared sympathetic to the Trump administration, which continued to defend the task force’s structure. The government emphasized that the HHS secretary exercises significant control over the task force – including the power to remove members of the task force at any time. 
But some justices questioned whether the HHS secretary actually has the power to appoint and remove task force members, leading to an April 26 order directing both the Trump administration and the challengers to file new briefs addressing that power (or the lack thereof). 
Sauer explained that federal law directs the director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a subagency within HHS, to “convene” the task force. Because there is no other law addressing the selection of task force members, he reasoned, Congress “necessarily included that power within the power to convene the” task force. And then two other laws transferred the director’s power to appoint members of the task force to the HHS secretary, he concluded. 
The Supreme Court’s decision in <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/73/385/">United States v. Hartwell</a> establishes that the power to appoint an “inferior” office is proper as long as Congress gives a department head “the ultimate decision over the appointment,” Sauer contended. Indeed, he suggested, the laws at issue in this case “more clearly” give the appointment power to the department head, who can personally appoint task force members – rather than simply reviewing a subordinate’s choice, as in Hartwell.
At a minimum, if it is not clear whether the secretary has the power to appoint task force members, Sauer told the justices, the court should resolve any ambiguities in the government’s favor rather than interpreting the laws in a way that will leave them “clearly unconstitutional.”
“Instead of halting the Task Force’s work unless and until Congress enacts a new law,” Sauer stressed, “this Court should sensibly interpret the laws already on the books to vest the appointment of Task Force members in the Secretary.”
Representing the challengers, Jonathan Mitchell observed that the law at the center of the court’s request only instructs the AHRQ director to “convene” the task force; it does not say anything about who can appoint the task force members or how. Congress’s use of the word “convene” does not mean “convene and appoint,” he wrote. Congress “is content to leave those decisions to the discretion of the executive branch, in the same way that the statute allows the executive to decide the number of Task Force members and the length of their terms,” Mitchell reasoned.
If task force members must be appointed by either the AHRQ director or the HHS secretary, and task force members are “principal officers,” then the law violates the Constitution, because principal officers – which, courts have concluded, the task force members are – must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, Mitchell said. The justices should thus interpret the law to avoid this potential constitutional problem, Mitchell posited. 
But in any event, Mitchell continued, on the government’s interpretation the AHRQ director can appoint the task force members “while giving the Secretary nothing more than an option to exercise the Director’s appointment powers given his supervisory role over the Department. That is not enough,” Mitchell concluded, “to ‘vest’ the appointment of the Task Force in the Secretary, because the statute permits the AHRQ Director to appoint Task Force members unilaterally without any secretarial involvement.”
A decision in the case is expected by late June or early July. 
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/additional-briefing-filed-in-hhs-task-force-case/">Additional briefing filed in HHS task force case</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Mon, 05 May 2025 21:33:56 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Court asks for government’s views in decades-old Exxon dispute with Cuba]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKx5b_i2WsRb3lhGNgNo2_0q</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/eW_4tlrEW97WA8eA9tgrwnn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="Court asks for government’s views in decades-old Exxon dispute with Cuba" title="Court asks for government’s views in decades-old Exxon dispute with Cuba"> The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Trump administration to weigh in on a dispute between Exxon Mobil and three Cuban-owned companies stemming from the Cuban government’s seizure of property more than a half-century ago. The call for the views of the U.S. solicitor general in <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/exxon-mobil-corp-v-corporacion-cimex-s-a/">Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Corporation Cimex</a> came as part of a <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/050525zor_5h25.pdf">list of orders</a> from the justices’ private conference on Friday, May 1.
The dispute dates back to 1960, when the Cuban government, led by Fidel Castro, confiscated all of the property owned by the Cuban-based subsidiaries of Exxon, then known as Standard Oil, including a refinery and over 100 service stations. 
Nine years later, a commission created by Congress certified that Standard Oil had lost more than $71 million – more than $600 million in today’s dollars. 
In 1996, Congress passed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996, also known as the Helms-Burton Act. Title III of the law allows U.S. nationals who owned property in Cuba to sue anyone who “traffics in property which was confiscated by the Cuban Government on or after January 1, 1959.” 
Exxon went to federal court in 2019, seeking compensation for its losses from three state-owned companies that, it contends, “traffic” in seized property. 
The Cuban companies asked the district judge to dismiss the case. They pointed to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a federal law that generally gives foreign countries immunity from lawsuits in U.S. courts. The district judge allowed the case to go forward as to one of the companies, concluding that it fell within an exception to the FSIA for commercial activity. The district court rejected Exxon’s contention that Title III of the Helms-Burton Act provides an independent basis for a lawsuit in U.S. courts.
Exxon appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which – by a vote of 2-1 – upheld the district court’s decision. Writing for the majority, Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan explained that the “terms of the FSIA contemplate that jurisdiction in a civil action against a foreign sovereign could arise only under the FSIA itself, not under some other statute like Title III.” Title III, he added, refers to scenarios in which people or entities who traffic in expropriated property can be held liable, while the FSIA “specifically addresses when a foreign state [is] immune from … jurisdiction.’”
Senior Judge A. Raymond Randolph dissented. The enactment of Title III, he contended “established a specific, independent, and exclusive cause of action for American nations whose property the Cuban government had confiscated decades earlier. The liability of those trafficking in such property does not depend on the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.” 
Exxon came to the Supreme Court in December, asking the justices to weigh in. “Forcing Helms-Burton Act claims into the FSIA framework,” it argued, “will deny many claimants the ‘judicial remedy’ that Congress promised, because many instances of trafficking by Cuban-owned enterprises may not satisfy any FSIA exception.” 
The Cuban-owned companies countered that the D.C. Circuit’s ruling “both respects and safeguards Congressional judgment in this sensitive area.” Moreover, they added, the justices do not need to intervene because Exxon’s claims against the companies may still be able to go forward under the commercial-activity exception. 
