Chief Justice Edward Douglass White died 105 years ago today. As Nora noted in her Closer Look about him, White was the first associate justice ever to be elevated to chief justice (well, not counting Chief Justice John Rutledge’s brief, sad stint as an associate justice).
And if you haven’t done so already, please register for Amy’s LinkedIn Live event with Briefly’s Adam Stofsky about this term’s highest-profile cases. It will take place tomorrow at noon EDT.
At the Court
The Supreme Court on Monday added a case on whether school employees can bring sex discrimination lawsuits under Title IX to its 2026-27 oral argument docket and sent two cases involving Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act back to the lower courts for another look in light of Louisiana v. Callais. For more on Monday’s order list, see the Morning Reads and On Site sections below.
The court has indicated that it may release opinions on Thursday at 10 a.m. EDT. We will be live blogging that morning beginning at 9:30.
Morning Reads
Supreme Court won’t weigh teacher’s firing for posts after George Floyd death
Ella Lee, The Hill
The court on Monday denied a petition for review from Jeanne Hedgepeth, who was fired from her teaching job at Palatine High School in Illinois after “she shared incendiary posts about protests following [George] Floyd’s death in Minneapolis,” according to The Hill. “Hedgepeth’s school district deemed the posts ‘disrespectful, demeaning of other viewpoints and racist,’ which the former teacher alleges amounted to infringement of protected speech.” Hedgepeth had asked the justices to review the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit’s ruling in which it held that the school’s interest in avoiding disruption outweighed Hedgepeth’s right to free speech.
Can social media companies be sued for sexual videos? Supreme Court weighs in
Maureen Groppe, USA Today
On Monday, the court “passed up a chance to review liability protections for social media sites, declining to take a case about whether X Corp. can be sued over the distribution of sexually explicit videos of minors,” according to USA Today. The case centers on the scope of Section 230, which “has been widely interpreted as shielding websites from lawsuits for user-generated content,” and which critics say is applied too broadly by lower courts. In the petition for review that was denied on Monday, two plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to allow them to sue X “for distributing child pornography or for benefiting from sex trafficking” over the company’s initial refusal to remove “sexually graphic videos of themselves” from the site even after being notified about the videos’ content.
Abortion Pill Lawsuit Leaves Trump Silent, and in a Political Bind
Pam Belluck and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times (paywalled)
Last week, the Supreme Court addressed Louisiana’s challenge to “a policy allowing abortion providers to prescribe mifepristone through telemedicine and send it by mail” and “restored telemedicine and mail access indefinitely while litigation continues in the lower courts.” And it issued its order without a brief from the Justice Department, “whose job it is to defend the F.D.A. in the case.” The New York Times highlighted the DOJ’s “highly unusual” decision not to file such a brief in its story about the “tricky political calculus” President Donald Trump must navigate in the abortion pill dispute. “Mr. Trump can stay quiet about the case and incur the wrath of anti-abortion leaders who view his silence as a betrayal and might stay home from the polls in November. Or he can voice his support for restricting access, which would inevitably fire up Democrats and independents to vote in greater numbers. For the moment, at least, he has chosen to remain quiet.”
Justice Clarence Thomas laments ‘very dicey’ threats to judiciary and heightened security for Supreme Court
John Fritze, CNN (paywalled)
During his Thursday remarks to the 11th Circuit Judicial Conference, Justice Clarence Thomas “repeatedly returned” to the fact that, amid a rise in security concerns, “it is now far more difficult for him to take part in activities outside the courthouse” than it was when he first became a judge and then justice, according to CNN. “That’s really one of the big changes since I’ve been on the court – that it’s become very, very dicey,” Thomas said. He returned to the topic of heightened security when he briefly discussed his support of University of Nebraska sports and his desire to be at more games. “And as I said, because of the security concerns, I’m not able to move around as much as I used to,” Thomas noted. CNN noted that the court has recently “sought millions of dollars in additional security funding from Congress.”
