The U.S. Supreme Court begins its new nine-month term on Monday, with several major cases already on the docket, including those involving guns, transgender rights, and online pornography. The court may also face legal disputes stemming from the Nov. 5 presidential election. With a 6-3 conservative majority, the court continues to shift U.S. law rightward on various issues. Last term ended with a controversial ruling on July 1, where the court granted Donald Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution for many actions he took as president.
The justices return from their summer recess amid scrutiny from both politicians and the public. This attention stems not only from their legal rulings but also from ongoing ethics scandals, unsolved leaks of confidential information, and public displays of tension among the justices themselves. “Something does feel broken,” said Lisa Blatt, a lawyer who frequently argues before the court, during a Washington event on Tuesday. “Some of them up there just seem visibly frustrated.”
The first major case before the court comes on Tuesday, involving “ghost guns,” which are home-assembled firearms that are difficult to trace. The Biden administration appealed a lower court decision that ruled the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) exceeded its authority with a 2022 regulation aimed at controlling these weapons, which law enforcement says are frequently used in crimes nationwide.
In other cases, the justices will hear the administration’s challenge to a Republican-backed Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. Another key case involves the adult entertainment industry’s challenge to a Texas law requiring pornographic websites to verify the age of users in an effort to limit minors’ access. Additionally, the court will hear arguments in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s defense of its decision to reject applications from two companies seeking to sell flavored vape products, which the agency has determined pose health risks to young consumers. The court has not yet announced argument dates for these cases.
The court’s recent ruling on Trump’s immunity deepened ideological divisions among the justices, reflecting broader political fractures in the U.S. “I was concerned about a system that appeared to provide immunity for one individual under one set of circumstances, when we have a criminal justice system that had ordinarily treated everyone the same,” liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said in an August interview with CBS. Other liberal justices have publicly voiced concerns about the court’s direction, particularly after the conservative majority’s 2022 rulings, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the expansion of gun rights. These remarks drew criticism from conservative justices like Samuel Alito.
University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone attributed the heightened scrutiny of the court to “questionable behavior of some of the justices in terms of taking gifts” and to the Republican-appointed justices’ approach to constitutional interpretation, which he called “highly problematic.” Stone argued that the court’s majority continues to impose politically conservative values in its constitutional rulings. However, others reject the idea that the court is politicized or corrupt. “A lot of those arguments are made in bad faith by people who just disagree with the substance of the court’s decisions,” said Washington attorney William Jay.
In November’s election, Trump, the Republican candidate, will face Democratic rival Kamala Harris. Following his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, Trump falsely claimed widespread voter fraud and pursued numerous legal challenges. While the Supreme Court declined to entertain those challenges, it may have to resolve election-related disputes in the coming months—an area Jay believes the court would prefer to avoid. “I think they’re all of the same view that it would be undesirable for the court to have to resolve the case about the election,” Jay said. “But at the same time, we only have one Supreme Court, and there’s really only one body that’s able to definitively settle a case that could have really high stakes.”
Recent media reports have exposed ethical concerns involving some justices, particularly conservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, for failing to disclose private jet travel and other gifts from wealthy benefactors. Under pressure from Democrats and other critics, the court introduced its first code of conduct last year, though it lacks any enforcement mechanism. Justices Jackson and Elena Kagan have publicly supported adding such a mechanism. In July, President Biden proposed 18-year term limits for justices and a binding code of conduct, but Republican opposition has left these reforms unlikely to pass.
Confidentiality and trust among the justices have also been tested by two high-profile leaks: the draft of the 2022 abortion decision and, more recently, internal memos related to Trump’s immunity case, which the New York Times published in September. Blatt described the latest leak as “nothing short of shocking,” suggesting a troubling mentality that “the ends justify the means.”
