Several cases are expected to test the limits of civil liberties and government power, raising questions that could reverberate far beyond the courtroom.
Cecillia Wang, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said at a news conference Wednesday previewing the term that there is an "urgent question" as to what positions the high court will take on issues that deeply divide Americans, at a moment when the court's popularity is at historic lows and liberties are at stake.
"Is this Supreme Court going to stake out a radical activist approach that disregards stare decisis, enlarges executive power in ways that are contrary to the Constitution and laws enacted by Congress and that trample individual freedom?" she said.
Legal experts told Law360 how the outcomes of the cases already on the court's docket — and those that might end up there soon — could shape civil rights across the nation.
Voting Rights Act May Come Under Threat
Analysts say the upcoming term will be an important one for issues related to voting rights.
Louisiana v. Callais focuses on a congressional district map Louisiana enacted in 2024 after a previous map was successfully challenged under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for diluting the power of Black voters in a state where they largely vote Democrat.
The new map, which was ordered by a federal court and was enacted by the state's Republican-led legislature, created a second majority-Black district.
But a group of 12 self-described "non-African American" voters sued the state, saying that the creation of the newer district violated two Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments — the 14th and the 15th — and that it impermissibly used race as a factor.
The Supreme Court has made clear that using race as a tool to achieve government goals is always "suspect," even in the context of policies, such as affirmative action, aimed at mitigating the effects of historical discrimination against minorities by society at large.
The court heard oral arguments in the Louisiana case in March, but in an unusual move, it decided to hold off on a ruling until the incoming term.
When the court hears rearguments in Louisiana v. Callais on Oct. 15, it will inquire about the interplay between the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted at the height of the Civil Rights Movement as a means to ensure that racial minorities' legal right to vote was actually able to be exercised at the ballot box, especially in the South.
"Throughout so much of this country, the voting rights, and, more generally, citizenship rights of Black Americans and other people of color in this country were systematically deprived," said Samuel Spital, an associate director and counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Spital, who is among the attorneys defending the congressional map before the high court, said that this is exactly what the Voting Rights Act is about: preventing discrimination and "getting us to a society where, as a multiracial democracy, we can all live together, can have confidence that our political institutions are going to take our interests into account."
Considered by many as the "crown jewel" of the Civil Rights Movement, the act was created to root out tactics aimed at disenfranchising nonwhite voters, including the long-used practice of vote dilution.
Vote dilution describes efforts to minimize the voting power of a particular demographic group. It can be achieved through what's known as "packing" — consolidating voters of a particular racial group in fewer districts — or through "cracking," splitting a concentrated group of voters across multiple districts to ensure that they do not form a majority in any of them.
"If you're a mapmaker, the way that you draw a line will have a big impact in terms of what the racial composition is of a district," Spital said.
Spital said Louisiana v. Callais should be viewed against the backdrop of state-sponsored discrimination that has ensured that Black communities and white communities are residentially segregated in Louisiana and many other parts of the country. The case also hinges on the polarization of the constituency: In many places across the country, but particularly in the South, voters tend to prefer different candidates based on race.
Callais follows a line of cases dating to 1993's Shaw v. Reno
, where the Supreme Court held that if race is the predominant factor in the drawing of a congressional map, the redistricting must be subject to the highest form of judicial inquiry — a test of constitutionality called strict scrutiny that places the burden of proof on the state to show that its intent was not racist.In 2023, in deciding Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard
, the court said race cannot play a role in admissions to colleges and universities. However, previous iterations of the court left the door open to using race-conscious policies to remedy past racial discrimination that the government played a role in maintaining.In Callais, Louisiana and intervenor NAACP have argued that party preference, not race, was the most significant factor at play in the creation of the new Louisiana district. Therefore, the new map should not have to clear the strict scrutiny threshold. But if the justices disagree and find that race was a predominant aspect in shaping the map, the inquiry will then focus on whether considering race was necessary to prevent a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
In a 5-4 ruling in 2023's Allen v. Milligan
, a case involving racial gerrymandering, the Supreme Court upheld the core of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as constitutional. That ruling reinforced the existing standard established in the 1986 Thornburg v. Gingles decision, which evaluates the "totality of the circumstances" to determine if a map dilutes minority voting strength.Some legal analysts have pointed out that the high court's conservative majority could use the Callais case to undo that precedent, with potentially wide-ranging implications. Since hearing oral arguments in Callais during the last term, the Supreme Court has requested additional briefing on a new question: whether the federal court that invalidated Louisiana's original map had the legal authority to subject it to the "totality of the circumstances" test provided in the Gingles decision.