There is no deadline for the solicitor general to respond to the court’s request for the government’s views. 
The justices once again did not act on several high-profile petitions for review that have been pending for several weeks, including challenges to <a href="https://www.scotus-blog.vipdev.lndo.site/cases/case-files/ocean-state-tactical-llc-v-rhode-island/">Rhode Island’s ban on large-capacity magazines</a> and <a href="https://www.scotus-blog.vipdev.lndo.site/cases/case-files/snope-v-brown/">Maryland’s ban on military-style assault rifles</a>, as well as a challenge to <a href="https://www.scotus-blog.vipdev.lndo.site/cases/case-files/apache-stronghold-v-united-states/">the transfer to a mining company of federal land</a> in Arizona that the San Carlos Apache Tribe regards as a sacred site.
The justices will meet again for another private conference on Thursday, May 15. Orders from that conference are likely on Monday, May 19, at 9:30 a.m. 
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/court-asks-for-governments-views-in-decades-old-exxon-dispute-with-cuba/">Court asks for government’s views in decades-old Exxon dispute with Cuba</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Mon, 05 May 2025 20:05:41 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[The morning read for Monday, May 5]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKzKPLCCa3uV6n-fx8LWuXng</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/yjywgmt7leoMCUlP9Uo27Xn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="The morning read for Monday, May 5" title="The morning read for Monday, May 5"> Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Monday morning read:
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/05/supreme-court-case-medical-marijuana-advertising/83414632007/">A fight over marijuana ads in Mississippi hits the Supreme Court</a> (Maureen Groppe, USA Today)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/us/supreme-court-doge-social-security.html">Trump Asks Supreme Court to Let DOGE View Social Security Data</a> (Adam Liptak, The New York Times)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/147-the-increasingly-overloaded-emergency">The Increasingly Overloaded Emergency Docket</a> (Steve Vladeck, One First)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/is-this-the-end-of-the-separation-of-church-and-state">Is This the End of the Separation of Church and State?</a> (Ruth Marcus, The New Yorker)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.advocate.com/news/transgender-military-supreme-court-amicus">Transgender service members warn SCOTUS of ‘Un-American’ purge if Trump ban is reinstated</a> (Christopher Wiggins, Advocate)</li>
</ul>

The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/the-morning-read-for-friday-may-2-2/">The morning read for Monday, May 5</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Mon, 05 May 2025 17:04:47 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Trump asks high court to allow DOGE access to Social Security records ]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKxeMUfZW6ujZwpx5_w21kha</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/XjFH2Vuro2fdQIZcqMVcnnn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="Trump asks high court to allow DOGE access to Social Security records " title="Trump asks high court to allow DOGE access to Social Security records "> The Trump administration came to the Supreme Court on Friday afternoon, asking the justices to pause a preliminary injunction issued by a federal judge in Maryland that temporarily bars members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the records of the Social Security Administration. The order by Senior U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A1063/358032/20250502151449738_SSA%20v.%20AFSCME%20stay%20final%20with%20appendix.pdf">U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote</a>, “does not merely halt the Executive Branch’s critically important efforts to improve its information-technology infrastructure and waste,” but “also constitutes inappropriate superintendence of a coequal branch.”

President Donald Trump formed DOGE, which is not a cabinet-level department, through an executive order that he signed on the first day of his second term in office. In February, two labor unions and a grassroots advocacy group, the Alliance for Retired Americans, went to federal court in Baltimore, Md., to challenge SSA’s decision to provide DOGE with access to its records. They contended that SSA had “abandoned its commitment to maintaining the privacy of personal data” for millions of Americans.
In March, Hollander temporarily barred SSA from giving DOGE team members access to SSA records, and in April it extended that prohibition while litigation continued in the lower courts. 
By a vote of 9-6, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit turned down the government’s request to put Hollander’s order on hold. That prompted the government to come to the Supreme Court on Friday afternoon, asking the justices to intervene. 
Sauer argued first that the challengers in this case do not have a legal right to sue, known as standing, because they cannot show that their members have actually been injured by the actions that they seek to stop. Although they contend that “the disclosure of their personal information to SSA DOGE team members constitutes an invasion of their privacy,” he wrote, they do not allege that their personal information has been revealed to anyone outside the government. Indeed, he noted, everyone who works at SSA – including DOGE team members – “are bound by the same legal and ethical restrictions on the disclosure” of personal information. Moreover, Sauer added, the challengers’ members voluntarily gave their information to the SSA, knowing that it “would routinely be used by agency employees and others within and outside the government to perform the types of activities that the SSA DOGE team members plan to undertake.”
Sauer next contended that Hollander did not have the power to review the challengers’ claim because an agency’s decision about “which employees may access particular agency data” is not the kind of final agency action that courts can review under the federal law governing administrative agencies. If it were, he told the justices, such a definition “would have sweeping and untenable consequences,” opening the door for federal courts to review “virtually every aspect of an agency’s internal management of its employees.”
Sauer urged the justices to intervene, telling them that Hollander’s order “imposes a significant obstacle to executing one of the President’s chief policy initiatives.” By contrast, he noted, there is no permanent harm to the challengers if the order is put on hold. In fact, he emphasized, the 4th Circuit granted the government’s request to put on hold another order by a district court in Maryland barring disclosure of some records to DOGE members by the Departments of the Treasury and Education, as well as the Office of Personnel Management.
Sauer also asked the court to issue an administrative stay – that is, to temporarily pause Hollander’s order to give it time to consider the government’s request. “The district court’s flawed injunction,” he concluded, “forecloses the Executive Branch from carrying out the pressing priorities of modernizing government information systems and ferreting out fraud, waste, and abuse.” The district court, he continued, “has now blocked these time-sensitive efforts for over a month, without any legal basis for doing so.”
