Supreme Court opens new term with major religion, guns, climate cases

Third-country deportations and election contingencies round out the docket

The U.S. Supreme Court formally opens a new term on Monday, with major test cases on religion, semi-automatic weapons, climate change, and immigration — and additional high-stakes disputes waiting to be added to the docket.

The calendar arrives against a changed operating backdrop: according to Georgetown University law professor Stephen Vladeck, the justices now issue twice as many full-court rulings from the emergency docket as from the merits docket. Emergency applications are decided quickly, with little briefing, no oral arguments, and minimal explanation. The administration has increasingly leapfrogged lower appellate courts it views as hostile to obtain Supreme Court review, and lower-court judges — both liberal and conservative — have complained that the abbreviated emergency rulings give them inadequate guidance.

The term opens Monday with a climate-change case testing whether state and local governments may sue energy companies for allegedly deceiving the public about the damaging effects of fossil fuels. Deepak Gupta, who teaches at Harvard Law School and practices in Washington, D.C., said the theory is that the energy companies told the public “the opposite of what the company’s own scientists knew,” leaving communities to absorb the local costs. Most court observers describe the case as an uphill battle for the plaintiffs.

Perhaps the term’s most consequential dispute, in terms of ripple effects, centers on religion. Michigan State University law professor Frank Ravitch described the current state of the court’s church-state doctrine as a complete reversal. “It’s literally the opposite of what the law was not that long ago, and it’s just a complete shift,” Ravitch said.

The Colorado case asks whether the state may be compelled to fund a religious preschool that declines to admit LGBTQ students or children of gay or transgender parents. St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton, Colorado, wants the funding guaranteed under the state’s universal pre-K law. The state counters that funding the parish would violate its anti-discrimination law. Last term the justices deadlocked 4-4 on a similar case after Justice Barrett recused herself, automatically leaving in place an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision that barred taxpayer funding of overtly religious charter schools. Barrett is participating in the Colorado case. The court’s conservative majority has repeatedly ruled in favor of religious exemptions from generally applicable laws but has not yet said religious schools are entitled to full taxpayer funding.

In December the court will hear arguments on whether state and local bans on semi-automatic weapons such as the AR-15 violate the Second Amendment. Former Solicitor General Don Verrilli Jr. noted that an AR-15 “can deliver upwards of 100 bullets per minute” without enhancements and up to 500 rounds per minute with various modifications, while also observing that millions of Americans own such firearms and would be dispossessed if the bans were upheld. Lawyer Erin Murphy, who has litigated cases on behalf of gun owners, said the “single most important question is who gets to decide what guns you have,” arguing there is no sense in telling individuals, “You’ve got this right against the government, but the government decides which arms you can get.”

The Trump administration has asked the court to decide whether the Department of Homeland Security may deport migrants to so-called “third countries” when their countries of origin refuse to accept them. The court will hear arguments in December. The administration has deported thousands of people to third countries where they have no connections, may not speak the language, and have often been jailed and allegedly subjected to torture. The court has twice blocked lower-court decisions that had prevented the policy from taking effect. A second immigration case tests the administration’s policy of detaining undocumented immigrants without a bond hearing, regardless of how long they have been in the United States.

Several additional cases may reach the court this term. One seeks to reverse a roughly half-century-old Supreme Court precedent barring public schools from posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms; Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama have enacted legislation inconsistent with the 1980 ruling, and lower courts are split on the question. Another potential case tests whether states may regulate Kalshi, the $40 billion prediction market that allows users to bet on outcomes ranging from sports to Supreme Court decisions.

The administration has also slow-walked for nearly two years cases it initially lost in lower courts, including attempts to deny medical research grants to Harvard University and to revoke security clearances from — and seek money damages against — law firms the administration views as hostile. Earlier this year the Justice Department told a federal court in Washington it was dropping the law-firm cases, then reversed course the next day.

Stanford University law professor Pam Karlan said the administration “don’t want to take up cases that they’re going to lose, but on the other hand, they have a boss who wants everything taken up there.” Vladeck added that “the real story of the upcoming term hasn’t been written yet because what we’re going to look back on as the biggest cases of the term … are not on the docket yet.”

The court may yet be drawn into election disputes as well. The court has already blocked a Trump-backed Missouri congressional map and rejected Trump’s mail-voting restrictions for this year’s midterms. Democrats have assembled teams of lawyers to address issues such as last-minute polling-place relocations and the presence of federal agents near polling places, with serious voting problems likely to reach the Supreme Court through the emergency docket.