The strong finish to the Supreme Court’s term felt like Christmas in June. That has been the case for a few years, thanks to the originalist majority of the 2020s. This term was a worthy successor to the previous three terms, when the Court corrected past grave errors in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (abortion), Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (racial discrimination in college admissions), and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (Chevron deference).
Rarely do we see a procedural case of the gravity of Trump v. CASA, where the Court put an end to a novel but pernicious procedural practice—universal injunctions—that had plagued the judicial landscape and frustrated presidential governance for decades even before district courts became increasingly profligate with them this year. Justice Barrett’s decision for the Court applied sound originalist analysis, recognizing the bounds of equitable relief during the founding period that should never have been abandoned. The dissents focused alternately on the underlying merits of the executive order—which the Court didn’t need to reach—or the notion that judges simply had to have universal injunctions available to effect justice. The latter idea earned Justice Barrett’s scorn for embracing an “imperial judiciary.”
As constitutional cases go, perhaps the most important this term was United States v. Skrmetti, in which the Court refused to contort the Equal Protection Clause to prevent Tennessee from barring risky gender-transition interventions for minors. That case is significant not because it broke new ground for judicial intervention, but because it didn’t. By declining to make transgender status into a new protected class, the Court avoided repeating the sort of monumental error that it had made in Roe v. Wade: inventing new legal rules that override democratic decision making on a contentious issue of policy.
It was another blow to the notion of an imperial judiciary and a reminder that some of the most critical decisions of the Court are the mistakes it does not make. Such decisions may be less memorable than the blunders, but they should still be celebrated.
Besides declining to invent new rights on the constitutional front, the Court added to its track record of protecting rights that the Constitution enumerates as it extended its string of decisions protecting religious freedom. Although an equally divided Court missed the opportunity to set precedent allowing the participation of a Catholic school in a charter school program in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, a unanimous Court reversed the denial of an exemption for Catholic Charities from Wisconsin’s unemployment-insurance tax in Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission. And in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a 6–3 Court overrode a rogue school board that had denied parents of diverse religious backgrounds the ability to opt out of having their young children subjected to “LGBTQ+”-themed content designed to mold their thinking in accordance with that ideology.
The Court extended the theme of parental rights and the protection of children by upholding in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton a Texas age-verification law that prohibits minors from accessing pornography online. That decision helped clean up the Court’s online pornography case law, which previously had been fraught with distortions of the First Amendment and confusion regarding constantly changing technology. While the liberal justices couldn’t bring themselves to uphold Texas’ common sense law, the Court did manage a united decision in a different internet case. In TikTok v. Garland, the Court unanimously upheld the law barring TikTok’s operation in the U.S. while it was under Chinese control.
To its additional credit, the Court resisted invitations to concoct baseless statutory rights or rules this term. In Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, the justices declined by a 6–3 vote to invent a new private right of action under Section 1983 to allow Planned Parenthood to sue over South Carolina’s exclusion of abortion clinics from the state’s Medicaid program. In the past the Court might have bent the normal rules to allow the abortion giant to challenge its defunding, but now it seems the era of the “abortion distortion” is over.
In Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, the Court unanimously rejected the idea that members of “majority groups” have to meet a higher standard to show discrimination than members of “minority groups.”
This was not a term that brought decisions breaking new ground on the separation of powers. There was a lost opportunity to reinvigorate the nondelegation doctrine in Federal Communications Commission v. Consumers’ Research, where the majority effectively rewrote a statute to avoid dealing with the problems presented by an extraordinary delegation of the power to raise revenue to a private entity through the FCC.
But the Court did hand down significant rulings in the aftermath of last year’s separation-of-powers landmark, Loper Bright. In McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates v. McKesson Corp., it held that the district court was not bound by the FCC’s interpretation of statutory restrictions on unsolicited faxes, showing that the Court is serious about its obligation to interpret statutory text without treating an agency’s interpretation as a thumb on the scale. That was also clear in City and County of San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency, where the Court rejected the EPA’s claimed authority under the Clean Water Act to impose permit conditions on entities that discharge pollutants based on the quality of the water in that body of water without setting specific, quantifiable limitations.
The Court’s emergency docket was particularly significant this term, given the flurry of early challenges to the new Trump administration and resulting injunctions from district courts. In any event, the administration prevailed in the vast majority of its emergency applications to the Court, including in challenges to firings of National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board members and probationary federal workers, disqualification of transgender people from military service, termination of education-related grants, and in cases involving DOGE. On cases involving removal or deportation of noncitizens, the administration had a mixed record, including a ruling with no recorded dissents in a high-profile case directing the government to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from custody in El Salvador. Trump v. CASA originated on the emergency docket, but was given full briefing and oral argument in May, becoming one of the most-anticipated decisions of the term.
Of course, the Court’s most important work by far is to be found in cases it decides on the merits, whether or not they begin on the emergency docket, because it is there that the justices lay out the contours of constitutional and statutory interpretation. On that front, the majority-originalist Court we have had since the arrival of Justice Barrett in 2020 has once again delivered one of the best terms since at least the 1960s, matched only by the three terms that immediately preceded it. Barrett, for her part, was recently pilloried by some as the next Justice Souter, an absurd notion that even a number of critics abandoned after the June decisions disclosed her principled originalist positions in top cases.
To understand how revolutionary this era is, consider what came before it. The years of the Warren and Burger Courts gave us regular bouts of thinly disguised judicial legislation. The Rehnquist Court regularly ended its terms with more judicial activism, aided by one or more of the Republican-appointed “swing” justices and typically over the dissent of the distinguished chief justice. No other aspect of American government has been so fundamentally transformed as the Supreme Court. None. This Court presents a remarkable and welcome contrast with those that preceded it.