The court on Friday afternoon directed the challengers to file their response by 4 p.m. on Monday, May 12. It did not act (at least immediately) on Sauer’s request for an administrative stay. 
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/trump-asks-high-court-to-allow-doge-access-to-social-security-records/">Trump asks high court to allow DOGE access to Social Security records </a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2025 23:54:11 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[The application of the "continuing violations” doctrine beyond "hostile workplace” claims]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKwh9UuaBQDjeWZMehmtHS8-</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/IfVLmgUA43nDD4jzaWTdGXn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="The application of the "continuing violations” doctrine beyond "hostile workplace” claims" title="The application of the "continuing violations” doctrine beyond "hostile workplace” claims"> The Relist Watch column examines cert petitions that the Supreme Court has “relisted” for its upcoming conference. A short explanation of relists is available <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/faqs-announcements-of-orders-and-opinions/#relists_explained">here</a>.
The Supreme Court continues its recent streak of “promoting” relists to granted cases, as the court granted review in <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/the-hain-celestial-group-inc-v-palmquist/">The Hain Celestial Group, Inc. v. Palmquist</a>, a lawsuit by parents seeking to hold a baby-food producer responsible for their child’s autism. The justices agreed to decide whether a federal district court’s final judgment in favor of the producer must be completely thrown out when the case is sent back to the state court because the district court should not have dismissed another defendant, the grocery chain Whole Foods, from the case.

The court declined to take up a second question presented in that case: whether a plaintiff may defeat diversity jurisdiction after the case is transferred to federal court by amending the complaint to add new factual allegations when the complaint at the time of removal did not state such a claim.
Turning to new business: There are 95 petitions and applications scheduled for this week’s conference. The justices will be discussing just one of them for a second time: <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/nicholson-v-w-l-york-inc-dba-cover-girls/">Nicholson v. W.L. York, Inc. dba Cover Girls</a>, in which the justices have been asked to decide when the statute of limitations begins to run on a claim of a “pattern or practice” of racial discrimination.
Chanel Nicholson, an African-American dancer, sued several Houston-area clubs under <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1981">42 U.S.C. § 1981</a>, which prohibits racial discrimination in making and enforcing contracts. Nicholson alleged that the clubs maintained an explicit and continuing policy of limiting how many Black dancers could perform during any given shift. She says she was repeatedly denied work because of this quota, including in 2014, 2017, and most recently in 2021.
In August 2021, Nicholson filed suit against the clubs, but the district court dismissed her case, concluding that <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1658">the applicable four-year statute of limitations</a> began to run in 2014 and the claims were thus barred. The <a href="https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca5/23-20440/23-20440-2024-03-04.pdf?ts=1709598617">U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit affirmed</a> in a brief per curiam opinion. 
The 5th Circuit noted that in National Railroad Passenger Corp. v. Morgan, the Supreme Court recognized a “continuing violations doctrine” under which acts of discrimination were considered part of “one continuing violation,” such that an action would be timely if the last act were timely. But the 5th Circuit said that theory applied only to “hostile workplace” claims, which Nicholson had not pleaded. It concluded that “the act of discrimination that she alleges took place in 2021 … was merely a continuation of [the clubs’] original act of discrimination that she alleges took place in 2014, upon which the limitations period has already elapsed.”
Nicholson filed <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-7490/309933/20240516160644252_20240516-155948-00003433-00004809.pdf">her petition</a> pro se – by herself, as a layperson – but retained Supreme Court counsel in time to file her <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-7490/355368/20250411133020649_23-7490--Nicholson%20-%20Cert%20Reply%2004-11%20rtf.pdf">reply brief</a>. She argues that the circuits are divided five to four on whether the continuing violations doctrine applies exclusively to hostile workplace claims, or whether it also applies to claims involving a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct.
Opposing review, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-7490/337373/20250115144034230_2025.01.15%20-%20Respondent%20Brief%20in%20Opposition%20-%20Nicholson%20I.pdf">the clubs argue</a> that the 2021 incidents in which Nicholson alleges that she was denied entry or not hired were merely effects of the original alleged discriminatory acts, not new violations that reset the statute of limitations. And they argue that there is no genuine split among the courts of appeals justifying Supreme Court review. Rather, they say, the federal appeals courts uniformly apply the continuing violations doctrine only in hostile work environment cases, and not to revive time-barred discrete acts of discrimination.
[Disclosure: I am among Nicholson’s counsel.] 
We should have a better idea soon whether the justices agree to hear Nicholson’s case in the fall. Until next time!
<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-new-relists">New Relists</h3>
<a></a><a></a><a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/nicholson-v-w-l-york-inc-dba-cover-girls/">Nicholson v. W.L. York, Inc. dba Cover Girls</a>, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/23-7490.html">23-7490</a>
Issue: Whether the continuing violations doctrine applies to claims premised on a pattern or practice of discrimination, or instead applies only in the context of hostile work environment claims.
(Relisted after the April 25 conference.)
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Returning Relists</h3>
<a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/apache-stronghold-v-united-states/">Apache Stronghold v. United States</a>, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/24-291.html">24-291</a>
Issue: Whether the government “substantially burdens” religious exercise under the <a href="https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/jmd/legacy/2014/07/24/act-pl103-141.pdf">Religious Freedom Restoration Act</a>, or must satisfy heightened scrutiny under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, when it singles out a sacred site for complete physical destruction, ending specific religious rituals forever.
(Relisted after the Dec. 6, Dec. 13, Jan. 10, Jan. 17, Jan. 24, Feb. 21, Feb. 28, March 7, March 21, March 28, April 4, April 17 and April 25 conferences.)
