on May 30, 2025 at 4:34 pm

The Supreme Court on Friday morning cleared the way for the Trump administration to revoke the Biden administration’s grant of parole – that is, permission to stay in the United States for humanitarian or public interest reasons – to more than 500,000 noncitizens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. In a brief unsigned order, the justices paused a ruling by a federal judge in Massachusetts that had temporarily barred the federal government from implementing the decision by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem while a challenge to it moves forward.  Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from Friday’s order, in an eight-page opinion joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She wrote that her colleagues had “plainly botched” their ruling today, and she decried the “devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.” When noncitizens arrive in the United States, they must show that they are entitled to be here. If they cannot do so, they generally must either remain in the custody of immigration authorities or leave the country. But federal immigration law also gives the DHS secretary the power to give them parole, as well as the discretion to revoke that parole. The dispute stems from Noem’s March 25 decision to terminate the parole of a large group of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, known as the CHNV special-parole programs. Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS secretary during the Biden administration, had granted these immigrants parole (and then extended it) in the hope that doing so would deter illegal migration through the U.S. border with Mexico. Under the program, noncitizens who passed a background check and had a sponsor in the United States who agreed to provide support could receive prior permission to travel to the United States and request parole. Shortly after his second inauguration, however, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the DHS secretary to end all “categorical parole programs,” including the CHNV programs. Noem did so on March 25 in a notice in the Federal Register that explained that the programs “have 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 noncitizens who had been admitted to the United States under the CHNV programs filed a lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts, seeking to challenge DHS’s March 2025 termination of the programs. In an order on April 14, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani barred DHS from terminating the CHNV programs without providing a case-by-case review of the decision to end parole for noncitizens who had benefited from the programs. And although she agreed with the federal government that courts cannot review the DHS secretary’s decision to revoke individual parole determinations, Talwani ruled that such a bar does not apply to this case because Noem did not have the authority to revoke an entire category’s worth of parole determinations. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit rejected DHS’s request to put Talwani’s order on hold, the Trump administration came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to intervene. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court that Talwani’s order had “nullified one of the Administration’s most consequential immigration policy decisions.” And it had created, he added, a “perverse one-way rachet” by finding fault only with Noem’s “decision to restore the traditional case-by-case process by undoing the prior categorical grant of CHNV parole.” Federal immigration law, he contended, “prescribes the exact opposite.” The noncitizens urged the justices to stay out of the dispute, telling the court that the federal government was seeking permission, through the court’s emergency docket, “to execute the largest mass illegalization event in modern American history.” All of the noncitizens, they stressed, had “followed the law and were individually approved to enter the United States on a case-by-case basis”; categorically terminating the programs now would permanently harm them not only them but also their “employers and communities.” By contrast, they observed, the government has not pointed to any concrete harm from allowing Talwani’s order to remain in place – instead asserting only that her order “thwarts the Government’s policy goals and contravenes its interest in expeditiously removing CHNV parole beneficiaries.” But in any event, they added, the government can still remove any individual noncitizen whom it deems inadmissible; it simply needs to do so on a case-by-case basis. Two weeks after the briefing in the case was complete, and 11 days after the court allowed the Trump administration to end protected status for a different group of Venezuelan nationals, a majority of the court granted the Trump administration’s request. It put Talwani’s order on hold while the appeal moves forward in the 1st Circuit and, if necessary, in the Supreme Court. As is common for cases on the court’s emergency docket, the court did not provide an explanation for its decision. In her dissent, Jackson emphasized that the decision to pause a lower court’s order “does not reflect a back-of-the-napkin assessment of which party has the better legal argument.” Instead, she wrote, the determination rests on whether it is necessary to prevent permanent harm to either the parties or the public while the litigation moves forward. In this case, Jackson