Notably, while the state of Louisiana and a group of Black voter plaintiffs were on the same side in defending the creation of the second Black-majority district in court, they now occupy different sides on the new question. In its most recent briefs, Louisiana has argued that conditions in the state surrounding racial gerrymandering have changed significantly from the past and that Section 2's safeguards are no longer needed.
Stuart Naifeh, the manager of the Redistricting Project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told reporters at a news briefing this week that the non-Black voter plaintiffs in Callais and the state of Louisiana are pushing the Supreme Court to go beyond the question presented in the case by arguing that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is not constitutional "at all."
Sarah Brannon, the deputy director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, said at the same briefing that it is possible that the high court could decide to strike down Section 2 as an unconstitutional use of race, overturning Milligan and Gingles.
"We are not clear that that is what is going to happen, or that is even the question that they are considering, but that, I think, would be the most extreme outcome," she said.
Transgender Athletes Fight to Compete
The court is going to hear two cases challenging the constitutionality of laws in West Virginia and Idaho that ban transgender girls and women from participating in high school and college sports.
The two cases are a microcosm of a widespread issue: 27 states, most of them under complete GOP control, have banned transgender youth from playing school sports since 2020. Bans have been blocked by court orders, in part or in whole, in at least six states, including Idaho and West Virginia.
At the same time, cisgender athletes have filed lawsuits arguing that allowing transgender women to compete with them is fundamentally unfair because their higher levels of testosterone give them an edge in athletic performance.
The Idaho case, Hecox v. Little, started with transgender woman Lindsay Hecox's 2020 lawsuit asking a federal court to stop the state's ban — the first enacted in the country — which would have prevented her from joining a female cross-country team at Boise State University.
A second plaintiff, a cisgender girl identified as Jane Doe, said the law could be used to harass girls like her who have an "athletic build" and sometimes pass as masculine. Hecox and Doe argue Idaho's ban violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.
In the second case, West Virginia v. B.P.J., plaintiff Becky Pepper-Jackson is challenging a similar ban in West Virginia, H.B. 3293. At the time her lawsuit was filed in May 2021, Pepper-Jackson was a transgender 11-year-old girl hoping to join the girls' cross-country and track teams. Her case also includes a claim under Title IX, a federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination.
In both cases, federal courts issued injunctions permitting the plaintiffs to compete against female contenders and later found the bans to be unconstitutional.
Josh Block, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the cases will mark the second time the Supreme Court will consider how the equal protection clause applies to transgender people.
The first time came last year, where the court held in United States v. Skrmetti that a Tennessee state law banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors did not violate the clause.
Block said there is more at stake in the Hecox and B.P.J. cases than just the plaintiffs' individual experiences. They will act as bellwethers indicating the Supreme Court's willingness to protect the rights of transgender people broadly.
"There is a really overwhelming amount of discrimination that's directed at transgender people in the country right now," Block said.
Block noted that official policy coming from the Trump administration declares that transgender people don't even exist.
"If ever there were a group that needed the courts to stand as a bulwark to protect their equal rights, it's transgender folks," he said.
In addition to the 14th Amendment question, in the B.P.J. case, the Supreme Court will determine whether Title IX falls under the reach of its 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County
, which held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids an employer to fire an employee merely for being gay or transgender.In challenges under the equal protection clause, courts presume laws to be constitutional and can only strike them down if a plaintiff can prove that they're based on animus against a certain class of people. Courts look at whether there is a rational connection between how the law treats a particular group and a government interest.
Classifications on the basis of race, religion, national origin and citizenship are viewed by courts as "highly suspect" and are analyzed under strict scrutiny's more stringent test.
