The Stat Pack is here! Jake S. Truscott and Adam Feldman crunched the numbers from the 2025-26 term and pulled together key takeaways. Scroll to the On Site section to learn more.
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At the Court
The Supreme Court Building will be closed on Friday in observance of the Independence Day holiday.
Morning Reads
Supreme Court sends GOP in Congress scrambling over birthright citizenship
Zachary Schermele, USA Today
After the Supreme Court struck down his executive order limiting access to automatic citizenship at birth, President Donald Trump “urg[ed] congressional Republicans to move quickly on legislative action to restrict or end birthright citizenship.” “The barriers to such a gambit, however, are many,” including that Congress may not be able to override the ruling without a constitutional amendment, “which would require two-thirds of Congress to approve and states to ratify,” according to USA Today. “If it requires a constitutional amendment, maybe we work towards that,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, said this week. “If there’s something to do statutorily, maybe we do that as well.”
Amy Coney Barrett Faces Right-Wing Ire Over Recent Rulings
Emily Davies, The New York Times (paywalled)
The Supreme Court’s final opinion announcement days fueled “a torrent of attacks from right-wing commentators” against Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who sided against “two key pillars of the Trump administration’s agenda” – limiting access to birthright citizenship and restricting mail-in voting – in two of the court’s final rulings, according to The New York Times. “Prominent G.O.P. officials and pundits cast Justice Barrett’s votes as part of a pattern of betrayal of Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.” However, “other conservative commentators praised her for what they saw as a principled approach to a job that should rise above the political fray.”
Transgender people finding it hard to win at US Supreme Court
Andrew Chung, Reuters (paywalled)
On Tuesday, the court “ruled against transgender student athletes, permitting state laws banning them from participating on female sports teams at public schools including universities.” The decision “represented another setback for transgender people fighting a growing array of state and federal restrictions targeting them,” as well as a series of Supreme Court losses on such issues as medical treatments for transgender minors and military service, according to Reuters. But some advocates for transgender rights found a silver lining in Tuesday’s ruling, contending that it “was narrowly focused on the sports context and that its reasoning did not foreclose successful challenges to other restrictions on transgender people.”
Lawyer for E. Jean Carroll says Trump wants to delay $5 million payment in sex abuse, defamation case
Graham Kates, CBS News
On Monday, the Supreme Court announced that it will not hear President Donald Trump’s challenge to a $5 million jury verdict entered against him in a sexual abuse and defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll. His legal team has since signaled that it plans “to ask the Supreme Court to reconsider his appeal,” and “asked for ... Carroll’s consent to delay” payment of the $5 million, according to CBS News. “Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, wrote in a court filing Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s lawyer called her with the request Monday, soon after the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. Later Monday, Kaplan wrote, she informed Mr. Trump’s team that ‘Carroll does not consent,’ and asked whether the president would agree to the immediate disbursement of the funds,” which are “held in a court-controlled bank account.”
Donald Trump is on a Supreme Court losing streak. Yes, really.
Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein, Politico
During President Donald Trump’s second term, through decisions on its argument and interim dockets, the Supreme Court has supported the president’s “bid to expand presidential power, especially over the federal workforce, and to gut a slew of laws meant to insulate some appointees from political pressure. It has allowed him to fire tens of thousands of people, cancel billions in federal grants and dramatically downsize federal agencies.” And yet, according to Politico, “the justices have stiff-armed Trump over and over again on his unique personal priorities – the issues he talks about most often, and most passionately,” such as tariffs and birthright citizenship.
On Site
Stat Pack
The 2025-26 term by the numbers
By several measures, this term was more ideologically divided than the last one. Last term, 15.2% of the court’s decisions were decided by a 6-3 vote, and 9% of all decisions were 6-3 ideological splits. This term, those figures rose significantly, to 28.8% and 22.7%, respectively. The liberal justices also dissented together more often, moving from 15% of cases to 24.2%. Learn more about this and other trends by reading the 2025-26 Stat Pack.
Contributor Corner
Aiding and abetting impunity
In his inaugural Court Beyond Borders column, Martin Flaherty revisited the court’s decision in Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe, which made it more difficult for foreigners to bring lawsuits in U.S. courts alleging serious violations of international law. “Recent global developments, from Ukraine to the Middle East, have led to increasing concerns about the decline of the post-World War II international order,” Flaherty wrote. “With Cisco Systems, the Supreme Court has done its part to hasten the process.”
Contributor Corner
Three cheers for Barbara!
In their Brothers in Law column, Akhil and Vikram Amar highlighted similarities between their writings on Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case, and Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in the case.
A Closer Look
The Clean-up Conference
Before the justices get to break for summer recess, the nine meet for a so-called “clean-up conference.” As Steve Vladeck has put it, the clean-up conference serves as “the Court’s internal deadline for getting [opinions related to orders from that term] out the door.” This year, the conference took place on Monday, which was the second-to-last opinion announcement day, and the court released its orders from that conference at noon on Tuesday, the last opinion announcement day.
We thought it’d be worth taking a closer look at what exactly the justices “clean up,” why this conference happens, and what tends to come of it.
Throughout the term, the justices (and their clerks) sift through thousands of cert petitions, some of which they discuss at their conferences. The petitions generally face one of five fates: rescheduled, relisted, held, granted, or denied.
If a petition is relisted, it means the justices have considered it at one or more conferences and want to consider it again at their next one (typically, cases are not granted unless they have been relisted at least once). Since the clean-up conference is the last conference before the justices’ summer recess, the court typically addresses the remaining relists, whether by granting them, denying them, or holding them, and starts the term in the fall with a clean slate.
If a petition is held, it means the justices are choosing to sit on it, often because the petition raises a legal question that is similar to one already being decided by the court. Once it rules in the related case, the court can then deal with the held petitions. Some of these get “GVR’d,” meaning the court grants the petition, vacates the lower court’s decision, and remands the case to the lower court for reconsideration in light of a new opinion. In Tuesday’s list of orders from this year’s clean-up conference, the justices issued seven GVRs.
Beyond the GVRs, the clean-up conference has in recent years also become a venue for the justices to grant new cases for the upcoming term – and sometimes very significant ones. At the court’s June 2023 clean-up conference, the justices added seven new cases to the next term’s argument docket, including United States v. Rahimi, a Second Amendment challenge over whether a federal ban on gun possession by individuals subject to domestic violence restraining orders violated the Constitution. A year earlier, the clean-up conference produced three new grants, including Moore v. Harper, about the power of state legislatures over federal elections. This year, the justices took up four cases during the clean-up conference (although two were consolidated), agreeing to weigh in on such issues as whether the Second Amendment protects possession of semiautomatic rifles.
The clean-up conference has also historically tended to produce a “variety of separate opinions addressing or dissenting from the court’s orders,” in which certain justices disagree with the decision to hear, or not hear, a case.
One final thing: the clean-up conference should not be confused with the “long conference,” which the justices hold in late September or early October after their recess ends. At that conference, the justices go through the many petitions that accumulated over the summer and get ready to “welcome” in the new term.
SCOTUS Quotes
“[A]s to competitive fairness, allowing biological males to play on women’s and girls’ sports teams can put female athletes at a serious disadvantage. That is because sports are generally zero sum.”
— Justice Brett Kavanaugh in West Virginia v. B.P.J. (2026)
“Sports, of course, are often zero sum, but the law need not and should not be.”
— Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting in B.P.J.