A New Docket Takes Shape: Three More Issues the Supreme Court Will Decide in Its Next Term

As the Supreme Court wrapped up its term last month, all eyes were understandably on the blockbusters—presidential removal power, campaign finance, the Second Amendment, birthright citizenship, immigration, and the other marquee cases that dominated the headlines. It will be hard to top a term like this one, but with its early cert grants, the Court is off to a good start.

In February, the justices agreed to hear Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. As I previously flagged, that case reaches far beyond its climate-tort facts and raises broader questions about horizontal federalism and territorial sovereignty. And in April, the Court granted certiorari in St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, which asks whether Colorado violated the Free Exercise Clause by excluding Catholic preschools from its “universal” pre-kindergarten program because they admit only families that support Catholic beliefs on sex and gender. Colorado appears poised to extend its losing streak at the Court in First Amendment cases.

The past few weeks have brought yet more significant cert grants dealing with AR-15 bans, parents’ rights regarding their children’s gender transitions, and proof of citizenship for voter registration. Start with the Second Amendment. On June 30, the justices granted certiorari in Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, agreeing to take up the question whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect the right to possess AR-15s and similar semi-automatic rifles in common use. Viramontes challenges the Cook County, Illinois ordinance that served as the template for Illinois’s later statewide ban. Grant challenges Connecticut’s ban.

The AR-15 question has been a long time coming. Last year, when the Court declined to review Maryland’s semi-automatic rifle ban, Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately that the Court “should and presumably will” take up the issue in a coming term. Justice Thomas dissented from the denial of certiorari, stating that he “would not wait to decide whether the government can ban the most popular rifle in America.”

The stakes are enormous. Ten states and the District of Columbia currently enforce bans reaching AR-15-type rifles, and two more loom on the horizon. Colorado’s takes effect in August, and Virginia’s, signed in May, is blocked for now by preliminary injunctions from two state judges. Just last week, a divided panel of the Seventh Circuit upheld Illinois’s statewide ban over a strenuous dissent from Chief Judge Brennan, who explained that “[b]ecause the people have overwhelmingly chosen the AR-15 rifle and its magazine as their weapon of choice, they are protected by the Second Amendment.” The Supreme Court’s ruling will finally settle the status of these hotly contested laws nationwide.

The Court will also decide whether parents may even get through the courthouse door to challenge a state law that cuts them out of their children’s gender-transition decisions. International Partners for Ethical Care v. Ferguson concerns 2023 amendments to Washington’s runaway-youth-shelter law. A group of Washington parents says those amendments let minors seeking “gender-affirming treatment” obtain services without parental notice or consent, keep parents from learning their child’s location or condition, and delay reunification unless parents accept the state’s preferred approach.

But the Court will never reach that dispute unless the parents can sue. The Ninth Circuit threw the case out for lack of standing, dismissing the parents’ injuries as speculative and self-inflicted. That drew sharp dissents from the denial of rehearing en banc by Judges VanDyke and Tung, each joined by Judge Bumatay. Judge VanDyke explained that the court “fundamentally misunderstood the nature of parental rights by concluding that the plaintiff parents have only alleged ‘self-inflicted injuries’ in describing how Washington’s legal regime has chilled and interfered with their parenting.” The ruling, Judge Tung added, “runs afoul of Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit jurisprudence governing standing” and “improperly construes the parents’ complaint in the light most disfavorable to them.”

Finally, the Court has taken up a challenge to Arizona’s effort to keep noncitizens off its voter rolls. Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, granted June 29 along with two companion cases, tests Arizona’s 2022 laws requiring documentary proof of citizenship from applicants who register using a state form, and authorizing the state to cancel the registrations of confirmed noncitizens close to a federal election. The Ninth Circuit blocked both provisions as inconsistent with the National Voter Registration Act.

Gun rights, parental rights, election integrity, religious liberty, and climate lawfare are already on the docket, and the Court is just getting started. Next term may prove as consequential as the one that just ended.