continued, the Trump administration has failed to show that it will be permanently injured if it cannot end the grant of parole now, rather than waiting until the dispute is resolved. This is particularly important, Jackson observed, when the court of appeals has agreed to fast-track its consideration of the Trump administration’s appeal. Meanwhile, according to Jackson , the noncitizens at the center of this dispute do face “significant problems” that “far exceed” any injury to the government. Many of them, she noted, “arrived here (at the invitation of the U.S. Government) because their home countries were afflicted by strife or they were otherwise subject to unsafe living or working conditions.” They “have sponsors here and, in many cases, have integrated into American neighborhoods and communities in the hope of eventually securing long-term legal status.” “No one disputes,” she concluded, “that social and economic chaos will ensue if that many noncitizen parolees are suddenly and summarily” removed from the country. Even if the Trump administration can ultimately end parole, Jackson explained, she would first allow the federal courts to resolve that “highly consequential legal issue.” “Instead,” she lamented, the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to “do what it wants regardless, rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process.” The post Supreme Court allows DHS to end parole for a half-million noncitizens appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

on May 30, 2025 at 3:23 pm

The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled to limit the scope of environmental review required under a seminal 1970s environmental protection law. The move brought a proposed 88-mile railroad line that would transport crude oil from oilfields in northern Utah to refineries on the Gulf Coast one step closer to production. Environmental groups and a neighboring Colorado county had told the justices that the federal agency that approved the project had failed to consider its broader environmental costs.  In ruling for the railroad, the justices sketched out a relatively narrow role for courts reviewing future decisions under the National Environmental Policy Act, the landmark environmental law at the center of the case. Emphasizing that the “goal of the law is to inform agency decisionmaking, not to paralyze it,” Justice Brett Kavanagh explained that courts should give “substantial deference” to the agency’s determination as to what should be included in the environmental impact statement prepared for a project. “In deciding cases involving the American economy,” Kavanaugh concluded, “courts should strive, where possible, for clarity and predictability.” The court’s three Democratic appointees agreed more narrowly with the result that their colleagues reached, even if they did not agree with the reasoning that they used to arrive at that conclusion. Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated that the majority “unnecessarily ground[ed] its analysis largely in matters of policy,” but the board, based on the statute itself, did not have the power to reject the application to build the railroad based on any negative effects that might flow from products carried on the railway. The dispute before the court began after the U.S. Surface Transportation Board approved a proposal by a group of Utah counties to build a railroad line that would connect with the broader interstate freight rail network to “facilitate the transportation of crude oil” from the state’s oil-rich Uinta Basin to refineries in states like Louisiana and Texas. The proposed train would quadruple production at Utah’s largest oil and gas fields. In August 2021, the board released an environmental impact statement that was more than 3,600 pages long and addressed the environmental consequences of the project. In approving the project in December of that year, the board explained that the project’s “substantial transportation and economic benefits” outweighed those environmental effects. Several environmental groups and Eagle County, Colorado, challenged the board’s decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court threw out the board’s order approving the project. It reasoned that the board should have taken a “hard look” at all of the railroad’s environmental effects. This would include, the court of appeals said, both the “upstream” effects – effects from oil drilling in the basin – and the “downstream” effects – effects from oil refining along the Gulf Coast. On Thursday the Supreme Court reversed. Kavanaugh explained that although NEPA requires agencies to prepare an environmental impact statement “identifying significant environmental effects of the projects, as well as feasible alternatives,” the law at its core “is purely procedural.” In reaching its decision about whether a project should go forward, he wrote, “an ‘agency is not constrained by NEPA from deciding that other values outweigh the environmental costs.’” When courts are reviewing these determinations, Kavanaugh continued, “the central principle” is “deference.” Kavanaugh acknowledged that since last year’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, courts generally do not provide deference to an agency’s interpretation of a statute, instead taking a fresh look at the law. “But when” – as in this situation – “an agency exercises discretion granted by a statute,” Kavanaugh wrote, courts instead look at whether the agency action “was reasonable