Some federal appellate courts have held that a standard between rational basis and strict scrutiny, known as intermediate scrutiny, should be used for cases involving transgender status, as it is used for cases involving state discrimination based on sex. The Supreme Court hasn't ruled on that question.
Religious Freedom and Prisoner Rights
When a prison guard at Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Cottonport, Louisiana, sought to shave Damon Landor's head, Landor, who wears his hair in dreadlocks consistent with his Rastafarian religious and cultural traditions, presented a copy of the Fifth Circuit's 2017 ruling in Ware v. Louisiana Department of Corrections
. The ruling held that prohibiting Rastafarian inmates from wearing dreadlocks violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, also known as the RLUIPA.The guard threw the opinion in the trash. Landor was later handcuffed to a chair and held down by two guards while a third one forcefully shaved his head, according to Landor's petition for review.
Legal experts say the case, Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety, fits a pattern of persistent discrimination against Black people for wearing natural hairstyles.
"This case has really horrible facts," the ACLU's Wang told Law360 in a recent phone call. The ACLU has filed an amicus brief in the case arguing that Landor should be able to bring a claim for damages against the prison officers who forcibly shaved him.
The RLUIPA was enacted in 2000 with the main goal of preventing governments from discriminating against individuals and religious institutions in zoning and landmarking laws.
The law also provides protections for religious practices for individuals in institutional settings, such as prisons.
A previous law enacted in 1993, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, makes any government restriction on religious activities subject to strict scrutiny.
In its 2020 ruling in Tanzin v. Tanvir
, a case involving a group of foreign-born Muslim men whom the FBI had placed on a no-fly list because they refused to become government informants, the Supreme Court held that private citizens can sue government officials for damages over violations of the RFRA.The question presented in Landor is whether the RLUIPA, which has identical language to the RFRA concerning the recovery of damages, offers the same path.
Immigration Detention and Forced Labor
The GEO Group Inc. is one of the largest private operators of prisons and immigration detention facilities in the United States. A class of noncitizen detainees held at a GEO-owned immigration detention facility in Aurora, Colorado, has accused the company of human trafficking in a yearslong case that has now reached the Supreme Court on a technical issue.
According to a complaint filed in October 2014, GEO staffers used immigration detainees to do a large amount of the janitorial and upkeep work at the facility while paying them only $1 per day.
Some people detained at the Aurora facility said that unless they worked for the GEO Group, they couldn't purchase food and drinks from the commissary, and couldn't make phone calls to loved ones or to attorneys. In the complaint, the class members accused GEO of forced labor under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and unjust enrichment, and demanded to be paid the minimum wage in effect in Colorado.
Legal experts say that although the litigation began during the second Obama term, it is taking center stage now that President Donald Trump's promised mass deportations rely in part on the construction of new detention facilities for noncitizens.
Matthew Cavedon, the director of the Project on Criminal Justice at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C, said the administration's push to criminalize immigrants and detain them is creating "a lot of potential for abuse."
"What's being alleged here is effectively modern-day slavery," Cavedon said.
Under Supreme Court precedent, government officials enjoy qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that shields them from civil lawsuits unless a plaintiff can prove that they have violated a clearly established constitutional right.
When a federal district court denies a government official qualified immunity, that ruling is immediately appealable under the so-called collateral orders doctrine. GEO, a private corporation, is arguing that, as a government contractor, it should enjoy the same protection — referred to in law as derivative sovereign immunity — and the same ability to raise it as a pretrial appeal.
In an October 2022 order, the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado denied GEO's immunity claim and found that the company could be held liable for its actions.
The question before the Supreme Court, an issue that has created a 5-3 split among the U.S. circuit courts, is whether private contractors for the government can take that same shortcut up to the appellate courts, and what sorts of limits there might be to the collateral orders doctrine.
The Cato Institute recently filed an amicus brief in support of the detainees, arguing the doctrine creates hurdles that prevent plaintiffs from obtaining relief when their rights are violated.
Warrantless Entries Under the Fourth Amendment
Case v. Montana asks what kind of evidence police need to justify entering somebody's home without a warrant.
The Fourth Amendment requires law enforcement officers to have "probable cause" that a crime has been, is being, or is about to be committed in order to arrest a person, or search their home or property.
