Law360's The Term - News & Analysis on the Supreme Court

Another U.S. Supreme Court season is in the books, and while the final week of opinions featured some supermajority holdings along party lines on divisive issues like affirmative action and gay rights, we also saw a number of decisions with unexpected lineups on issues like voting rights and religious freedom. This week, the hosts of both Pro Say and The Term team up to discuss the surprising unanimity we saw in many of the justices’ opinions, the impact we should expect following some of the blockbuster opinions handed down in the final week, and finally what, if anything, we can take away from the ethics conversation that dominated the headlines throughout the term.

The U.S. Supreme Court wrapped up its term on Friday with a pair of monumental opinions. First, the court ruled that a Christian website designer in Colorado can refuse services for same-sex weddings on account of her protected free speech rights, and in a second case struck down President Joe Biden’s ambitious student loan forgiveness plan. We welcome Holland & Hart partner Christopher Jackson as a guest to give us the highlights from the blockbuster 303 Creative v. Elenis decision before digging further into why the justices said the Biden Administration lacked the authority to forgive more than $400 billion in federal loans.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday dismantled affirmative action in a 6-3 majority opinion which held that race-based admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Law360 senior Boston courts reporter Chris Villani joins us to discuss the monumental ruling and its sweeping implications for academia and a potentially broad swath of the workforce. Also this week, we welcome Columbia law professor and voting rights expert Richard Briffault to discuss Tuesday’s blockbuster election law opinion.

The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on a pair of important immigration questions Friday morning, deciding in one opinion to uphold a federal law that makes it a crime to encourage illegal immigration, and in another opinion reviving the Biden Administration’s selective deportation policy over challenges from the state of Texas and others. On this week’s episode of The Term we welcome Law360 senior immigration reporter Britain Eakin who spent the day getting reactions from the immigration law community about what these opinions mean moving forward. Also this week, two big administrative law rulings related to habeas challenges and arbitration proceedings, as well as denied water rights for Navajo Nation.

The Indian Child Welfare Act, a 1978 federal law designed to stop the state and federal practice of removing Native American children from their communities, survived the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday after a 7-2 majority held that the law does not illegally tread on state authority in regulating child custody programs. The justices stopped short of deciding the question of whether the law discriminated against non-native parents, but the opinion was hailed nonetheless as a major victory for Native American rights. On this week’s episode of The Term, we welcome Law360 reporter Caleb Symons who has been closely tracking this case to explain the majority opinion and the implications it has for Native American sovereignty.

In one of the blockbuster voting rights cases of the Supreme Court term, a five-justice majority on Thursday concluded that an Alabama congressional map drawn following the 2020 census diluted Black voter representation in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. 

Alabama’s electoral map packed a large number of Black voters into a single district, and the state argued it could not be redrawn to add a second majority-Black district without making race the primary consideration, which it said violated the Constitution. But the majority rejected that argument and instead affirmed a lower court’s finding that Alabama could have done so. 

On this week’s episode of The Term, we welcome Jenner & Block partner Sam Hirsch, an expert in voting rights and redistricting litigation, to explain the stakes of the case and implications of the opinion moving forward. We also discuss a major trademark ruling in favor of Jack Daniels, and the latest financial disclosures from the justices.

In one of the blockbuster employment cases of the term, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday gave companies the green light to sue over strikes that are structured to cause intentional damage to their property, dealing a blow to unions who argued that exposing strike actions to litigation could chill worker collective action. We talk you through the details and implications of this 8-1 opinion on this week’s episode of The Term.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday set out to clarify what constitutes “waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act and, in the process, settled on a more narrow reading that will limit the federal government’s authority to regulate wetlands. On this week’s episode of The Term, Law360 environmental senior reporter Juan Carlos Rodriguez drops by to explain the opinion as well as the important consequences it will have for permitting and enforcement. Also this week, a 94-year-old woman whose condo was seized by the government wins an important case involving the takings clause.

The case that many court watchers speculated could break the internet by curtailing protections for social media companies sued over content on their platforms landed with a thud on Thursday, as the Supreme Court remanded the case back without weighing in on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. On this week’s episode of The Term we talk through how the justices reached that conclusion, plus a blockbuster copyright decision that Andy Warhol’s portraits of music icon Prince do not fall under the fair use doctrine.

The U.S. Supreme Court finally chipped away at its mountain of outstanding opinions, releasing five decisions on Thursday. Among those, one upheld a California law banning in-state sales of pork products that come from animals kept in confined spaces, and another favored a trans asylum seeker who sought an appellate court review of their immigration proceedings. We talk through the justices’ latest round of writing and where they landed on these issues on this week’s episode of The Term.