As 2025 draws to a close, we can be thankful that the current Supreme Court remains the best in living memory as it champions the Constitution’s first principles. Let us recall five highlights of this year—decisions that limited judicial overreach, affirmed state authority to protect children, defended parental rights in education, and helped clear up confusion regarding both the religion and speech clauses of the First Amendment:
Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion in Skrmetti was a model of judicial restraint and democratic accountability. The 6–3 decision upheld Tennessee’s ban on certain risky gender-transition interventions for minors, refusing to federalize state medical policy through a bogus interpretation of equal protection. The Court’s reasoning was straightforward: Tennessee’s law classifies based on age and medical use, not sex. When the same treatment serves different medical purposes, a state can reasonably permit it for one purpose while restricting it for another. There’s nothing constitutionally problematic about that requiring heightened scrutiny—it’s basic medical regulation of the kind that states have long been permitted to enact.
What made this decision particularly significant was the Court’s refusal to be swept up in a modern cultural fad. The dissent wanted the Court to manufacture a new suspect class and apply heightened scrutiny to every state law touching on gender identity. That would have been judicial policymaking of the worst sort, taking a contested medical and ethical question away from voters and their elected representatives. Instead, the Court applied rational basis review, found that Tennessee had legitimate interests in protecting minors and regulating medical practice, and let democracy work. Skrmetti was a crucial victory not just for Tennessee but for federalism and democratic accountability.
Justice Alito’s opinion in Mahmoud was a religious liberty milestone on a Court that already has an impressive track record in that area. The 6–3 ruling protected parents who sought to opt their children out of a Montgomery County, Maryland curriculum that featured books designed to “disrupt” children’s thinking about sexuality and gender in elementary school.
The school board’s position was remarkable in its audacity. Parents of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish faith all objected on religious grounds to having their young children exposed to materials contradicting their families’ deeply held beliefs about marriage and sexuality. The board initially allowed opt-outs, then revoked that accommodation—while continuing to allow opt-outs from sex education for older students. Justice Alito explained that the Free Exercise Clause protects against government policies that substantially interfere with the religious development of children. The school board’s mandatory exposure of elementary students to materials designed to undermine their parents’ religious beliefs about fundamental questions of human identity met that standard easily. What made the victory even sweeter was the opinion’s implicit rebuke to the culture of “inclusion” that too often means excluding traditional religious viewpoints.
Justice Barrett’s majority opinion in CASA tackled one of the most pernicious procedural issues in modern federal litigation: the proliferation of nationwide injunctions that allow a single district judge to impose policy preferences across the entire country. The consolidated cases arose from sweeping injunctions issued by three district courts striking down President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship nationwide—not just for the plaintiffs before them, but for everyone.
Barrett’s opinion for a 6–3 Court employed a classic originalist examination of the historical origins of federal equity power. Universal injunctions—orders constraining the government far beyond what is needed to provide complete relief to parties before a court—are a modern invention, the Court explained. An analogous practice was not to be found in the first Judiciary Act enacted in 1789 or in the practice of English courts at the time the Constitution was adopted.
This is a significant course correction. In recent years, nationwide injunctions had become the weapon of choice for forum-shopping litigants seeking to impose their preferred policies on the entire nation. A plaintiff need only find one sympathetic district judge anywhere in the country, and suddenly a national policy grinds to a halt. The result had been a race to the courthouse and a one-way ratchet: The government loses if even a single court grants relief, while plaintiffs can keep trying until they find a favorable forum. No longer. Parties may still seek broad relief through class actions or other available procedural mechanisms, but a crucial principle is back in place: Party-specific disputes merit party-specific relief.
Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton
In an era when children can access pornography with a few clicks on smartphones their parents can’t effectively monitor, the Court’s decision in Free Speech Coalition was both urgent and overdue. The 6–3 ruling upheld Texas’s age-verification requirements for websites featuring sexually explicit material, rejecting the challengers’ argument that any burden on adult access triggers strict scrutiny.
Justice Thomas’s majority opinion helped clear up an area of law that had been marred by muddled precedents that largely addressed the internet of the 1990s, when filtering software and parental controls appeared to be viable solutions. The Court in Free Speech Coalition recognized that sexually explicit material that’s obscene for minors enjoys no First Amendment protection as to them, even if it would be protected as to adults. Age-verification requirements impose only an incidental burden on adult speech—adults remain free to access the material; they simply must verify that they are old enough to do so legally. For a law that directly regulates unprotected conduct (minors accessing obscene material) and only incidentally burdens protected speech (adults’ access), intermediate scrutiny is appropriate. Texas easily met that standard. The decision recognizes that parents need tools to keep their children safe online and that the First Amendment does not prohibit commonsense regulations that serve that goal without significantly burdening adult access.
Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission
The Court’s decision in Catholic Charities was a forceful defense of religious liberty and an important check on government officials who think they can decide what counts as sufficiently “religious” to merit constitutional protection. And this time, the Court was unanimous, its decision written by Justice Sotomayor.
Wisconsin had denied Catholic Charities a religious tax exemption on the theory that the organization was not, to quote the language of the relevant statute, “operated primarily for religious purposes.” Why? Because Catholic Charities serves everyone—not just Catholics—and does not proselytize when providing social services. Wisconsin was penalizing Catholic Charities, an arm of the Diocese of Superior, for following Catholic teaching about serving the poor without regard to their faith. This amounted to unconstitutional denominational discrimination. Wisconsin has no authority to prefer one theological approach over another, but the state was effectively saying that only religions that proselytize or limit their charitable work to co-religionists qualify for protection. That discriminates among religions based on their theological beliefs and practices—a paradigmatic First Amendment violation.
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The above five cases share a common thread: They are part of the current Court’s restoration of proper constitutional boundaries that had been eroded by decades of judicial activism and other government overreach. They provide a roadmap for constitutional restoration that hopefully will continue in 2026.