on May 9, 2025 at 3:19 pm

The court announced this morning that Retired Associate Justice David Souter died yesterday at his home in New Hampshire. He was 85 years old. Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Friday morning read: Retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter dies at 85 (Dan Mangan, CNBC) David H. Souter, Republican Justice Who Allied With Court’s Liberal Wing, Dies at 85 (Linda Greenhouse, The New York Times) Hegseth initiates ban on transgender troops after Supreme Court ruling (Alex Horton & Casey Parks, The Washington Post) The Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship case isn’t really about birthright citizenship (Ian Millhiser, Vox) A Way Out of SCOTUS Charter School Ruling Mess: Focus on Mission, Not Religion (Richard D. Kahlenberg, The 74) The post The morning read for Friday, May 9 appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

on May 9, 2025 at 2:31 pm

Retired Justice David Souter, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by a Republican president but became a reliable member of the court’s liberal bloc during his 19 years there – so much so that the phrase “No more Souters” became a rallying cry when future Republican presidents had the opportunity to fill vacancies on the court – died on Thursday at his home in New Hampshire. He was 85 years old. In a statement released by the court’s Public Information Office on Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts remembered Souter, saying that he “brought uncommon wisdom and kindness to a lifetime of public service.” Souter, Roberts concluded, “will be greatly missed.” David Hackett Souter was born on September 17, 1939, in Melrose, Mass. He graduated from Harvard College in 1961. He was named a Rhodes Scholar, spending two years at Oxford University’s Magdalen College, from which he received a master’s degree in jurisprudence in 1963. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1966, Souter spent two years in private practice at Orr and Reno, a small firm in Concord. Souter then began a stint in state government, working for Warren Rudman, then the attorney general of New Hampshire. Over the next eight years, he served as an assistant attorney general and then a deputy attorney general before being appointed as the attorney general in 1976. He served in that role for two years before being named as a judge on a state trial court. In 1983, he was named to the state supreme court, where he served for seven years before he was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the United States Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit on May 25, 1990. But Souter’s initial stay on the 1st Circuit was fleeting. In July 1990, when he was just 50 years old, Republican George H.W. Bush nominated Souter to replace liberal lion Justice William Brennan. Bush called him “extraordinarily bright” and cited his reputation for being “extraordinarily fair.” Souter notably lacked a “paper trail”: He had not written any articles or given any speeches that might shed light on his views on controversial issues like abortion. What he did have was the backing of powerful New Hampshirites within the Bush administration, such as John Sununu, a former New Hampshire governor and Bush’s chief of staff, who had named him to the state supreme court. In an interview with the New York Times, Sununu said that he ”was looking for someone who would be a strict constructionist, consistent with basic conservative attitudes, and that’s what I got.” Sununu added that he ”was able to tell the President that I was sure he would do the same thing when he encountered Federal questions.” Rudman, then a U.S. senator, described Souter as “the single most intellectually brilliant mind I have ever met.” Questions and concerns about the possible effects of Souter’s confirmation on the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, establishing a constitutional right to an abortion, dominated Souter’s confirmation hearing. Molly Yard, then the president of the National Organization for Women, said, “I tremble for this country if you confirm David Souter,” warning that he would “be the fifth vote to overturn” that decision. Souter was eventually confirmed by a vote of 90-9 and began work on the court in Oct. 1990. Less than two years later, Souter would assuage the fears of abortion-rights advocates, and garner the ire of anti-abortion forces, when he joined Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor to reaffirm the fundamental right to an abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. After 19 years on the bench, Souter stepped down from the court at the relatively young (for a Supreme Court justice) age of 69 in 2009. Only three justices on the court at the time (Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas) were younger than he was. Souter’s retirement was not entirely a surprise however, as he was long believed to have disliked Washington, D.C.: He had said once that he had “the world’s best job in the world’s worst city.” After he had announced his intent to retire but before he officially left the bench, Souter penned a dissent in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a lawsuit brought by a conservative nonprofit prohibited from showing a movie that criticized then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Souter’s draft was sharply critical of the majority opinion, which would have gone well beyond what the challengers requested to instead invalidate two major campaign-finance decisions. Writing in the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin described Souter’s draft dissent as an “extraordinary, bridge-burning farewell to the Court” that Chief Justice John Roberts feared “could damage the Court’s credibility.” Instead of deciding the case then, Toobin reported, the court heard oral argument in the case again the following term, instructing both sides to the dispute to brief the broader questions. After his retirement from the Supreme Court, Souter became a regular fixture back on the 1st Circuit, hearing hundreds of cases. In one of those cases, Carson v. Makin, Souter joined his colleagues in unanimously rejecting a challenge to a Maine program that paid tuition for some students to attend private schools, but barred the use of state funds for tuition at private schools that provide religious instruction. In June 2022, the Supreme Court reversed the 1st Circuit’s ruling. Writing for a six-justice majority, Chief Justice John Roberts made clear that when state and local governments opt to subsidize private schools, they must allow families to use those subsidies to pay for religious schools. Any other result, Roberts explained, would be “discrimination against religion.” The court’s ruling in Carson was the third of three decisions opening the door for the use of public funding for religious schools. The justices heard oral arguments last week in a case seeking to extend that trio of decisions to allow the establishment of the country’s first religious charter school. A decision in that case is expected by late June or early July. The post David Souter, retired Supreme Court justice, dies at 85 appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