and reasonably explained.” In NEPA cases, he stated, “an agency’s only obligation is to prepare an adequate report.” Kavanaugh spelled out the limits on the role of the courts even more clearly, stressing that “it is critical to disaggregate the agency’s role from the court’s role. So long as the EIS addresses environmental effects from the project at issue,” he wrote, “courts should defer to agencies’ decisions about where to draw the line—including (i) how far to go in considering indirect environmental effects from the project at hand and (ii) whether to analyze environmental effects from other projects separate in time or place from the project at hand.” Kavanaugh also criticized courts that have in the past, in his view, not provided the kind of deference that NEPA requires. In doing so, he suggested, those courts “have slowed down or blocked many projects and, in turn, caused litigation-averse agencies to take ever more time and to prepare even longer EISs for future projects.” And as a result, he concluded, “NEPA has transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents (who may not always be entirely motivated by concern for the environment) to try to stop or at least slow down new infrastructure and construction projects.” The effects of that transformation, Kavanaugh explained, are significant. “Fewer projects make it to the finish line” or even “the starting line,” he stated – and the ones that do make it are more expensive. “A 1970 legislative acorn has grown over the years into a judicial oak,” he said, “that has hindered infrastructure development ‘under the guise’ of just a little more process.” The D.C. Circuit’s ruling was also wrong, Kavanaugh added, because the board was not required to address the environmental effects of “projects that are separate in time or place from the” railroad itself. Indeed, Kavanaugh observed, “those separate projects fall outside the Board’s authority and would be initiated, if at all, by” other parties. In an 11-page opinion, Sotomayor faulted the majority for relying on policy considerations but explained that the board did not have the power to reject railroad applications based on the ways that other entities would use the products carried on the proposed railroad. As a result, she reasoned, the board could not have rejected the Utah counties’ request based on a desire to “prevent the harmful effects of oil drilling and refining.” Therefore, she concluded, she agreed with her colleagues’ decision to reverse the D.C. Circuit’s ruling “requiring the Board to consider in further detail harms caused by the oil industry.” Justice Neil Gorsuch was recused from the case. A Dec. 4 letter from Scott Harris, the clerk of the Supreme Court, indicated only that Gorsuch was not participating “consistent with the Code of Conduct” adopted by the justices in 2023. However, Gorsuch has long had close ties with Philip Anschutz, a billionaire with investments in the energy sector, including a company that filed a “friend of the court” brief in this case. The post Supreme Court limits scope of environmental review  appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

on May 30, 2025 at 1:00 pm

Yesterday, May 29, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County. Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Thursday morning read: The Supreme Court May Not Step in and Save Trump’s Tariffs (Ankush Khardori, Politico) The Supreme Court Gives Permission to Build Under NEPA (The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal) ‘Devastating Loss for Our Wild Places’: Supreme Court Attacks Bedrock Environmental Law (Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams) SCOTUS effectively pardoned Trump. Now he wants to extend that same immunity to others.(Chris Hayes, MSNBC) Old Paths to the Supreme Court (Ed Whalen, Confirmation Tales) The post The morning read for Friday, May 30 appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

on May 29, 2025 at 7:27 pm

The Relist Watch column examines cert petitions that the Supreme Court has “relisted” for its upcoming conference. A short explanation of relists is available here. The Supreme Court is making good progress in sorting through the current relists. This week it disposed of four. It was good news for the petitioner in Fernandez v. United States, involving the scope of a statute that gives judges discretion to reduce criminal sentences for “extraordinary and compelling reasons.” The court will consider whether those “extraordinary and compelling reasons” include doubt about guilt that may also be alleged as grounds for vacatur of a sentence under 28 U.S.C. § 2255. The court is now holding a second relisted petition raising a similar issue, Elliott v. United States, pending disposition in Fernandez. The Supreme Court declined review in 15-time relist Apache Stronghold v. United States, however, which challenged a federal land transfer that would facilitate copper mining at Oak Flat, a site sacred to the Western Apache. Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented from the denial, emphasizing that the planned mining operations would permanently destroy a central place of worship, preventing the Apaches from practicing essential religious ceremonies that cannot occur elsewhere. The court also denied review in 10-time relist L.M. v. Middleborough, involving a Massachusetts middle-school student who was barred from wearing to school a shirt stating “There Are Only Two Genders.