The most important cases of the next term

When the justices return to the bench to hear oral arguments in the fall, they will tackle several hot-button issues, including state bans on the participation by transgender athletes on women’s and girls’ sports teams, voting rights, religion, campaign-finance laws, and the death penalty. Before adjourning for their summer recess, the justices had granted review in 32 cases – precisely the number needed to fill their argument calendars for October, November, and December.

Here, in brief, are some of the most important cases on the court’s merits docket so far.

On the last day before the court’s summer recess, the justices once again agreed to wade into the culture wars when they announced that they would hear a pair of challenges to the constitutionality of laws that prohibit transgender girls and women from participating on girls’ and women’s sports teams. In Little v. Hecox, the court will hear a case brought by Lindsay Hecox, a transgender woman who wanted to compete on the women’s track and cross-country teams at Boise State University. She asked a federal court to bar Idaho from enforcing its ban against her, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed that the law violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

And in West Virginia v. B.P.J., the court will hear a case filed by a 14-year-old transgender girl who has begun to receive puberty blockers and hormone therapy, seeking to be able to compete on the girls’ sports teams at her middle school. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled last year that West Virginia’s ban violates Title IX, a federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs and activities that receive federal funding, because it discriminates against the student based on sex.

Just under four months before taking up the transgender sports cases, the Supreme Court had already agreed to weigh in on another flashpoint in the culture wars – a challenge to the constitutionality of Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy” – therapy to “convert” someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The plaintiff in Chiles v. Salazar is a practicing Christian who says that she sometimes works with clients who want to discuss topics that “implicate Christian values about human sexuality and the treatment of their own body.” As a licensed counselor, she says, “she believes clients can accept the bodies that God has given them and find peace,” and the law violates her First Amendment right to free speech and to freely exercise her religion by barring her from helping them to do so.

A federal appeals court in Denver upheld the Colorado law. It concluded that the state had enacted the law to regulate the health-care profession, and in particular therapists’ conduct, rather than therapists’ speech.

In November 2024, the court – after considering the case at more than 20 conferences – sent the case of Joseph Smith, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Durk Van Dam, back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit for that court to clarify how it reached its conclusion that Smith was intellectually disabled, so that his execution would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch indicated that they would have gone ahead and granted the state’s petition for review then, without waiting for the court of appeals to take another look.

The case returned to the court of appeals, which once again concluded that Smith’s death sentence should be set aside. Smith had obtained five IQ scores, ranging from 72 to 78, and his intellectual-disability claim hinged in part on whether his IQ was 70 or lower. The 11th Circuit stressed that it had not thrown out Smith’s death sentence simply because the standard range of error for his lowest IQ score (72) would put his IQ at 69. Instead, it said, it had upheld the district court’s ruling in Smith’s favor “based on the complete record, including any relevant expert testimony.”

The state returned to the Supreme Court in February, and in early June the justices agreed to decide how and whether courts should assess a defendant’s claim that he cannot be executed because he is intellectually disabled when, as in Smith’s case, the defendant has taken multiple IQ tests.

In Louisiana v. Callais, the court will hear oral arguments for a second time in a challenge to Louisiana’s most recent congressional map. A group of Louisiana voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” argued that the map, which created a second majority-Black district in the state, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

A three-judge federal court agreed and prohibited Louisiana from using the map in the 2024 elections. But the Supreme Court put that decision on hold last year, clearing the way for the state to use it.

When the case came to the Supreme Court, the state argued that it was effectively between a rock and a hard place. It had created the map with two majority-Black districts, it said, after a different federal court threw out an earlier map that only contained one majority-Black district, finding that the map violated the Voting Rights Act. The map at the center of the current case was enacted to comply with that court’s instructions to draw a new map, and to protect powerful Republican incumbents in the U.S. House of Representatives, it contended. The non-African-American voters countered that it was “utterly implausible” that race was not the primary motivating factor in the decision to draw the 2024 map.

