Good morning, and welcome to what’s expected to be this month’s first opinion day. We will be live blogging beginning at 9:30 a.m. EDT.
At the Court
After the possible announcement of opinions this morning, the justices will meet in a private conference to discuss cases and vote on petitions for review. Orders from today’s conference are expected on Monday at 9:30 a.m. EDT.
Last week, in response to requests from Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, Justice Samuel Alito temporarily paused a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reinstating the requirement that the abortion pill mifepristone be dispensed only in person. That pause will expire today at 5 p.m. EDT, so the court is expected to act soon.
On Monday, Virginia asked the court on its interim docket to reinstate its new congressional map. A response to that request is due this afternoon by 5 p.m. EDT.
Morning Reads
Supreme Court faces new criticism for redistricting decisions so close to the 2026 elections
Lawrence Hurley, NBC News
Although it’s been more than two weeks since the Supreme Court released its Louisiana v. Callais decision, “liberal lawyers and commentators” continue to debate whether the court failed to follow its own guidance on when to rule in election-related cases, according to NBC News. “The Supreme Court has frequently admonished judges not to interfere in election cases when the process is already underway, but it is now being accused of doing exactly that in” Callais and other “recent decisions favoring Republicans in redistricting fights.”
Democrats are going there on attacking the Supreme Court. Here’s what it could mean
Aaron Blake, CNN
After the recent rulings on congressional redistricting, “Democrats’ rhetoric” about the court “has taken a turn,” according to CNN. “Increasingly, they’re not just sharply criticizing the court; they’re attacking its legitimacy, calling it corrupt, painting it as overtly political and warning it will live in infamy.” CNN noted that these comments “risk[] delegitimizing a key branch of government,” and that “it’s not yet clear” if they will actually pay off for Democrats at the polls. The critiques “could motivate passionate portions of the Democratic base,” but may not appeal to swing voters. In general, polls show “that large swaths of the country” do not buy into “the idea that the court is hopelessly captured and illegitimate.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asks public to back judicial independence
Josh Gerstein, Politico (paywalled)
During a pair of appearances on Tuesday at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson urged listeners to defend the judiciary’s independence, contending that everyone benefits when judges are “not beholden to the political branches or beholden to people,” according to Politico. When asked about the current “atmosphere” at the Supreme Court, Jackson didn’t dig into the ongoing fallout from the court’s recent decisions on tariffs and the Voting Rights Act, and instead emphasized that the justices “are very good at compartmentalizing.” “Yeah, no, it’s fine,” Jackson said of the atmosphere. “In the world of law and the world of writing your opinions, you’re going to disagree, and you have the opportunity to express your views in the context of your opinions, but in our day-to-day interactions, none of us takes it personally, and we get along just fine.”
Appeals court spares Trump from paying $83 million defamation award to E. Jean Carroll — for now
Michael R. Sisak and Larry Neumeister, Associated Press
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has “agreed to a request” made by President Donald Trump’s legal team to let the president delay paying an “$83 million defamation award” to E. Jean Carroll “until the U.S. Supreme Court gets a chance to review the case or reject an appeal,” according to the Associated Press. However, the 2nd Circuit will require Trump to “post a $7.4 million bond to cover any additional interest costs, a request Carroll’s attorney had made.” The defamation award stems from comments Trump made about Carroll in 2019 after she claimed that he “sexually attacked” her “in a Manhattan luxury department store dressing room in spring 1996.” In a separate case on these allegations, a jury “awarded Carroll $5 million after concluding Trump sexually abused her in the department store and then defamed her after she published her account of it in a 2019 memoir.” Trump has asked the Supreme Court to review that $5 million judgment and is expected to appeal the $83 million judgment soon.
Becoming Justice Gorsuch
Susan Matthews, Slate (paywalled)
On Wednesday, Slate announced a new season of the podcast “Slow Burn” focused on Justice Neil Gorsuch. The announcement doubled as a lengthy reflection on Gorsuch, whom Slate described as “the most anonymous member of the bench,” who avoids “provoking the ire that some of his fellow right-wing justices receive” with, in Susan Matthews’ view, a “nice-guy act.” The story emphasized Gorsuch’s use of textualism, a method of legal interpretation that focuses on “the words that end up on the page,” rather than lawmakers’ intentions, and contended that it leads him – and the court – to “absurd results.”
On Site
From the SCOTUSblog Team
A brief guide to each chief justice of the United States
Last Friday in this newsletter, we finished providing brief biographies of each chief justice of the United States. In light of that achievement, we put together a story sharing the highlights from each of their short bios.
Contributor Corner
The government’s Fourth Amendment double standard
In his Civil Rights and Wrongs column, Daniel Harawa explored a petition for review in which the government asks the court to hold that race cannot be considered when analyzing whether someone has been seized for purposes of a Fourth Amendment analysis. That position, according to Harawa, “is hard to square” with the government’s insistence in a recent case on immigration stops that race “can be a factor supporting reasonable suspicion.” “Race, on th[at] account, does constitutional work for the government and then disappears when it is the citizen’s turn. That is untenable.”