Justices Testifying Before Congress
Steve Vladeck, One First
In the near future, the Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to hear directly from at least two justices about the court’s $228.4 million appropriations request for the next fiscal year. In a post for his Substack, Steve Vladeck explored the history and significance of justice participation in congressional hearings, including why he believes that “more frequent appearances would be a relatively low-cost means of restoring some of the interbranch dialogue that used to be common.” “Budget hearings ... are an opportunity for justices to explain how the judiciary spends public money, to make the case for resources the courts genuinely need (security, technology, judgeships), to react to some of the myriad threats federal judges from across Article III are currently facing, and to engage with members of Congress on matters of judicial administration where the branches have overlapping responsibilities,” Vladeck wrote.
On Site
From the SCOTUSblog Team
Court agrees to hear case on ability of employees to bring certain suits for sex discrimination, turns down child pornography reporting suit against X
The court on Monday added one new case to its docket for the 2026-27 term, on whether employees can bring lawsuits for sex discrimination under a federal law that applies to schools that receive federal funding. Over a brief dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court also sent a pair of cases involving Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act back to the lower courts for another look. Additionally, it turned down a group of cases challenging a government program that requires the Health and Human Services Secretary to negotiate Medicare drug prices.
Contributor Corner
Strange judicial bedfellows
In her In Dissent column, Anastasia Boden revisited Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the court invalidated Connecticut’s restrictions on contraception use. “Conservative” Justice John Marshall Harlan II was in the majority and “progressive” Justice Hugo Black was in dissent, which illustrates, according to Boden, how “unwieldy” these labels can be at the Supreme Court.
A Closer Look
Opinion Season
Summer is quickly approaching, but we here at SCOTUSblog are focused on a different season: opinion season, the time of year when court watchers’ attention shifts from argument days (which, barring unforeseen events, ended on April 29) to opinion days.
The court is expected to release 33 more opinions in argued cases over roughly the next six weeks and to close out the current term by late June or early July. We’re expecting at least one ruling to be released on Thursday, but the court has not yet announced opinion days for next week or the month of June.
Still, we’re not entirely in the dark about what the next six weeks will hold. In each of the past three terms, the court has followed essentially the same pattern during opinion season: weekly opinion announcements on Thursdays – which serve as conference days for the justices this time of year – from mid-May until mid-June, at which point the justices began holding two or even three opinion days per week to get all of the remaining decisions out the door.
If the court continues that pattern this term (as it seems to be doing), opinions will be announced on Thursday, May 21; Thursday, May 28; Thursday, June 4; Thursday, June 11; Thursday, June 18; and Thursday, June 25. Beyond those Thursdays, the prediction game gets tougher. We know that the justices will not release opinions on Friday, June 19, which is the Juneteenth holiday, but the next Friday – June 26 – is a good candidate, because the court scheduled several Friday opinion days in late June over the past three terms. Indeed, Friday, June 27, 2025, was the final opinion day last term.
But even if these guesses turn out to be accurate, plenty of mysteries remain. Most notably, we will not know in advance how many rulings or which rulings are coming on each opinion day, except for the final one. On what will turn out to be the next-to-last opinion day, the chief justice will indicate that when it next takes the bench the court “will announce all remaining opinions ready during this term of the Court.” The court often releases the highest-profile cases on the final day (since these often take longer to write based on the number of concurrences and dissents they generate, particularly if they were argued later in the term), which may mean that we won’t get the birthright citizenship ruling until then.
If you have lingering questions about opinion season, please feel free to send them to scotusblog@thedispatch.com. We will do our best to answer them in this newsletter, whether in a future Closer Look or the Ask Amy section. And please plan on joining our opinion announcement live blogs, which will begin at 9:30 a.m. EDT on opinion days.
SCOTUS Quote
“I think maybe the best way to be a good writer is to continually surround yourself with good writing and to see what good writers do. I try to avoid bad writing, although that’s not altogether my choice, because I have to read all these briefs, and, for the most part, I think that the Supreme Court is gifted with, it has a wonderful bar that argues a lot of our cases. And for the most part, I think they do a superb job. ... But every once in a while, you pick up one, and you think, every moment I spend with this brief, I become a worse writer.”
— Justice Elena Kagan (2019)