After almost 80 minutes of arguments in March, there did not seem to be a consensus among the justices on how to resolve the case. And indeed, on June 27, the court revealed that it was apparently not able to resolve the dispute during the 2024-25 term. Instead, the court issued a one-page order indicating that the case would be rescheduled for argument during the 2025-26 term. “In due course,” the justices added, they would release an order “specifying any additional questions to be addressed in supplemental briefing” – an order that, as of the time of publication, has not yet been issued.  

In a major campaign-finance case, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the justices will reconsider their 2001 ruling in Federal Election Commission v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, in which the court upheld federal limits on coordinated campaign expenditures, which restrict political parties from spending money on campaign advertising in cooperation with political candidates.

The NRSC, then-Sen. J.D. Vance, and others filed their challenge in federal court in Cincinnati, contending that the campaign-finance limits violate the First Amendment. They urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit to overturn them, arguing that the court’s 2001 decision in the Colorado case should no longer apply because since then the Supreme Court has “tightened the free-speech restrictions on campaign-finance regulations.”

The court of appeals acknowledged a “tension” between the Colorado case and the Supreme Court’s later decisions but Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton emphasized that only the Supreme Court, and not the court of appeals, can overturn the Colorado decision. The challengers then came to the Supreme Court, which agreed on June 30 to take up their case.

The justices will also weigh in on whether an inmate can file a lawsuit seeking to hold a government official personally responsible, rather than suing the government entity for which the official works, for violations of a federal law intended to protect the religious liberty rights of prisoners. Damon Landor, the plaintiff in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety, was nearing the end of a five-month sentence in the Louisiana prison system when he was transferred to another prison, where he explained to an intake guard that he was a practicing Rastafarian. Landor had not cut his hair, which reached nearly to his knees, for almost 20 years. But although Landor also provided the guard with a copy of a ruling by a federal appeals court striking down the state’s policy prohibiting prisoners from wearing dreadlocks, the prison’s warden instructed guards to restrain him in a chair, where they forcibly shaved his head.

Landor went to federal court, where he argued that the state and the prison officials had violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a law enacted by Congress in 2000 in part to strengthen prisoners’ religious rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit threw out his claims against the individual prison officials, holding that the RLUIPA does not allow private plaintiffs to bring claims against individual officials for money damages.

In Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, the justices will decide an important copyright question – specifically, whether and to what extent an internet service provider can be held liable for copyright infringement by its subscribers. A group of music labels, led by Sony Music, filed a lawsuit against Cox, contending that some of its subscribers had repeatedly infringed the labels’ copyrights over a two-year period. A jury agreed and awarded the labels $1 billion.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit tossed out the $1 billion award, but it nonetheless agreed that Cox was liable for contributing to the subscribers’ infringement of the labels’ copyrights. Cox came to the Supreme Court last year, and the justices agreed in June to take up the case.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the fall in a case involving what sounds like a relatively technical question: Whether a federal court has the power to rule on a group’s claim that New Jersey’s demand for information about its fundraising practices discouraged it from exercising its First Amendment rights, or whether the group must instead litigate that claim in state proceedings. But the case has garnered significant attention because that question comes to the court in a case involving First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, a group of faith-based pregnancy centers that the New Jersey attorney general’s office contends may have misled women about abortion services.

New Jersey’s attorney general, Matthew Platkin, issued a subpoena to First Choice in which he sought (among other things) information about the group’s donors. First Choice went to federal court to challenge the subpoena, but the district court concluded that it could not review the claims because only a state court has the power to enforce or quash a subpoena.

After a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit upheld the district court’s ruling and dismissed the case, First Choice came to the Supreme Court, which granted review in First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin in June.

But the biggest cases are still likely to come. For the past few years, many of the most notable cases – including Trump v. CASA, Trump v. United States, Loper-Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Biden v. Nebraska, and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, just to name a few – were not added to the court’s docket until after the justices’ summer recess. So more high-profile cases could be on the way, including challenges to Trump administration initiatives that return to the court on the merits after making appearances on the emergency docket during the 2024-25 term.