Contributor Corner
Can the state force religious preschools to promote other religions?
In a column for SCOTUSblog, Denise Harle highlighted the petition for review in Foothill Christian Ministries v. Johnson, which raises “interconnected free-speech and free-exercise issues.” Specifically, it asks whether the government can require religious preschools to promote other religions. The petition is scheduled to be considered by the justices during today’s conference.
Podcasts
Amarica's Constitution
JFK's Wall
Akhil Amar and Andy Lipka’s journey through centuries of religious practice, attitudes, and constitutionalism reaches the 20th century, when several presidential elections set mileposts for the American religious debate.
A Closer Look
Doe v. X Corp.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been in the news regularly this spring amid legal battles over whether social media sites can be held liable for allegedly harming young users’ mental health. The law states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In other words, Section 230 makes it so that sites generally can’t be held accountable for content uploaded by users, and it’s proven to be a powerful defense for sites accused of allowing dangerous information to spread unimpeded.
During the 2022-23 term, the Supreme Court heard two cases on the scope of Section 230 and declined to limit its application. In Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh, a unanimous court held that a family’s effort to hold Twitter, Facebook, and Google liable for aiding and abetting international terrorism by failing to remove content related to ISIS was barred by Section 230. The court then sent the second case, Gonzalez v. Google LLC, on whether Google could be held liable for the spread of ISIS recruitment videos on YouTube, back to a lower court for further consideration in light of Taamneh.
Since then, the court has declined other opportunities to address the scope of this law, including in Doe v. Snap, Inc., in which the court was asked to weigh whether Snapchat was immune from a lawsuit over its design – specifically, over how sexual predators took advantage of its emphasis on vanishing photos to prey upon young users. The court denied the petition for review in July 2024, but Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the denial in an opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. “Although the Court denies certiorari today, there will be other opportunities in the future. But, make no mistake about it—there is danger in delay,” Thomas wrote. “Social-media platforms have increasingly used §230 as a get-out-of-jail free card.”
At their private conference on Thursday, the justices will again consider whether to revisit Section 230 in a case involving Twitter (now known as X). In Doe v. X Corp., two unnamed plaintiffs seek to hold the site accountable for failing to remove child pornography, and they’ve asked the court to hold that Section 230 does not bar their claims.
The dispute began in 2020, when, according to the petition for review, sex traffickers who tricked John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 into sending them sexual content when they were young teenagers uploaded that content to Twitter. Doe 1 and his mother contacted the site and asked for it to be taken down, emphasizing that it featured underage boys and was therefore child pornography. Twitter declined to remove the content, informing Doe 1 that it “didn’t find a violation of our policies.” Finally, nine days after Doe 1 first reached out – and after an official with the Department of Homeland Security had also reached out, after being contacted by Doe 1’s mother – Twitter removed the posts.
Doe 1 and Doe 2 sued Twitter, alleging, among other things, that it had knowingly distributed child pornography and that it has failed to develop the tools needed to ensure that such content will not spread on its site. Citing Section 230, a federal district court dismissed the vast majority of the counts, concluding, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit later summarized, “that because these counts sought to treat Twitter as a publisher of third-party content—child pornography generally, and the video of Plaintiffs specifically—Twitter was immune under §230.” The 9th Circuit affirmed most of those dismissals, but held that claims related to how Twitter fields concerns about pornographic material could move forward because they address the site’s design and the company’s duty to report child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and “do not arise from Twitter’s role as a publisher.”
In their petition for review, the Does urge the justices to review the 9th Circuit’s ruling and allow the dismissed claims to move forward. Specifically, they contend that Section 230 does not grant immunity when a company allows “criminal content” to remain on its site even after being notified about it. Holding that this law shields companies from such lawsuits “puts §230 at war with itself,” according to the petition, because lawmakers included language in the provision to encourage sites to identify and restrict children’s access to “objectionable or inappropriate online material,” and “to ensure vigorous enforcement of Federal criminal laws to deter and punish trafficking in obscenity, stalking, and harassment by means of computer.”
In its response, X counters that the 9th Circuit applied a “settled interpretation of Section 230 ... on which the digital economy has relied for nearly 30 years.” The Supreme Court should not, X continued, take the “destabilizing step” of holding that a site loses its Section 230 immunity and can be treated like a publisher of child pornography if it doesn’t move quickly enough in addressing content concerns.
Doe v. X Corp. is scheduled to be considered by the justices for the first time on Thursday.
SCOTUS Quote
MS. MOSKOWITZ: “… if the parent is concealing the child – for example, if the parent is moving from place to place to evade detection or changing the child’s name or not enrolling the child in school to avoid detection –”
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: “My gosh, all it takes is moving to Peoria. I mean, I don't mean to denigrate Peoria, but all it takes is moving to a place that has no connection to –”
JUSTICE SCALIA: “Justice Sotomayor is from New York.”
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: “Yes, obviously.”
— Lozano v. Montoya Alvarez (2013)