<a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/ocean-state-tactical-llc-v-rhode-island/">Ocean State Tactical, LLC v. Rhode Island</a>, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/24-131.html">24-131</a>
Issues: (1) Whether a retrospective and confiscatory ban on the possession of ammunition-feeding devices that are in common use violates the Second Amendment; and (2) whether a law dispossessing citizens without compensation of property that they lawfully acquired and long possessed without incident violates the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.
(Relisted after the Jan. 10, Jan. 17, Jan. 24, Feb. 21, Feb. 28, March 7, March 21, March 28, April 4, April 17 and April 25 conferences.)
<a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/snope-v-brown/">Snope v. Brown</a>, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/24-203.html">24-203</a>
Issue: Whether the Constitution permits Maryland to ban semiautomatic rifles that are in common use for lawful purposes, including the most popular rifle in America.
(Relisted after the Jan. 10, Jan. 17, Jan. 24, Feb. 21, Feb. 28, March 7, March 21, March 28, April 4, April 17 and April 25 conferences.)
<a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/l-m-v-town-of-middleborough-massachusetts/">L.M. v. Town of Middleborough, Massachusetts</a>, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/24-410.html">24-410</a>
Issue: Whether school officials may presume substantial disruption or a violation of the rights of others from a student’s silent, passive, and untargeted ideological speech simply because that speech relates to matters of personal identity, even when the speech responds to the school’s opposing views, actions, or policies.
(Relisted after the Feb. 21, Feb. 28, March 7, March 21, March 28, April 4, April 17 and April 25 conferences.)
<a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/first-choice-womens-resource-centers-inc-v-platkin/">First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, Inc. v. Platkin</a>, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/24-781.html">24-781</a>
Issue: Where the subject of a state investigatory demand has established a reasonably objective chill of its First Amendment rights, is a federal court in a first-filed action deprived of jurisdiction because those rights must be adjudicated in state court?
(Relisted after the April 4, April 17 and April 25 conferences.)
<a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/ghp-management-corporation-v-city-of-los-angeles-california/">GHP Management Corp v. City of Los Angeles, California</a>, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/24-435.html">24-435</a>
Issue: Whether an eviction moratorium depriving property owners of the fundamental right to exclude nonpaying tenants effects a physical taking.
(Relisted after the April 17 and April 25 conferences.)
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/the-application-of-the-continuing-violations-doctrine-beyond-hostile-workplace-claims/">The application of the “continuing violations” doctrine beyond “hostile workplace” claims</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2025 17:49:50 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[The morning read for Friday, May 2]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKxoc4li2c6BMZNaYRWadcX6</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/aHOJYtnOgTGWcLlTD1wkJXn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="The morning read for Friday, May 2" title="The morning read for Friday, May 2"> Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Friday morning read:
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/01/politics/trump-asks-supreme-court-to-end-deportation-protections-for-venezuelans-in-the-us">Trump asks Supreme Court to end deportation protections for Venezuelans in the US</a> (John Fritze, CNN)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/01/ketanji-brown-jackson-sharply-condemns-trumps-attacks-on-judges-00323010">Ketanji Brown Jackson sharply condemns Trump’s attacks on judges</a> (Josh Gerstein, Politico)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.thebulwark.com/p/conservative-case-against-trump-power-grab-firing-commission-members">The Conservative Case Against Trump’s Latest Power Grab</a> (Amit Agarwal, The Bulwark)</li>
<li><a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/194751/supreme-court-declaring-war-secularism">The Supreme Court Is Declaring War on Secularism</a> (Matt Ford, The New Republic)</li>
<li><a href="https://thereload.com/doj-urges-supreme-court-to-hear-hawaii-gun-free-zone-case/">DOJ Urges Supreme Court to Hear Hawaii ‘Gun-Free Zone’ Case</a> (Stephen Gutowski, The Reload) </li>
</ul>

The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/the-morning-read-for-friday-may-2/">The morning read for Friday, May 2</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2025 17:04:46 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Trump asks Supreme Court to allow an end to protected status for Venezuelans ]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKwxi_7RGceAehtLdxSOwF-n</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/MYv-0RnHgHoabU-Nov2oH3n9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="Trump asks Supreme Court to allow an end to protected status for Venezuelans " title="Trump asks Supreme Court to allow an end to protected status for Venezuelans "> The Trump administration came to the Supreme Court once again on Thursday afternoon, asking the justices to clear the way for it to end the protected status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan citizens living in the United States. The ruling by Senior U.S. District Judge Edward Chen keeping the protection in place, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote, “wrested control of the nation’s immigration policy away from the Executive Branch and imposed the court’s own perception as to whether the government’s actions might ‘contradict U.S. foreign policies,’ ‘have adverse national security ramifications,’ or ‘weaken the standing of the United States in the international community.’”
In the Temporary Protected Status program, Congress gave the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to allow some foreign citizens to stay in the United States and work if they cannot return safely to their home country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions in the foreign state.” The secretary is instructed to terminate the TPS designation when a country no longer meets those criteria. 

In 2021, Alejandro Mayorkas – then the Secretary of Homeland Security – designated Venezuela under the TPS program and later extended the program. 
At issue in the case is the Feb. 1, 2025, termination of the TPS designation (as well as efforts to extend it) by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem for a particular group of Venezuelan nationals.
Less than three weeks later, the plaintiffs in this case – Venezuelan nationals who are beneficiaries of the TPS program, as well as an organization representing TPS beneficiaries – went to federal court in San Francisco, seeking to postpone Noem’s termination. 
On March 31, Chen granted that request and issued an order that barred Noem from ending the designation. He called Noem’s conduct in seeking to lift an existing TPS designation “unprecedented,” and suggested that her decision had been “predicated on negative stereotypes” about Venezuelan migrants.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected the government’s request to stay Chen’s order while its appeal continued. That prompted Sauer to come to the Supreme Court on Thursday, seeking to put Chen’s order on hold while the government appeals to the 9th Circuit and, if necessary, the Supreme Court.