on May 8, 2025 at 10:17 pm

Lawyers for a group of Venezuelan nationals urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to keep in place a ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco that prohibits Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem from ending their designation under a special immigration program giving them temporary protection from deportation. Granting the government’s request and putting the order by Senior U.S. District Judge Edward Chen on hold “would radically shift the status quo,” wrote Ahilan Arulanantham, a UCLA law professor representing the Venezuelan citizens. It would mean that “nearly 350,000 people would immediately lose the right to live and work in this country,” Arulanantham emphasized. The plaintiffs in this case are beneficiaries of the Temporary Protected Status program, which allows them to stay in the United States and work. Under federal law, the DHS secretary can designate foreign citizens under the TPS program when she determines that they cannot return safely to their home country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions in the foreign state.” When a country no longer meets those criteria, the law provides, the secretary should terminate the TPS designation. The initial designation of Venezuela under the TPS program was made in 2021, by then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who subsequently extended the program. In February, Noem ended both the TPS designation and efforts to extend it for a particular group of Venezuelan nationals. The plaintiffs in this case then went to federal court in San Francisco, asking Senior U.S. District Judge Edward Chen to delay Noem’s termination. Chen issued an order on March 31 that prohibited Noem from ending the TPS designation, calling her conduct “unprecedented” and suggesting that the decision to revoke the designation had been based on negative stereotypes about Venezuelan migrants. When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit turned down the government’s request to pause Chen’s ruling while its appeal continued, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to intervene. He emphasized that the TPS program “implicates particularly discretionary, sensitive, and foreign-policy-laden judgments of the Executive Branch.” The Venezuelan nationals told the justices that putting Chen’s order on hold “would cause more harm than it would prevent, inflicting massive injury on” them “through lost employment and widespread deportations to an unsafe country.” By contrast, they suggested, the government has not pointed to any “harm it has suffered or will suffer between now and when the Ninth Circuit decides its appeal, which is set for argument on July 16.” Indeed, they noted, the government did not even ask the Supreme Court to step in for “nearly two full weeks after” the 9th Circuit declined to do so. Moreover, the group added, they are likely to win on the merits of their claim – one of the key criteria the justices consider in determining whether to grant temporary relief – because although federal immigration law gives the DHS secretary significant discretion in deciding whether to designate a country for TPS or to redesignate it, she has substantially less discretion once those designations are made, “both as to the timing of the review process and what criteria the Secretary must use in deciding whether to extend or instead terminate TPS protection.” And federal law does not give her any power to vacate or rescind an extension, the plaintiffs emphasized. The Venezuelan nationals’ filing in this case came on the same afternoon that the Trump administration asked the courtto intervene in another immigration dispute, involving a ruling by a federal district judge in Massachusetts that blocked the Department of Homeland Security from revoking the Biden administration’s grant of parole – that is, permission to temporarily stay in the United States for humanitarian or public interest reasons – to more than 500,000 noncitizens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The post Venezuelan TPS recipients tell justices to let status stand appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

on May 8, 2025 at 7:06 pm

The Trump administration returned to the Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon, once again seeking emergency relief from the justices. This time Solicitor General D. John Sauer, asked the court to pause a ruling by a federal district judge in Massachusetts that blocked the Department of Homeland Security from revoking the Biden administration’s grant of parole – that is, permission to temporarily stay in the United States for humanitarian or public interest reasons – to more than 500,000 noncitizens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Sauer told the justices that the order by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani “has nullified one of the Administration’s most consequential immigration policy decisions,” blocking a decision by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem “and maintaining parole for up to two years for 532,000 aliens whose continued presence in the United States the Secretary deems contrary to U.S. interests.” Under federal immigration law, noncitizens who arrive in this country and cannot show that they are entitled to enter normally must either leave the country or stay in immigration custody. However, the DHS secretary also has the discretion to allow immigrants to enter the country and to revoke that permission. During the Biden administration, then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas granted two-year terms of parole to a large group of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The policy, known as the CHNV special-parole programs, rested on the theory that allowing the mass parole of citizens from those countries would deter illegal migration through the U.S.-Mexico border. In March, DHS ended the parole of noncitizens through the CHNV special-parole programs while retaining the discretion to grant parole on a case-by-case basis. It reasoned that the programs had “at best traded an unmanageable population of unlawful migration along the southwest border for the additional complication of a substantial population of aliens in the interior of the United States without a clear path to a durable status.” A group of immigrants who had been admitted to the United States under the special-parole programs went to federal court in Boston to challenge the March 2025 termination of the programs. Talwani barred DHS from ending the special-parole programs without providing case-by-case review of the decision to end parole for noncitizens. Talwani rejected the government’s argument that she did not have the power to review Noem’s decision to end the programs because another provision of federal immigration law prohibits judges from weighing in on such discretionary decisions. Talwani agreed that courts cannot review the DHS secretary’s decision to revoke individual parole determinations. But that ban does not apply, Talwani reasoned, because Noem did not have the power to revoke an entire category’s worth of parole determinations, and therefore she did not have any discretion to exercise. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit declined to put Talwani’s order on hold, prompting the government to come to the Supreme Court on Thursday. Sauer contended that Talwani’s order “creates a perverse one-way rachet”: Although Mayorkas “granted CHNV parole categorically,” the order “faulted only Secretary Noem’s decision to restore the traditional case-by-case process by undoing the prior categorical grant of CHNV parole. The INA, however, prescribes the exact opposite.” As a result, he wrote, the government would be required to make “individualized parole determinations for every one of the 532,000 parolees under the CHNV programs—a colossal undertaking.” The court instructed lawyers for the immigrants to file their response by 4 p.m. on Thursday, May 15. The post Government asks justices to allow DHS to revoke parole for a half-million noncitizens appeared first on SCOTUSblog.