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld the school’s decision, finding no First Amendment violation. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Thomas, dissented from the denial of cert, arguing that the school engaged in viewpoint discrimination by promoting gender fluidity while silencing opposing views. Thomas, ever the originalist, also wrote a separate opinion that reiterated his skepticism of the seminal student-speech case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, yet emphasized that even under Tinker, the school’s actions were unjustified. That brings us to this week’s conference, in which there are 143 petitions and applications on the Supreme Court’s docket. Four of these are newly relisted cases. Government contractors’ defenses to torts The GEO Group, Inc. v. Menocal arises from a class action brought by former immigration detainees at a private detention facility in Aurora, Colorado, operated by The GEO Group, Inc. under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The plaintiffs claim that GEO required detainees to clean common areas under threat of punishment – starting with the loss of TV and telephone privileges – potentially including solitary confinement. According to the plaintiffs, there was also a separate voluntary work program under which detainees could do various jobs, but for which they were paid just $1 per day.  The class action alleged violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and Colorado common law prohibitions against unjust enrichment. GEO asserted that it had derivative sovereign immunity under the 1940 Supreme Court case Yearsley v. W.A. Ross Construction Co., arguing that it was merely executing government directives and was thus immune from suit. But the district court denied GEO at summary judgment, holding that the challenged policies were not required by the ICE contract. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit subsequently dismissed GEO’s appeal for lack of appellate jurisdiction, holding that denial of Yearsley immunity is not an immediately appealable collateral order. GEO now seeks Supreme Court review, arguing that the decision deepens a 5-3 circuit split on whether Yearsley-based claims of derivative sovereign immunity can be reviewed before final judgment. GEO’s cert petition insists that denying immediate review frustrates the very purpose of immunity: to avoid litigation burdens in the first place. Supporting briefs from groups including the Professional Services Council warn the lower court’s ruling may chill contractor participation in federal programs. But the former detainees counter that Yearsley is merely a merits defense – not an immunity from suit – and contend the issue is too fact-bound for interlocutory appeal. According to GEO, three new courts of appeals have weighed in since the Supreme Court last considered the issue in CACI Premier Technology v. al Shimari. Although the court denied review of CACI in 2021, in that case the government – in response to the court’s invitation – argued that Supreme Court review is warranted, even though it takes the view that Yearsley immunity is not immediately appealable. Perhaps the time for review has finally arrived.  Immunity of federal contractors In 2016, an Afghan national working under Fluor Corporation at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, employed pursuant to a Pentagon program encouraging the employment of Afghan citizens, built an explosive vest while unsupervised. He then detonated it, grievously injuring U.S. Army Specialist Winston Hencely. Hencely sued Fluor in tort, alleging negligent hiring, supervision, and retention under South Carolina law, as well as third-party contract claims. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit affirmed the district court’s dismissal of the case, holding that the tort claims were barred by a form of federal preemption based on the “combatant activities” exception to the Federal Tort Claims Act. Although the appeals court recognized this provision normally bars claims only against the federal government, it determined this applied to claims against Fluor as a contractor since Fluor was “integrated into” combat operations and was working under the command of the military. In Hencely v. Fluor Corporation, Hencely seeks Supreme Court review to resolve whether federal contractors enjoy immunity from state-law tort suits because they are integrated into combat operations, even when, as alleged here, they violate military orders and contractual duties. Hencely contends the 4th Circuit applied a new preemption theory unmoored from the FTCA’s text or Supreme Court precedent, extending the 1988 Supreme Court decision Boyle v. United Technologies Corporation, which immunized government contractors from liability under certain circumstances, beyond recognition. A brief from West Virginia and eleven other states supporting Hencely echoes that concern, contending the ruling “rewrote the statute” to provide sweeping immunity for private contractors. Fluor counters that the ruling merely applies settled Boyle principles to war-zone logistics and implicates no true circuit split. If the court wants to revisit Boyle or cabin the FTCA’s combat-zone carve-out, this could be a case to watch. Standing in election law cases Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections features a constitutional challenge to an Illinois law requiring the counting of mail-in ballots that arrive up to two weeks after Election Day, so long as they are postmarked (or certified) by Election Day. Representative Michael Bost, R-Ill., and two former presidential electors sued under the Constitution’s elections and electors clauses, arguing that the extended ballot receipt deadline unlawfully extends federal election timing beyond what 2 U.S.C. § 7 and 3 U.S.C. § 1 allow. They also invoked candidate-specific injuries, including campaign resource burdens and the alleged dilution of the “accurate vote tally.”  