The TPS program “implicates particularly discretionary, sensitive, and foreign-policy-laden judgments of the Executive Branch regarding immigration policy,” Sauer emphasized. And in particular, he wrote, Congress specifically provided that courts should not be able to review the secretary’s determinations. But although the TPS statute is “unambiguous” on that point, Sauer stressed, Chen concluded that he could review Noem’s decisions because the plaintiffs had brought their challenges under the federal law governing administrative agencies. Chen “issued sweeping preliminary relief that overrides” Noem’s determinations and puts her decisions on hold “indefinitely,” requiring her to allow “hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan nations to remain in the country, notwithstanding her reasoned determination that doing so is ‘contrary to the national interest,’” Sauer complained.
The Supreme Court directed TPS beneficiaries to file a response to the government’s request by 5 p.m. on Thursday, May 8. 
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/trump-asks-supreme-court-to-allow-an-end-to-protected-status-for-venezuelans/">Trump asks Supreme Court to allow an end to protected status for Venezuelans </a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2025 00:28:05 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Transgender service members urge justices to let them continue to serve]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKweyzreYUKyIYvmyuk5fxzE</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/Hss63mFCsiG0iaUxoukcNHn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="Transgender service members urge justices to let them continue to serve" title="Transgender service members urge justices to let them continue to serve"> A group of transgender service members urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to leave in place an order by a federal judge that bars the government from enforcing a policy that would prohibit them from serving in the U.S. military. Putting the order on hold, they told the justices, would “upend the status quo by allowing the government to immediately begin discharging thousands of transgender servicemembers, including” the plaintiffs in this case, “thereby ending distinguished careers and gouging holes in military units”
The Trump administration came to the court last week, asking the justices to put the order on hold while the service members’ challenge to the policy continues in the lower courts. The order, it said, had usurped the executive branch’s “authority to determine who may serve in the Nation’s armed forces.” 

The proceedings now before the court began as a challenge to a policy issued in February by the Department of Defense that, subject to narrow exceptions, disqualifies anyone who has gender dysphoria – that is, psychological distress caused by a conflict between the sex that someone is assigned at birth and that person’s gender identity – or has undergone medical interventions to treat gender dysphoria. 
Seven of the eight individual plaintiffs are currently members of the armed forces and have collectively served more than 100 years and received more than 70 medals. The eighth individual plaintiff would like to join the military. 
The lead plaintiff is Commander Emily Shilling, a naval aviator who has flown more than 60 combat missions and served as a naval test pilot. During her nearly two decades of service, she says, the Navy has spent more than $20 million on her training. 
The plaintiffs contend that the policy violates, among other things, the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. 
Senior U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle, a George W. Bush appointee, agreed with the plaintiffs and barred the government from enforcing its policy anywhere in the United States. He called the policy a “de facto blanket prohibition on transgender service.” 
When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit declined to pause Settle’s order while the government appealed, the Trump administration went instead to the Supreme Court on April 24. Solicitor General D. John Sauer stressed that an expert panel during Trump’s first administration had concluded that allowing people with gender dysphoria to serve in the armed forces would be “contrary to ‘military effectiveness and lethality.’” Indeed, he noted, the justices during that administration had allowed the government to enforce a policy “materially indistinguishable from the one at issue here.”
The plaintiffs reject the premise of the policy. Instead, they maintain, “equal service by openly transgender servicemembers has improved our military’s readiness, lethality, and unit cohesion, while discharging transgender servicemembers from our Armed Forces would harm all three, as well as the public fisc.”
It is immaterial, the plaintiffs say, that the Supreme Court allowed the military to implement a “much narrower and different policy” in 2019. That policy allowed active-duty service members who had already transitioned to remain in the armed forces and retain their healthcare. The earlier policy, they contend, also “lacked the animus-laden language” of the 2025 policy and the executive order that led to it, “which disparage transgender people as inherently untruthful, undisciplined, dishonorable, selfish, arrogant, and incapable of meeting the rigorous standards of military service.” Moreover, the policy before the court in 2019 was “based on predictions about open service by transgender people.” But since then, they emphasize, transgender people have served openly in the military, without any negative effect on military readiness or lethality.
The plaintiffs push back against the government’s insistence that the ban only applies to people with gender dysphoria, not to transgender people, dismissing that argument as “folly.” The ban requires members of the armed forces to “only serve in accordance with their [birth] sex,” they note, and prohibits them from serving if they have ever tried “to transition to any sex other than their [birth] sex.” Indeed, they add, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the department itself have repeatedly referred to the ban as applying to transgender service members.
The Trump administration will now have an opportunity to reply to the plaintiffs’ brief. After that, a ruling on the government’s request could come at any time. 
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/transgender-service-members-urge-justices-to-let-them-continue-to-serve/">Transgender service members urge justices to let them continue to serve</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2025 23:35:26 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Court rules for Coast Guard reservist in "national emergency” pay dispute]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKxIxSJPBd4ib7kdRKkm2PJP</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/SMUiTwXeIm8RFlX8Wo9Dlnn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="Court rules for Coast Guard reservist in "national emergency” pay dispute" title="Court rules for Coast Guard reservist in "national emergency” pay dispute"> The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that an air traffic controller who was called up to serve on active duty in the U.S. Coast Guard “during a national emergency” is entitled to have the government pay him the difference between his civilian salary and his military pay, without having to show that his service was connected to a specific emergency.
By a vote of 5-4, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-861_7lh8.pdf">the court rejected</a> the government’s narrower interpretation of the law at issue in the case, which would make it harder for reservists like Coast Guard reservist Nick Feliciano to recover differential pay. The justices splintered in an unusual line-up, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor joining four of her more conservative colleagues – Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett – in the majority.

