Friday’s final Supreme Court decisions capped off what may be remembered as one of the most consequential terms in recent memory—not just for the individual cases decided, but for what they reveal about the Court’s fundamental transformation under its current originalist majority. The three decisions, handed down on the final day and by 6–3 votes along ideological lines, encapsulate some of the broader themes that have defined this Court: a commitment to constitutional limits on federal power, robust protection of religious liberty, and an unwavering focus on safeguarding children from government overreach.
The Originalist Revolution in Action
The most striking aspect of Friday’s decisions wasn’t any single ruling, but rather how they demonstrated the Court’s consistent methodology. In Trump v. CASA, Justice Barrett’s majority opinion shutting down universal injunctions exemplified the originalist approach at its finest and echoed the style of her former boss, Justice Scalia. Rather than asking whether universal injunctions produce good policy outcomes, Barrett methodically examined the historical foundations of federal equity power, clarifying that universal injunctions are a novelty and outside the scope of federal power. Federal judges, like all other members of our government, have limited powers, so they can only grant relief to the parties to the case—in CASA that meant several immigrant-rights groups and states, along with a few individuals—rather than blocking application of the executive order to anyone.
The CASA case combined two politically charged issues: whether Trump’s executive order regarding birthright citizenship is constitutional and whether the increasingly common “universal injunction” is proper. As expected following oral arguments, the Court didn’t reach the citizenship question, but that doesn’t mean the decision was a dodge. Having ruled out universal injunctions, the question returns to the lower courts, which will address that issue for the first time. Make no mistake, it will return to the high court before long.
While this litigation will continue to determine whether the states and organizational plaintiffs actually have standing to sue, as well as to decide the underlying citizenship issue, the universal injunction ruling alone will have profound implications for the balance of power between the federal courts and the executive branch. For too long, forum-shopping litigants could effectively halt nationwide policy with a single favorable district court ruling. Friday’s decision restores constitutional equilibrium by requiring challengers to follow established procedures like class actions rather than judicial innovations that have no basis in law or history.
Justice Barrett’s majority opinion focused on the history of judicial remedies. You know you’re reading an originalist when you see sentences like, “We must therefore ask whether universal injunctions are sufficiently ‘analogous’ to the relief issued ‘by the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the enactment of the original Judiciary Act.’” Somewhere, Justice Scalia is smiling.
Justice Jackson, however, was not. She called this “a mind-numbingly technical query” and railed with a barrage of hyperbole against what she considered “an existential threat to the rule of law.” I’m not sure which part of Barrett’s takedown of Jackson was more devastating, her responses to Jackson’s arguments, or her now-famous conclusion suggesting that the dissent isn’t worth any more of the Court’s time: “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.” Ouch.
In addition to skewering Jackson, Barrett shot down one red herring after another in Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion for the three liberals, which presented a long-winded diatribe opining on the merits of the underlying citizenship question. It was an awkward day for those who had gone all in on the notion that Justice Barrett is the next Justice Souter.
There were three concurring opinions in the case. Justice Thomas wrote to clarify that injunctions may not always constitute full relief, and that’s ok. Justice Alito sounded the alarm that aggressive litigants have been abusing class actions and standing doctrine, making clear that the Court won’t ignore those end-runs around this decision. Justice Kavanaugh pushed back in his concurring opinion on people who attempted to bully the Court and impugn its integrity every time they see an emergency docket decision they dislike. The emergency docket is not only perfectly valid, but important for avoiding unjust results when lower courts make errors that are causing immediate harm. “When a stay or injunction application arrives here, this Court should not and cannot hide in the tall grass.”
A Term Defined by Protecting Children
Perhaps the most remarkable pattern this term has been the Court’s unwavering commitment to protecting children across multiple contexts. Friday’s Mahmoud v. Taylor and Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton decisions, combined with this term’s earlier ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, reveal a Court that understands its constitutional duty to safeguard the most vulnerable members of society.
In Mahmoud, the Court recognized what should be obvious: parents have fundamental rights to direct their children’s education, especially their religious education. The decision reinforces that public schools cannot become indoctrination centers that override parental authority under the guise of promoting “kindness” or “awareness.” When Justice Sotomayor’s dissent characterized ideologically driven curricula as merely teaching that “LGBTQ people exist,” Justice Alito correctly identified this as “air-brushing the record” of what was actually occurring.
Ten years ago in Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Kennedy promised that religious rights would continue to be respected, even in the face of an increasingly doctrinaire LGBTQ orthodoxy. Unfortunately, it has taken a decade of Court decisions to correct the many lower courts who have denigrated First Amendment rights, but Friday’s Mahmoud is a major victory in that effort.
The age verification case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, represents an even more fundamental victory for child protection. Justice Thomas’s opinion upholding Texas’ law requiring age verification for online pornography access demonstrates that technological change doesn’t eliminate traditional state authority to protect minors from harmful content. The decision recognizes that minors “have long been thought to be more susceptible to the harmful effects of sexually explicit content” and that states retain compelling interests in shielding children from such material.
Justice Thomas’s opinion for the Court solidly rests on “[h]istory, tradition, and precedent.” That Thomas would look to history and tradition is no surprise, but it represents a shift in the Court’s approach as typically obscenity law has focused heavily on precedent, wandering as a result from the Constitution’s original understanding. This decision didn’t turn back the clock on any of those precedents, but it is a reminder that we now have a Court with a solid originalist majority. Indeed, only a Court unmoored from history and common sense could hold that the First Amendment stands in the way of requiring online pornographers to use widely available and commercially practical age-verification technology to ensure that their customers are not children.
Unfortunately, three of the justices, in a dissent by Justice Kagan, did take that position. They wanted to make Texas take additional steps to prove they weren’t blocking any more adult porn use than absolutely necessary. But even the dissenters had to acknowledge that Texas’ perfectly reasonable law “might well pass the strict-scrutiny test, hard as it usually is to do so.”
Constitutional Limits and Missed Opportunities
Not every decision represented a complete victory for constitutional governance. The Court’s ruling in FCC v. Consumers’ Research represents a missed opportunity to reinvigorate the nondelegation doctrine. The Court’s 6–3 opinion, written by Justice Kagan, accepted Congress’s extraordinary delegation of taxing authority to a private entity through the FCC despite its problems.
Even though the case is a missed opportunity, it comes with a silver lining. Justice Gorsuch’s powerful dissent—joined by Justices Thomas and Alito—sends an unmistakable signal: the nondelegation doctrine is far from dead.
While the majority had to adopt a strained reading of the statute to save this unprecedented tax delegation, they nonetheless acknowledged there are constitutional limits Congress cannot cross. And the majority didn’t consider the validity of two particularly problematic provisions that may come back to the Court and give it a chance to correct its error. Friday’s decision is a speed bump, not a roadblock, for constitutional accountability in our separated powers system.
The Broader Transformation
These final decisions must be understood in the context of the Court’s broader evolution. Consider the constitutional disasters that the three liberal justices advocated for in dissent: virtually unrestricted access to pornography for minors, usurpation of parental rights in education, and mandating children’s access to experimental transgender procedures. Each of these positions would have been unthinkable in mainstream legal thought just decades ago, yet they now represent the liberal wing’s constitutional vision.
The contrast with previous eras is stark. Gone are the days when Republican-appointed justices like O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter would enable liberal majorities to impose the latest progressive orthodoxy through constitutional interpretation. Today’s originalist majority has shown remarkable consistency in applying constitutional principles regardless of contemporary political pressures.