The Supreme Court decides some of its most important cases in June. The justices generally break for the summer at the end of the month or in early July, and the toughest appeals take the longest to sort out from a term that starts in October.
As we enter June’s first scheduled opinion day, Thursday, dozens of decisions remain. Below are five of the disputes I’m watching for this month (and however far into July we go) — with the caveat that some of the court’s most consequential work comes on the shadow docket, where orders on emergency applications can drop anytime.
Birthright citizenship (sort of)
This is a weird one, procedurally. It started on the shadow docket, with an emergency application from the Trump administration that, like so many others this term, sought urgent relief from lower court injunctions against illegal executive actions. But instead of summarily deciding the application without explanation, as is the typical practice, the justices granted a rare hearing, held it in a special May 15 session and still haven’t decided the case.
As a reminder, we aren’t expecting an answer to the big question of whether Donald Trump’s executive order against birthright citizenship is legal. That’s because the administration only asked the justices to say that the trial judges who ruled against the order shouldn’t have been allowed to grant nationwide injunctions. So the forthcoming ruling could be limited to that procedural issue, which also has important consequences for all sorts of other lawsuits against the administration. But we’ll be looking for any hints from the court on that crucial, underlying citizenship question, even if a final answer won’t come this term.
Gender-affirming care for minors
The Skrmetti case was the one to watch heading into the term, and we’re still waiting on a ruling following the Dec. 4 hearing. At issue is the constitutionality of Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, and the court’s decision could also have implications for bans in other states around the country. The court at the hearing sounded ready to approve the ban.
Religion v. LGBTQ books in public school
Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s recusal led to a tie vote (and therefore a nonruling) in a case from Oklahoma that could’ve approved the country’s first religious public charter school. But other religion-related cases remain, including an appeal from Maryland parents who want to keep their elementary public school kids away from LGBTQ-themed books. While the parents say they face an “impossible choice” between subjecting their children to instruction against their beliefs or losing out on public education, school officials say the parents aren’t deprived of religious rights just because their kids are exposed to material the parents find offensive.
Mexico wants to press a novel, multibillion-dollar lawsuit against U.S. gunmakers for the wreckage their weapons have caused in the neighboring southern nation. A federal appeals court removed a roadblock to the suit last year, but then the weapons manufacturers sought the Supreme Court’s help. They argued that Mexico’s claim is too attenuated because it’s based on “an eight-step causal chain — peppered by independent criminal actors and derivative sovereign harms — to try to link the lawful production and sale of firearms within the United States to the chaos ravaging Mexico courtesy of its drug cartels.” The high court sounded inclined to agree at a March hearing, but we’ll have to see if the opinion confirms the lack of industry accountability. Another billion-dollar industry seemed to fare less well at its hearing before the justices. An adult industry trade group raised a constitutional challenge to a Texas law requiring age-verification to access pornographic sites. More specifically, the industry argued at the high court that an appeals court used the wrong legal standard when ruling against it. The impending ruling could have vast First Amendment implications beyond porn, though sympathy for Texas’ stated goal of protecting children, coupled with antipathy toward pornography generally, could lead to an opinion that at least attempts to confine any free speech restrictions to the lurid context. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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