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, in a 17-page opinion joined by Justices Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
At issue in this case is the interpretation of a federal law known as the “differential pay” statute, which is intended to compensate reservists who are federal employees for the difference between their salaries while on active duty and their federal civilian salaries. 
The law provides that federal civilian employees are entitled to differential pay while on active duty “pursuant to a call or order to active duty under” a provision that includes, among others, “any other provision of law during a war or during a national emergency declared by the President or Congress.” 
Feliciano was called up to serve in the Coast Guard as part of the operations in Iraq and the war following the Sept. 11 attacks. He served from July 2012 until February 2017. While he was on active duty, he served on a Coast Guard ship that escorted other ships to and from a harbor. Feliciano’s pay rate was lower during his five years on active duty than what he earned as a federal employee for the Federal Aviation Administration.
Feliciano went to the Merits Systems Protection Board and then to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, seeking differential pay – which he had not received for most of the time that he was on active duty. The Federal Circuit ruled that reservists seeking differential pay under the law at issue here must demonstrate that they were “directly called to serve in a contingency operation.” 
Feliciano then went to the Supreme Court, which agreed to decide whether federal civilian employees are entitled to differential pay even if their duties are not directly connected to the national emergency. 
The dispute hinges on the meaning of the word “during” in the phrase “during a national emergency.” Writing for the majority, Gorsuch explained that the word “during” usually “means ‘contemporaneous with,’” and “does not generally imply a substantive connection.” 
Gorsuch acknowledged that Congress sometimes uses a word in a way that is intended to be different from its regular meaning. But there is no reason to believe, he continued, that Congress did so hear. 
“Given all that,” Gorsuch concluded, “we think Mr. Feliciano’s reading more consistent with the statutory language before us. Just ask yourself how an ordinary American might approach the law’s terms. Would he have any reason to think that a reservist called up to active duty ‘during’ a national emergency is entitled to differential pay if, and only if, he can prove his service has a ‘substantive connection’ to a particular emergency? We doubt it.” 
Gorsuch added that a “number of contextual clues” further supported the majority’s decision. First, he noted, Congress did make clear in other laws that both a temporal and a substantive connection are required. Its failure to do so here “supplies a telling clue,” Gorsuch posited. 
Requiring a substantive connection to obtain differential pay would raise additional questions, Gorsuch continued, such as exactly what reservists must show: Are they required to show that they served in support of a contingency operation while on active duty, as the government contends, or directly in a contingency operation, as the Federal Circuit contends? “How might we choose between these two rules? The statute,” Gorsuch observed, “does not say.” 
The majority rejected the contention that its rule could create problems – for example, by requiring the government to provide differential pay even when Congress might not have intended it, such as a reservist who is called up to active duty to face a court martial. Gorsuch indicated that such scenarios are for Congress, rather than the courts, to address. 
In his dissent, Thomas countered that reservists are called to serve “during a national emergency” only when they are called up “in the course of an operation responding to a national emergency.” 
Thomas resisted Gorsuch’s contention that the word “during” normally means “contemporaneous with.” Although it sometimes serves that purpose, Thomas acknowledged, at other times it can be used “to reference only events that are substantively connected to the ongoing event—that is, events that occur ‘in the course of’ or ‘in the process of’ the ongoing event.” 
Because the meaning of “during” is not, standing alone, clear, Thomas continued, courts should instead look at the broader context of the phrase “during a national emergency.” And those “contextual clues,” Thomas wrote, indicate that the phrase only applies to reservists who are called to serve in operations responding to a national emergency.
This does not, Thomas stressed, necessarily mean that Feliciano will not receive differential pay. “As even the Government admits,” Thomas wrote, “Feliciano’s ‘orders indicate that [he] would have been entitled to differential pay’ under a proper reading of the” law.” Thomas therefore would send the case back to the Federal Circuit for it to take another look. 
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/court-rules-for-coast-guard-reservist-in-national-emergency-pay-dispute/">Court rules for Coast Guard reservist in “national emergency” pay dispute</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2025 18:37:40 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[The morning read for Thursday, May 1]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKynKXSgNjlmLC1Ly282xAAw</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/pyl0oDY5ZixwfRokF0FOQnn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="The morning read for Thursday, May 1" title="The morning read for Thursday, May 1"> Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Thursday morning read:
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-considers-endorsing-countrys-first-religious-public-char-rcna203328">Supreme Court’s conservatives lean toward allowing country’s first religious public charter school</a> (Lawrence Hurley, NBC News)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/st-isidore-seville-catholic-oklahoma-charter-schools-scotus/">Divided Supreme Court weighs effort to create nation’s first religious charter school</a> (Melissa Quinn, CBS News)</li>
<li><a href="https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-federal-employees-military-reservists-pay-ed9ffe20a00fb70af6dc97d5f0450545">US Supreme Court resolves pay fight in favor of federal workers who also are military reservists </a>(The Associated Press)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/01/trump-tariffs-injunction-supreme-court-00319135">The Supreme Court Could Unleash Chaos on the Economy</a> (Ankush Khardori, Politico) </li>
<li><a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/29/supreme-court-fbi-lawsuit-wrong-house-raid/83343691007/">Guns drawn, the FBI barged into the wrong house. Supreme Court justice calls it ‘ridiculous’ </a>(Bart Jansen, USA Today)</li>
</ul>

The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/the-morning-read-for-thursday-april-24-2-2-2-2-2/">The morning read for Thursday, May 1</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2025 16:11:30 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Class action question turns into procedural dispute ]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKwo39Wbq6_6SQm0QkxGtqLL</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/KN_Vm6uv-knKD3mlDnVITnn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="Class action question turns into procedural dispute " title="Class action question turns into procedural dispute "> Another day at the Supreme Court and, suitable for the way this term has gone, another case that pretty clearly does not belong before the court. The justices granted review in <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/laboratory-corporation-of-america-holdings-v-davis/">Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings v. Davis</a> to decide whether a district court can certify a class action that includes claimants who in fact have not suffered any cognizable injury. Here, for example, a group of blind individuals filed suit against Labcorp when it installed automated check-in kiosks in its facilities in the COVID-19 era. The class contends that the kiosks discriminate against the blind, and the parties spent a lot of time in the district court arguing about the suitable bounds of the class. At one point, the court defined a class that excluded all who did not know about or did not want to use the kiosk, on the theory that they were not injured. Later, the district court modified the definition to include everybody who came into a clinic, whether they did or did not want to use the kiosk.

