Supreme Court denies Florida’s request to enforce state law on illegal immigration

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Wednesday morning read:

• Climate Activists Use Supreme Court’s Samuel Alito’s Words to Boost Lawsuit (Jenna Sundel, Newsweek)
• The Supreme Court Says the President Can Fire People (The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal)
• The Inscrutable Supreme Court (Paul Rosenzweig, The Atlantic)
• Religion at the Supreme Court (Mark Movsesian, The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason)
• The Bleak Unifying Principle of This Supreme Court Term (Mark Joseph Stern, Slate)

The most surprising part of the Supreme Court’s Thursday order enabling the Trump administration to move forward with sending eight immigrants to South Sudan wasn’t the decision. After all, the court had already sided with the government on deportations to third-party countries in late June; Thursday’s order clarified the reach of that opinion, rather than revealing something truly new.

Instead, the surprise came from Justice Elena Kagan, who, rather than siding with her liberal colleagues, spotlighted her break from them with a brief concurring opinion. 

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Tuesday morning read:

• In Digital Era, Supreme Court Insists on Vast Piles of Paper (Adam Liptak, The New York Times)
• Appeals court rules against North Dakota tribes in voting rights case that could go to Supreme Court (Jack Dura and Steve Karnowski, AP News)
• A New Supreme Court Case Could Give the Wealthy Even More Political Power (Mike Ludwig, Truthout)
• The Past Four Years at the Supreme Court Did Not Need to Be This Way (Jay Willis, Slate)
• Now that Supreme Court is out for the summer, will Congress finally do its job? (Dace Potas, USA Today)

Also, beginning at 5 pm tonight, we hope to be live streaming the 2025 Supreme Court Review, presented by The National Constitution Center and the Center on the Structural Constitution at Texas A&M University School of Law.

This is part of SCOTUSblog’s term in review series, in which scholars analyze some of the most significant cases of the 2024-25 Supreme Court term.

In Kousisis v. United States, decided on May 22, the Supreme Court considered the breadth of federal wire and mail fraud offenses and unanimously rejected a requirement that a fraud victim suffer a net economic loss. Instead, the court focused on whether the fraudster’s misrepresentations were material – that is, whether they would have affected the victim’s decision to engage in the fraudulent transaction in the first place.

Brothers in Law is a recurring series by Professors Akhil and Vikram Amar. For more content from Akhil and Vikram, please see Akhil’s free weekly podcast, “Amarica’s Constitution,” and Vikram’s regular columns on Justia.

Every justice takes an oath to support the Constitution itself as the supreme law of the land. Most members of the current court boast that they are faithful originalists – that is, jurists who generally prioritize the Constitution’s text, history, and structure, as distinct from mere precedent or politics or practicality. Yet over the centuries, the justices have often failed to root their ruminations in the rich soil of the Constitution itself, even as they have claimed to be doing constitutional law. Last term was no exception.