Court adds seven new cases to the 2025-26 term

The Supreme Court on Monday morning added seven new cases, covering issues ranging from campaign-finance regulations to the flexibility of the deadline to move a case from state to federal court, to its docket for the 2025-26 term. The list of orders released from the justices’ private conference on Thursday, June 26, was one of the final opportunities for the justices to bulk up next term’s docket before their summer recess.

The cases granted on Monday will likely be argued in the fall, with a ruling to follow sometime in 2026.

The justices are expected to issue one final set of orders on Thursday, July 3, at 9:30 a.m. Over the summer, the Supreme Court will issue three regularly scheduled lists of orders – on July 21, Aug. 18, and Sept. 5 – although those summer order lists do not normally add new cases to the court’s merits docket. The justices can also act on requests for emergency relief at any time.

In the highest-profile new case, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the justices will reconsider their 2001 ruling that upheld federal limits on coordinated campaign expenditures, which restrict political parties from spending money on campaign advertising with input from political candidates. (That case is discussed in more detail in a separate post.)

In Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, the justices will weigh in on the question of responsibility for copyright infringement on the internet. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit held that Cox Communications, which provides internet services to 6 million homes in 18 states, could be held “liable for materially contributing to copyright infringement” because it did not cut off access to the internet for some users whom it knew were using their accounts to infringe.

Cox Communications came to the Supreme Court last year, asking the justices to review the lower court’s decision. The company told the justices that the stakes in the case are “immense.” “Without this Court’s intervention,” it argued, “the Fourth Circuit’s ruling threatens mass evictions from the internet, severing millions from an essential conduit to engagement with modern society.”

The music industry, led by Sony Music Entertainment, had urged the Supreme Court to deny review, calling Cox’s “contrived arguments about the tenuous state of the internet” “both wrong and disingenuous.” The company, Sony emphasized, “has no problem” terminating internet access for more than a half-million subscribers who failed to pay their bills during a two-year period – a window in which it ”terminated 32 subscribers for copyright infringement.”

In Urias-Orellana v. Bondi, the justices will decide how much deference courts of appeals should give to a determination by the Board of Immigration Appeals that an individual seeking asylum has not been persecuted. The Trump administration agreed in this case that the Supreme Court should grant review to resolve confusion in the courts of appeals about the proper standard of review.

In Enbridge Energy v. Nessel, the court took up a case that arises from efforts by Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, to shut down an underwater pipeline owned and operated by Enbridge that runs between the state’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas. Nessel filed the case in state court in 2019; in December 2021, Enbridge sought to move the case to federal court. When that motion was denied, Enbridge appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, which ruled that the company had sought to transfer the case too late.

Enbridge came to the Supreme Court in January, asking the justices to determine whether there are any exceptions to the 30-day time limit to remove a case from a state court to a federal one. The justices granted the company’s petition on Monday.

In M&K Employee Solutions v. Trustees of the IAM Pension, the justices agreed to decide a technical question under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act relating to the method used to calculate the amount that an employer must pay when it withdraws from a multiemployer pension fund. The court had asked the Trump administration for its views in the case, and the federal government had recommended that review be granted.

In FS Credit Corp. v. Saba Capital Master Fund, the justices will determine whether Congress created a right for private individuals and entities to bring a lawsuit to sue investment funds. Here too, the Trump administration had recommended, in response to a request from the court, that the justices take up the case.

And in Rico v. United States, the court will decide whether the fugitive-tolling doctrine – the idea that criminal defendants should not get credit toward their sentences if they are not actually in prison – also applies when a defendant is not in prison but is instead on supervised release.  

The justices called for the federal government’s views in three cases: Havana Docks Corp. v. Royal Caribbean Cruises, an effort by the company that built the docks in Havana to recover more than $100 million from the cruise ships that use them; Parker Hannifin Corp. v. Johnson, a case involving the standards for pleading an “impudent investment” claim under ERISA ; and Monsanto v. Durnell, a case by a Missouri man who contends that he developed cancer as a result of his exposure to Monsanto’s weedkiller Roundup. There is no deadline for the U.S. solicitor general to file his briefs in response to the justices’ requests on Monday.

Two years ago, in National Pork Producers Association v. Ross, a deeply divided Supreme Court rejected a challenge to a controversial California law, known as Proposition 12, that prohibits the sale in California of pork products from pigs raised in ways that are deemed “cruel” – for example, because they do not have at least 24 square feet of living space (about the size of two bath towels).

In a decision by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court rejected the challengers’ contention in that case that the law violates the dormant commerce clause, the idea that the Constitution’s delegation of power over interstate commerce to Congress bars states from passing laws that discriminate against that commerce.

The court also rebuffed the challengers’ argument that under the Supreme Court’s 1970 decision in Pike v. Bruce Church, the law is unconstitutional because its benefits for California residents are outweighed by the burdens it imposes on out-of-state economic interests. Three justices – Gorsuch and Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett – would have held that courts cannot undertake such a balancing test, while six others disagreed. Even among those justices, however, several would have held that the challengers’ claim in that case could not go forward.

In Iowa Pork Producers Association v. Bonta, the Iowa Pork Producers Association filed its own challenge to Proposition 12, contending (among other things) that the law violates the dormant commerce clause by discriminating against out-of-state commerce.

After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected the group’s claims, the group came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to weigh in, both on whether it has stated a claim and on how lower courts should interpret decisions like Ross in which the justices are deeply fractured and issue multiple opinions. But in a brief unsigned order, the court turned down the group’s petition. Justice Brett Kavanaugh indicated, without any explanation, that he would have granted the petition for review.