Labcorp’s arguments in the court challenge that second definition, but the problem is that it only appealed the first definition, which is strictly limited to those who can claim an injury from the presence of the kiosks. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit held that because Labcorp did not appeal the second definition, it did not have jurisdiction to review that second definition. So now the justices have a case with briefs challenging the propriety of a definition that the defendant never appealed.
Predictably, a large share of the argument was about what the justices should do about that. For the most part, the sentiment (expressed repeatedly by Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Sonia Sotomayor) was that the court has no reason to address the second definition and that it should send the case back to the lower courts to let them consider whether there is any way for Labcorp still to challenge that definition.
To the extent the justices addressed the question on which they granted review, the justices appeared skeptical of Labcorp’s position. The leaders on that point were Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Neil Gorsuch, and Sotomayor. Labcorp contended that the members of the class necessarily have to share the same injury to be in the class, but the justices seemed to think that class definitions are quite “fluid,” as Sotomayor emphasized.
The group could not see any reason why the question of precisely who was injured needs to be settled up front. For them, the only requirement in the rules is that the court needs to find a way to sort the “wheat from the chaff” — the injured from the uninjured — before the court finally awards damages. 
Sotomayor, recalling her time as a trial judge, commented that class definitions “get amended constantly,” and that “it’s not until the judgment is entered that you have to … identify who’s been injured or not.” 
Seconding Sotomayor’s sentiment, Kagan commented that “the court is not doing anything with respect to those claims until the court actually provides damages, … and as long as the court figures this question out before the court actually does anything with respect to those claims, that seems to me good enough.” 
Gorsuch seemed persuaded by the practicalities, suggesting that from his perspective, “overall, looking at the whole thing, it’s manageable. There are at least some common questions. The named plaintiffs are generally typical and common issues predominate.” 
When Sopan Joshi, representing the government, argued that the problem is that the class doesn’t have “commonality” unless the plaintiffs shared a common injury, Gorsuch and Kagan both objected strenuously. Gorsuch interjected: “Hold on. … I had understood it as one issue has to be common, and that that has to be predominant. …. Now you’re telling me that Article III, and Article III alone, must be satisfied by everyone at the outset.” When Joshi insisted that all in the class must share a common injury, Gorsuch reiterated his point even more firmly: “No, they don’t all have to be common. There has to be a common question that predominates over others.”
Apparently bemused by his discussion of commonality, Kagan asked Joshi to look back at the past 70 years of the court’s class action cases. “[I]t strikes me that if you look at all the classes that have been certified by that point, you’re always going to be able to find people for idiosyncratic reasons who don’t share the same injury, who don’t have standing, and all that’s never been seen as kind of the end all and be all,” she said. To do that, Kagan continued, “we have to explode everything. So it seems very inconsistent to me with the way class actions have been practiced for many decades.”
That’s not to say that there was no sympathy for Labcorp’s position. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh commented on the “elephant in the room” – that the very certification of a class often can force defendants to settle – but they did not suggest any way to avoid the procedural obstacle to reaching the question.
Although the justices have shown some interest this year in reaching out to decide the questions to which they devoted an hour of oral argument, this really seems to be one where there is little appetite for finding a way to reach that question. When skepticism about getting to the question includes Barrett, Gorsuch, Sotomayor, and Kagan, it is a little hard envisioning a majority finding a way around the obvious difficulties. 
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/04/class-action-question-turns-into-procedural-dispute/">Class action question turns into procedural dispute </a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2025 23:08:39 +0200</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Supreme Court divided over approving first religious charter school ]]></title>
<link>https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/mcTlhFXeJKx2aXpvdeqBibb9ICM-PHur</link>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/dml6b3XqgYli5M6MdcJlGXn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="Supreme Court divided over approving first religious charter school " title="Supreme Court divided over approving first religious charter school "> The Supreme Court on Wednesday was divided over a Catholic virtual charter school’s bid to become the country’s first religious charter school. With Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused from the case, the outcome appeared to hinge on the vote of Chief Justice John Roberts, who asked probing questions of both sides but did not make his position clear.
The case began two years ago, when Oklahoma’s charter school board approved an application by the archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the diocese of Tulsa to establish St. Isidore of Seville, a virtual Catholic charter school. Although the state law governing charter schools requires them to be non-religious “in their programs, admissions policies, and other operations,” the board’s contract with St. Isidore provided that the school could freely exercise its religious beliefs. 

Gentner Drummond, the state’s Republican attorney general, went to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, asking it to invalidate the board’s contract with St. Isidore. 
The state supreme court agreed to do so. St. Isidore, the state court ruled, is a public school and therefore required under state law to be non-religious. 
Representing the Oklahoma charter school board, James Campbell told the justices that the state’s charter school program relies on private organizations to create more educational options. “Fueled by private ingenuity,” Campbell emphasized, “those schools are thriving.” And he pointed to three of the Supreme Court’s recent cases – <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/trinity-lutheran-church-of-columbia-inc-v-pauley/">Trinity Lutheran v. Comer</a>, <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/carson-v-makin/">Carson v. Makin</a>, and <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/espinoza-v-montana-department-of-revenue/">Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue</a> – that, he said, stand for the proposition that when the government makes benefits or funds generally available to the public, it cannot exclude people or groups from such programs just because they are religious.