The question in Case, which has divided circuit courts, is the threshold for applying a "community caretaker" exception to that rule, specifically whether a reasonable suspicion of imminent danger is enough to justify an entry.
In September 2021, police entered and searched the home of William Trevor Case without a warrant after his ex-girlfriend called 911 saying he had threatened suicide during a phone call.
According to the ex-girlfriend, identified only as J.H. in a petition for review filed by Case in December, Case said he had a loaded gun and she later "heard a pop."
Officers who arrived at the home and knew about Case's history of alcohol abuse and mental health issues opted not to seek a warrant because they didn't suspect any criminal activity, thinking only that Case was inside waiting for them so he could "commit suicide by cop," according to the petition.
The officers then waited more than 40 minutes from arrival before entering the home through the unlocked front door, yelling that they were in the home to continue announcing themselves. Shortly after, one of the officers encountered Case and shot him after seeing what he thought was a gun. A handgun was recovered near Case, who was charged with felony assault on a police officer.
Case was unsuccessful in trying to suppress the evidence gathered from that warrantless entry, and he was convicted at trial. A divided Montana Supreme Court upheld the trial court's suppression ruling, reasoning that the officers were permitted to enter the home under the "community caretaker" exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. That exception is present in both Montana and federal case law.
Under that exception, when police are concerned about the physical safety or welfare of somebody inside a home, they may be able to enter without a warrant. An example, given by the U.S. Supreme Court in a prior case, would be officers checking on an elderly person who has not shown up to church as usual.
But Case argued that the police lacked the immediate need for action, also known as exigent circumstances, to apply the exception in his case. Case points to the Supreme Court's 2021 unanimous decision in Caniglia v. Strom
, holding that the "community caretaking" exception does not permit warrantless entry into a person's home.State and local police officers enter residences without warrants on a daily basis as part of their routine duties, especially during 911 calls for welfare checks, domestic disturbances, violent crimes in progress, or other crises.
"It is something that regulates day in, day out, everyday policing, so it is going to have a large reach," said Cavedon, of the Cato Institute.
In the Caniglia case, officers making a welfare check entered Edward Caniglia's house in Rhode Island without a warrant after determining that he posed an imminent danger to himself. Case's scenario, however, presents a unique wrinkle: Before the officers entered his home, they spent nearly 45 minutes deliberating on what to do.
"That makes it a little bit harder for the government to argue that this was a true urgent emergency where they couldn't pick up the phone and call the judge," Cavedon said.
The Supreme Court softened the Fourth Amendment's "probable cause" protections in the seminal 1968 ruling in Terry v. Ohio
, holding that only "reasonable suspicion" is needed for police to stop and question someone who they think is involved in criminal activity and is armed.That precedent, which gave constitutional backing to a police practice known as "stop and frisk," was followed by a series of cases in which the high court wrestled with what could justify exceptions to the Fourth Amendment requirements.
Case v. Montana falls into that line of cases. When Montana defended the police's entry into Case's home, it conceded that the officers didn't have probable cause, only reasonable suspicion.
"The Supreme Court has always been clear that entering into the home is a really big deal for Fourth Amendment purposes, that entry into the home is at the very heart of what the Fourth Amendment is meant to regulate. But there are exceptions to that," Cavedon said.
In Caniglia, the Supreme Court made clear that there is no free-floating community caretaking exception, and that police entering into somebody's home is not the same as firefighters rescuing a kitten from a tree. Police need more than just neutral concern about somebody's safety before they can perform a warrantless entry.
However, the court also acknowledged the existence of an exigent circumstances doctrine.
"If a police officer is walking through a neighborhood and hears somebody screaming, 'Help! I'm being attacked!' they do not need to call up the magistrate judge and apply for a warrant. They can and, in fact, should, respond immediately, go in there and protect somebody," Cavedon said. "How much evidence do they need that some sort of danger is going on?"
While probable cause means that a reasonable person would think that it was probable that something bad was going on, reasonable suspicion is a lower standard, Cavedon said.
"I like to think about it as an officer raising an eyebrow," he said.
Is IQ Enough to Keep Someone Off Death Row?