But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit didn’t buy it. In an opinion by Judge John Lee, the court dismissed for lack of standing, stating the harm to the plaintiffs as voters claiming their votes were diluted by late-returned ballots were the sort of “generalized grievances” that failed to distinguish these plaintiffs from anyone else in Illinois. A majority of the 7th Circuit also rejected Bost’s claims as a candidate, declaring it speculative that late-received votes made any difference. Judge Michael Scudder dissented in part, saying that Bost was injured as a candidate because the law increased his campaign costs by requiring him to monitor late-arriving votes.  Bost argues that the 7th Circuit’s decision created a circuit split. In support of this, he points to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit’s decision in Carson v. Simon (recognizing candidates’ interest in accurate vote tallies) and precedents from the U.S Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit like Tex. Democratic Party v. Benkiser and Republican National Committee v. Wetzel (accepting campaign costs as a cognizable injury). Illinois contends that no such split exists, as those cases involved competitive injuries not alleged here. Supporting briefs, from groups including the Gun Owners of America, warn of a post-2020 trend tightening standing rules, risking unreviewable election law abuses. With around half the states adopting similar postmarked-by-Election-Day counting policies, this case may catch the court’s eye. Intellectual disability in capital cases Over two decades ago, the Supreme Court held in Atkins v. Virginia that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the execution of individuals who are intellectually disabled. In Hall v. Florida and Moore v. Texas, the court then adopted a definition of intellectual disability that looked to (among other factors) “significantly subaverage intellectual functioning,” and in particular, whether “the lower end of [the offender’s] [IQ] score range falls at or below 70.” Joseph Clifton Smith was convicted and sentenced to death for murdering Durk Van Dam in order to steal his boots, tools, and $140. In repeated IQ tests, Smith scored 78, 75, 74, 74, and 72. On habeas review, the district court held that Smith was intellectually disabled, noting among other things that because his 72 score had a three-point margin of error, his IQ could be as low as 69. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit affirmed. In 2023, Alabama petitioned for review and after a remarkable 21 relists, the Supreme Court summarily vacated the judgment and remanded, perhaps simply kicking the can down the road. Specifically, the court said the 11th Circuit’s opinion could be read as granting review because a single one of Smith’s tests could have been as low as 69, and that interpretation “would suggest a per se rule that the lower end of the standard-error range for an offender’s lowest score is dispositive.” On the other hand, the court noted that the 11th Circuit also approvingly cited the district court’s determination that Smith’s lowest score was not an outlier when considered together with his higher scores. According to the court, “[t]hat analysis would suggest a more holistic approach to multiple IQ scores that considers the relevant evidence, including as appropriate any relevant expert testimony.” On remand, the 11th Circuit made clear that the latter (“holistic”) reading was the correct one, and that it had not relied on a single IQ test. The appeals court wrote that “to be even more precise, based on the complete record, including any relevant expert testimony, we concluded that the district court did not clearly err in its factual findings that Smith suffered from significantly subaverage intellectual function, that he had significant and substantial deficits in adaptive behavior, and that he manifested those qualities before he turned 18.” Alabama is now back at the Supreme Court. In Hamm v. Smith, Alabama contends that the courts below misapplied Hall and Moore by proceeding to the adaptive-functioning prong of the intellectual-disability test despite no IQ score clearly at or below 70. That, Alabama says, guts the rule requiring defendants to prove each Atkins prong – including “significantly subaverage intellectual functioning” – by a preponderance of the evidence. Instead, the 11th Circuit supposedly allowed Smith to proceed based on the possibility that his “true” IQ could fall within range, even if his scores (ranging from 72 to 78 post-age-18) never showed a 70. Smith responds that the petition is a factbound request to second-guess credibility determinations after a full evidentiary hearing, and no real circuit split exists.   