More than a half-century ago, in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Supreme Court ruled that individuals can bring a lawsuit for money damages against government officials for a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. Since then, the court has only allowed two other claims – known as Bivens actions – to go forward, cautioning that such cases are “disfavored judicial activity.” Three years ago, the court once again declined to allow claims under Bivens – for excessive force under the Fourth Amendment and retaliation under the First Amendment – to proceed. In an opinion by Thomas, five justices – Thomas joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett – indicated that if they were starting with a blank slate, they would not allow claims like Bivens’ unless specifically created by Congress.

On Monday the court summarily reversed – that is, without additional briefing or oral argument, a ruling in favor of Andrew Fields, who was incarcerated at a federal prison in southwestern Virginia when he was sent to administrative segregation in a “special housing unit.” Fields was restrained in a wheelchair when he arrived at the unit and was placed in an observation cell; he contends that prison staff physically abused him, including by slamming his head into a concrete wall, while he was there.

Fields filed a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons and prison officials, contending that they had used excessive force in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The district court dismissed Fields’ case, holding that he could not rely on Bivens to bring a damages claim. But the 4th Circuit reinstated his claims against the individual officials who had allegedly abused him. That prompted the officials to come to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to take up his case and reconsider Bivens.

The Trump administration urged the court to summarily reverse the 4th Circuit’s decision. The federal government’s decision to weigh in without having been invited to do so by the justices, then-Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris explained, “reflects its views about the severity of the court of appeals’ error and the gravity of the decision’s potential consequences.” 

On Monday the court did just that. In an unsigned decision, the justices reiterated that “recognizing a cause of action under Bivens is ‘a disfavored judicial activity.’” Fields’ case, they said, failed both steps of the two-part test that the court has applied in deciding whether to allow a Bivens claim to go forward. First, the court wrote, it arises in a “new context,” because Congress “has not enacted a statutory cause of action for money damages.” Second, the court continued, there are reasons why the court should not recognize a Bivens claim here: Doing so, the court suggested, “could have negative systemic consequences for prison officials and the ‘inordinately difficult undertaking’ of running a prison.”

Justice Thomas penned a statement regarding the court’s denial of review in MacRae v. Mattos, the case of a teacher who was fired for her posts on TikTok before she was hired. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld a ruling in favor of the school district, and the Supreme Court declined on Monday to disturb that decision. Thomas agreed with the decision not to intervene, but he suggested that the 1st Circuit’s ruling was “the latest in a trend of lower court decisions that have misapplied our First Amendment precedents in cases involving controversial political speech.”

Over a dissent by Thomas that Gorsuch joined, the court turned away a challenge to an eviction moratorium adopted by Los Angeles during the COVID-19 pandemic that the challengers in this case call “one of the most onerous” in the country. It prohibited landlords from trying to evict tenants who couldn’t pay their rent because of the pandemic – for example, if they lost their job, had child-care expenses as a result of school closures, or had health-care expenses from the virus. The Supreme Court on Monday declined to decide whether the city’s moratorium violates the Constitution’s ban on the taking of private property for public use without just compensation. 

The dispute began in 2021, when a group of landlords went to federal court to challenge the moratorium. They asked for $20 million in back rent that they had not received as a result of the moratorium. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected their contention that because they could not remove their tenants, the moratorium was a physical taking of their property. The court of appeals reasoned that the landlords in this case had voluntarily rented their properties out to their tenants. A law, it continued, “that merely adjusts the existing relationship between landlord and tenant, including adjusting rental amount, terms of eviction, and even the identity of the tenant, does not effect a taking.”

The landlords went to the Supreme Court last year, asking the justices to take up their case. They contended that two other courts of appeals – the Federal Circuit and the 8th Circuit – would have allowed their case to go forward. They argued that “the pandemic served only as a catalyst for an unprecedented expansion of power in which local electeds [sic] arrogated the means to press private property into public service without paying for it.”

The city countered that the landlords’ argument “conflicts with so much of” the Supreme Court’s “jurisprudence distinguishing appropriation from regulation—cases that were decided as they were for good and practical reasons.” If the justices agree with the landlords, the city warned, it will either require governments “to pay for every property-related imposition” or once again lead to “the same line-drawing problem that the Court’s regulatory takings jurisprudence already solves.”

Thomas argued that because the courts of appeals were divided on the question at the center of the case, the Supreme Court has “an obligation to fix” the confusion that the division has created. Moreover, he added, “this issue is important and recurring. Given the sheer number of landlords and tenants, any eviction-moratorium statute stands to affect countless parties.”

In Wiggins v. United States, a case involving the definition of the term “controlled substance offense” for purposes of a provision of the federal sentencing guidelines, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Barrett, wrote a statement regarding the denial of review. Sotomayor observed that the courts of appeals were divided on this question, and that three years ago she had urged the U.S. Sentencing Commission to take action to clarify the meaning of the phrase – but it has not done so. “If the Commission does not intend to resolve the split,” she concluded, “it should provide an explanation so that this Court can decide whether to address the issue and restore uniformity.”

And in Black v. Tennessee, Sotomayor wrote another statement regarding the denial of review, this time in a case involving Tennessee’s instructions for juries in voluntary manslaughter cases. She explained that she had decided to write “to highlight the constitutional flaws in Tennessee’s approach to manslaughter instructions, and to encourage the Tennessee Supreme Court to resolve them in the first instance.”

The court did not act on two cases challenging state laws that ban transgender women and girls from participating on female sports teams: Little v. Hecox, a challenge to Idaho’s ban; and West Virginia v. B.P.J., a challenge to West Virginia’s ban. Both cases had been on hold – presumably while the court considered United States v. Skrmetti, a challenge to Tennessee’s ban on certain forms of medical treatments for transgender minors. The justices considered the cases again last week but did not act on them on Monday.