The Supreme Court is set to hear the case of an Alabama death row prisoner whose attorneys say his intellectual disability makes him ineligible for execution. The challenge could reshape how courts apply the court's 2002 landmark ruling in Atkins v. Virginia
, which found it unconstitutional to execute intellectually disabled people.The justices in June granted Alabama's request to review an Eleventh Circuit ruling preventing the state from executing Joseph Clifton Smith, who was convicted of a 1997 murder and has received IQ test scores ranging from 72 to 78. Like many states, Alabama sets the cutoff for exemption from capital punishment at 70 but also requires courts to weigh a defendant's adaptive skills — the practical ability to care for one's self.
After an evidentiary hearing, a federal district court in Alabama ruled in August 2021 that executing Smith would violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual" punishment.
Factoring in the standard error of measurement for those IQ tests, the district court found Smith's actual lowest score could be 69 and also pointed to deficits in his ability to live independently, care for himself, show empathy and solve problems — impairments that appeared early in his life — in concluding that he is intellectually disabled for the purpose of the death penalty.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld that decision, but Alabama appealed. In November 2023, the Supreme Court vacated the ruling, saying it was unclear how the lower courts had reached their conclusions, and ordered further review.
Ten days later, the Eleventh Circuit explained that it had taken a "holistic approach," confirming that Smith demonstrated subaverage intellectual function, significant adaptive deficits, and signs of those deficits before age 18. At the same time, the court stressed that a low-end error range alone — such as 69 from a single IQ score — was not enough to declare intellectual disability.
Alabama renewed its petition this year, and the justices narrowed their review to a single issue: "whether and how courts may consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores in assessing an Atkins claim."
In an amicus brief submitted to the high court last week, The Arc, a national nonprofit advocating for the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, told the justices that intellectual disability is a condition that is diagnosed using both quantitative and qualitative data.
Hallmarks of intelligence in daily life, such as reasoning, planning and learning from experience, also need to be considered through clinical assessments.
"Standardized tests alone cannot substitute for a complete analysis of intellectual functioning," The Arc wrote in the brief. The brief was filed jointly with the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, and the National Disability Rights Network.
In a news release accompanying the filing, The Arc's general counsel, Shira Wakschlag, said the safeguards put in place by the Atkins ruling are at risk.
"People with intellectual disability have a specific condition, not a rote IQ number," Wakschlag said in the statement. "The state's request would upend decades of precedent, ignore science, and put people with intellectual disability at risk of unlawful execution."
Robin M. Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told Law360 in an email that the Supreme Court is increasingly reluctant to regulate use of the death penalty in the states as it has done in the past.
"There is a serious effort in some states to challenge long-standing protections for vulnerable groups such as people with intellectual disability," Maher said. "They may see an opportunity with this court's current membership to roll back some of the critical protections that restricted who states could sentence to death and execute."
Birthright Citizenship Possibly on the Line
Last week, the Trump administration filed two separate petitions for review arising out of separate challenges to Trump's executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship.
Although the two cases took different paths through the courts — Trump v. Barbara arises out of a putative class action in the First Circuit, while Trump v. Washington is from a lawsuit filed by a group of states and individual plaintiffs — the administration's objective is the same: have the Supreme Court declare that the citizenship clause in the 14th Amendment was written only to confer U.S. citizenship to newly freed slaves after the Civil War, and not to the children of noncitizens without legal status or who are in the country temporarily.
The text of the citizenship clause reads: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
In the petitions, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer says Trump's executive order "restores the original meaning" of the citizenship clause by arguing that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" excludes people who are in the country without a permanent legal status. The order, which Trump signed on Inauguration Day, directs federal agencies not to issue or accept citizenship documents for children of temporary visitors and unauthorized immigrants.
"The erroneous extension of birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens has caused substantial harm to the United States," the petition said. "Most obviously, it has impaired the United States' territorial integrity by creating a strong incentive for illegal immigration."
The question now before the justices is whether the order complies on its face with the citizenship clause and with Section 1401 of Title 8 of the U.S. Code, which codifies it into law. Responses to both petitions are due by Oct. 29.
Legal analysts believe it is likely that the Supreme Court will hear the issue this term.
--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.
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