The United States filed a rare (or at least previously rare) unsolicited cert-stage amicus brief supporting Alabama, arguing the court should take the case to clarify that states may require a threshold IQ finding before turning to adaptive deficits. The government also asks the court to grant review to provide guidance on how multiple IQ scores should be evaluated in the aggregate – a surprisingly uncharted area two decades post-Atkins. Nineteen states have also filed an amicus brief supporting Alabama. Expect a decision soon on whether this becomes Atkins’ next chapter – a grant seems reasonably likely. That’s all for this week. Tune in Monday to find out whether the court will be adding anything to the fall argument calendar. New Relists Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections, 24-568 Issue: Whether petitioners, as federal candidates, have pleaded sufficient factual allegations to show Article III standing to challenge state time, place, and manner regulations concerning their federal elections. (relisted after the May 22 conference) The GEO Group, Inc. v. Menocal, 24-758 Issue: Whether an order denying a government contractor’s claim of derivative sovereign immunity is immediately appealable under the collateral-order doctrine. (relisted after the May 22 conference) Hamm v. Smith, 24-872 Issues: (1) Whether, under a proper application of Atkins v. Virginia, a state can require a claimant to prove an IQ of 70 or less by a preponderance of the evidence; and (2) whether courts evaluating multiple IQ scores must find that every valid score of “about” 75 or less supports an Atkins claim. (relisted after the May 22 conference) Hencely v. Fluor Corporation, 24-924 Issue: Whether Boyle v. United Technologies Corp. should be extended to allow federal interests emanating from the Federal Tort Claims Act’s combatant-activities exception to preempt state tort claims against a government contractor for conduct that breached its contract and violated military orders. (relisted after the May 22 conference) Returning Relists Ocean State Tactical, LLC v. Rhode Island, 24-131 Issues: (1) Whether a retrospective and confiscatory ban on the possession of ammunition-feeding devices that are in common use violates the Second Amendment; and (2) whether a law dispossessing citizens without compensation of property that they lawfully acquired and long possessed without incident violates the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment. (Relisted after the Jan. 10, Jan. 17, Jan. 24, Feb. 21, Feb. 28, March 7, March 21, March 28, April 4, April 17, April 25, May 2, May 15 and May 22 conferences.) Snope v. Brown, 24-203 Issue: Whether the Constitution permits Maryland to ban semiautomatic rifles that are in common use for lawful purposes, including the most popular rifle in America. (Relisted after the Jan. 10, Jan. 17, Jan. 24, Feb. 21, Feb. 28, March 7, March 21, March 28, April 4, April 17, April 25, May 2, May 15 and May 22 conferences.) First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, Inc. v. Platkin, 24-781 Issue: Where the subject of a state investigatory demand has established a reasonably objective chill of its First Amendment rights, is a federal court in a first-filed action deprived of jurisdiction because those rights must be adjudicated in state court? (Relisted after the April 4, April 17, April 25, May 2, May 15 and May 22 conferences.) GHP Management Corp v. City of Los Angeles, California, 24-435 Issue: Whether an eviction moratorium depriving property owners of the fundamental right to exclude nonpaying tenants effects a physical taking. (Relisted after the April 17, April 25, May 2, May 15 and May 22 conferences.) Nicholson v. W.L. York, Inc. dba Cover Girls, 23-7490 Issue: Whether the continuing violations doctrine applies to claims premised on a pattern or practice of discrimination, or instead applies only in the context of hostile work environment claims. (Relisted after the April 25, May 2, May 15 and May 22 conferences.) Chambers-Smith v. Ayers, 24-584 Issue: Whether, when a person in state custody obtains new support for a previously available claim, that means she has a new “factual predicate” that restarts her clock to file a habeas petition under 28 U.S.C. §2244(d)(1)(D). (relisted after the May 15 and May 22 conferences.) Case v. Montana, 24-624 Issue: Whether law enforcement may enter a home without a search warrant based on less than probable cause that an emergency is occurring, or whether the emergency-aid exception requires probable cause. (relisted after the May 15 and May 22 conferences.) Meadors v. Erie County Board of Elections, 24-684 Issue: Whether the “capable of repetition, yet evading review” doctrine requires plaintiffs in election law cases to predict and articulate specific plans for their own future electoral participation, or instead it is sufficient to show that the challenged law will continue to affect voters and candidates in future elections. (relisted after the May 15 and May 22 conferences.) Iowa Pork Producers Association v. Bonta, 24-728 Issues: (1) Whether a party alleging that California’s Proposition 12, “which enacts a pork sales ban to regulate the manner in which pigs are housed in states across the country,” discriminates against interstate commerce, both directly and under Pike v. Bruce Church, states a claim; and (2) whether lower federal courts evaluating fractured opinions from the court consider all justices’ opinions to determine the majority position on a legal issue, or instead are limited to consider only opinions concurring in the result. (relisted after the May 15 and May 22 conferences.) The post Government contractors’ defenses, election challenges, and intellectual disability in capital cases appeared first on SCOTUSblog.