Roberts pushed back against Campbell’s reliance on the trio of cases, suggesting that those cases “involved fairly discrete state involvement.” By contrast, Roberts said, “this does strike me as a much more comprehensive involvement.” 
Justice Elena Kagan agreed, telling Campbell that this case was “a fair bit different” from Carson, in which the Supreme Court struck down a Maine policy that allowed public funds to be used to pay tuition at non-sectarian schools but not at religious schools. The charter schools in this case, she said, “look like regular public schools” and are subject to the same kinds of requirements as traditional public schools – for example, they are free, they are open to everyone, they have to comply with proficiency standards, and the state can shut them down. “These are state-run institutions,” Kagan concluded.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also appeared dubious that the Trinity Lutheran line of cases was necessarily applicable here. In Carson, she noted, the Supreme Court ruled that a state can opt to provide a strictly secular education in its public schools. St. Isidore, she posited, is not being denied a benefit that everyone else is receiving but is instead being denied a benefit that no one else gets – the ability to establish a religious public school. Under the Supreme Court’s cases, she contended, it would have been a different story if St. Isidore wanted to establish a secular public school but its application was rejected because it is a religious institution.
Another key focus of the argument was whether St. Isidore is a private actor that has a right to the free exercise of religion or is instead a government entity or a state actor, which would not have such a right. 
Representing Drummond, Gregory Garre argued that charter schools like St. Isidore have “all the hallmarks of government entities.” They are created by the state, he said – here, by the legislature under state law – and they remain under state supervision and control. The state, he maintained, exercises “extensive oversight of” charter schools’ curriculum, far more than it wields for private schools in the state. Indeed, he noted, federal law requires charter schools to operate under “public supervision and direction.” The state has designated charter schools as public entities, and the public understands them to be public schools, he said.
But Campbell pushed back on that characterization, telling the justices that St. Isidore had been created by two private organizations and is controlled by an outside board. 
Justice Neil Gorsuch seemed receptive to this characterization. He later observed that if the lack of supervision by a school’s board resulted in a determination that a charter school is not a government entity, states could respond by initiating more oversight for charter schools – for example, by placing public officials on the board. 
Justice Samuel Alito focused on comments made by Drummond in opposing St. Isidore’s application to open a virtual charter school, when he noted that approving St. Isidore’s application would mean that the board would also have to approve a religious charter school operated by a minority religion. You have, he told Garre, a “very serious Masterpiece Cakeshop problem,” referring to the 2018 case of a Colorado baker who refused to make a custom wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The court issued a narrow ruling for the baker, finding that a Colorado administrative agency had been too hostile to his sincerely held religious beliefs. The opposition “reeks of hostility to” Islam, Alito stressed.
The justices also spent time exploring the implications of a ruling in either direction. Kagan described a hypothetical involving a school in a Hasidic community in New York that wanted to adopt a curriculum focused on the Talmud and other ancient texts, with instruction in Yiddish or Hebrew. Does New York have to approve this charter school, Kagan queried, even though the curriculum is “super different”? The state wanted to adopt a charter-school program to offer flexibility, but a ruling for the charter school in this case would require it to fund all kinds of religious schools if it wants to have programs at all.
Gorsuch countered that it might be a “neutral rule” to require charter schools to teach a standard curriculum that included subjects like math, science, and English. 
Other justices, including Roberts, asked Garre to address the court’s decision in <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/fulton-v-city-of-philadelphia-pennsylvania/">Fulton v. City of Philadelphia</a>, holding that the city violated the free exercise clause when it refused to enter into a contract with Catholic Social Services to place children in foster homes because of the agency’s policy of not certifying same-sex couples as foster parents. 
Garre responded that the case before the court on Wednesday was “fundamentally different” from Fulton, because in that case Catholic Social Services was not funded or controlled by the state. 
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of the justices who was most openly sympathetic to the charter school, echoed the arguments by the school and the board that upholding the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s opinion could mean that other faith-based services, like Catholic Social Services or Catholic Charities, would also be deemed government entities and be unable to exercise their religion. 
Garre again tried to distinguish St. Isidore from those kinds of services, telling Kavanaugh that the other faith-based services are not established by the state itself. 
Gorsuch pressed Garre further, observing that Catholic Social Services could in fact provide adoption services only with “incredible oversight” from the city. How, Gorsuch asked, would we draw the line between faith-based services that would or would not be government entities? “We have to have a test,” Gorsuch concluded. 
Toward the end of his time at the lectern, Garre told the justices that if they rule for the board and the school, it will have a “dramatic effect” on the charter-school system. It would mean, he said, that both the federal law governing charter schools and virtually all state charter-school laws would also be unconstitutional, because they require charter schools to be “non-sectarian.” Congress and state governments could adopt new laws, he acknowledged, but in the interim he contended that there would be “uncertainty, confusion, and disruption.”
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the federal law ensuring that students with disabilities receive a free appropriate public education, applies to charter schools because they are understood to be public schools, Garre continued. But that understanding could be upended by a ruling for the school and the board. 
And if religious schools can qualify as public charter schools, Garre continued, it will raise questions about who can be admitted to such schools, whom the schools can hire as teachers, and what the curricula at those schools will be. 
But several of the justices saw the issue before the court very differently. In Kavanaugh’s view, the religious schools weren’t asking for favoritism; they were simply seeking not to be excluded from the charter-school program based on their religion. The school and the board appeared to have four votes – Justice Clarence Thomas along with Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. Whether the chief justice will join them to overturn the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision seems possible, but remains to be seen.
The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/04/supreme-court-divided-over-approving-first-religious-charter-school/">Supreme Court divided over approving first religious charter school </a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.]]></description>
<pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2025 20:39:49 +0200</pubDate>
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