SCOTUStoday for Thursday, February 19

Updated on Feb. 19 at 9:50 a.m.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on this day in 1942, authorizing the removal of Japanese Americans to internment camps. In 1944, the Supreme Court considered the legality of this relocation, holding that the president and Congress did not exceed their war-time powers. Chief Justice John Roberts condemned that ruling in 2018, writing that it “was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—’has no place in law under the Constitution.'”

SCOTUS Quick Hits

• On Tuesday, the Supreme Court announced that it has adopted a new process for identifying potential conflicts of interest for the justices. For more on this updated process, see the On Site section below.
• The court has indicated that it may announce opinions tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. EST. SCOTUSblog will host an opinion day live blog beginning at 9:30.
• Also on Friday, the justices will meet in a private conference to discuss cases and vote on petitions for review. Orders from that conference are expected on Monday at 9:30 a.m. EST.
• The court may announce opinions on Tuesday, Feb. 24, and Wednesday, Feb. 25, as well. We will host live blogs on those days.
• On Friday, a Republican member of Congress, a group of voters, and New York election officials asked the Supreme Court to allow New York to proceed with the 2026 elections using its existing congressional map. The voters challenging the current map have been asked to respond to the new filings by 4 p.m. EST today.
• The court could rule at any time on an interim docket case on California’s policies for parental notification if a student chooses to use different names or pronouns.
• The court will next hear arguments on Monday, Feb. 23, the first day of its February sitting.

Morning Reads

• E.P.A. Faces First Lawsuit Over Its Killing of Major Climate Rule (Karen Zraick, The New York Times)(Paywall) — Last week, the Trump administration repealed the endangerment finding, an Obama-era rule that “had formed the basis for climate regulations in the United States.” As expected, the move prompted legal action: “Environmental and health groups filed a lawsuit on Wednesday morning in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, arguing that the E.P.A.’s move to eliminate limits on greenhouse gases from vehicles, and potentially other sources, was illegal,” according to The New York Times. The lawsuit, or one like it, is expected to eventually end up before the Supreme Court.
• Judge bars ICE from detaining Ábrego García, slams ’empty’ Africa removal threats (Ryan Knappenberger, Courthouse News Service) — On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis “blocked the Trump administration from taking Kilmar Ábrego García back into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, finding his extended detention in El Salvador and the United States was already unconstitutional,” according to Courthouse News Service. In her decision, Xinis cited Zadvydas v. Davis, “a 2001 Supreme Court decision that created an ‘implicit time limitation’ for immigration detention and prohibits ‘indefinite detention.'”
• Bayer retreats as investors sour on deal to settle Roundup litigation (Reuters)(Paywall) — Investors are questioning Bayer’s plan to use $7.25 billion to settle current and future lawsuits over the alleged link between its Roundup weedkiller and cancer, according to Reuters. After rising Tuesday when the settlement was announced, “Bayer’s shares slumped as much as 12% on Wednesday” as investors debated whether the proposal will actually do much to resolve ongoing litigation. Analysts told Reuters that “much still hinge[s] on an outstanding U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the overall merits of the lawsuits.” The case is set to be argued on April 27.
• Gorsuch’s ‘told you so’ moment on Trump’s tariffs (Ella Lee and Zach Schonfeld, The Hill) — In the latest edition of their newsletter, The Gavel, Ella Lee and Zach Schonfeld revisited November’s oral argument on tariffs, observing that Justice Neil Gorsuch may have predicted the future when he “raised alarm about what he called a ‘one-way ratchet’ of authority from Congress to the president if Trump wins a case that challenges his use of emergency powers to impose duties on a host of countries,” noting that presidents are unlikely to “give that power back.” That comment is newly significant as Congress attempts to repeal Trump’s tariffs on Canada. “The bipartisan support for repealing the tariffs falls far short of the two-thirds majority needed in both the House and Senate to override an expected veto,” according to Lee and Schonfeld.
• Catching up with Supreme Court’s busy docket (Marcia Coyle, National Constitution Center) — Ahead of the start of the Supreme Court’s February argument session, the National Constitution Center published an article on this term’s highest-profile cases, including disputes on birthright citizenship and the Second Amendment rights of habitual drug users. The gun rights case is set to be argued on March 2, and the birthright citizenship case is scheduled for April 1.

A Closer Look: District of Columbia v. R.W.

The Supreme Court has instructed courts to look at the “totality of the circumstances” when assessing whether a police officer had reasonable suspicion to conduct an investigative stop. But does that mean courts can never determine certain details should be discounted? That’s the question raised in the petition for review in District of Columbia v. R.W.

The dispute centers on the actions of a Metropolitan Police Department officer in the early morning hours of Feb. 7, 2023. After receiving a dispatch call at around 2 a.m. about “a suspicious vehicle or stolen vehicle” at an apartment building in southeast Washington, D.C., the officer drove to the building and pulled into its parking lot, according to the petition. As he did so, the officer witnessed two individuals leave the backseat of a parked car and run off. He then noticed the car begin to move, as the individual who remained in the car backed out with the rear door still open. 

The officer confronted the driver – who was 15 at the time and is identified as R.W. in court filings – and tried to determine who the car belonged to. He noticed “that the window on the open door was ‘completely shattered,’ suggesting that the vehicle was stolen,” according to the petition. “A run of the plates” apparently confirmed that conclusion, and the officer arrested R.W. 

For the past three years, R.W. and his legal team have been fighting to suppress all evidence collected after the officer confronted R.W. They contend that the officer did not have reasonable suspicion to detain R.W. and thus violated the Fourth Amendment.

The trial court denied their motion to suppress evidence, holding that the officer had reasonable suspicion to confront R.W. and probable cause to arrest him. “Following a bench trial, R.W. was adjudicated delinquent on four charges related to the use of a stolen vehicle and received one year of probation,” according to the petition.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals, however, sided with R.W., holding that the dispatch call and the flight of two individuals from the car should not have been included in the trial court’s reasonable-suspicion analysis. The call should have been disregarded, according to the appeals court, because the police department did not provide the court with any “information about its source and reliability.” And the flight of two individuals away from the car “did not suggest that R.W. was engaged in a suspicious joint venture with his two companions.” When those details are omitted from the analysis, the appeals court concluded that “the lateness of the hour and the slight movement of the car did not give rise to reasonable articulable suspicion that R.W. was involved in criminal activity.”

The District of Columbia contends that the appeals court ran afoul of past Supreme Court rulings stating that “an investigative stop must be assessed using the ‘totality of circumstances.’” In the process, according to the petition, the court deepened a disagreement between lower courts over whether facts can be omitted from a reasonable-suspicion analysis if they appear “innocent, unreliable, or overly general” when viewed independently.

D.C. urges the justices to take up the case and make it clear that courts should not overcomplicate assessments of reasonable suspicion. “Officers cannot and should not put on blinders in assessing fast-moving and fluid circumstances; neither should courts,” the petition said.

Initially, R.W. waived his right to respond to the petition, but the court called for a response in September. In R.W.’s brief, his legal team contends that the District of Columbia has “concoct[ed] a split” by mischaracterizing the lower court’s decision. “There is no split because the District takes issue with form, not substance. Despite the District’s attempts to suggest otherwise, the court below did not impose categorical rules ‘exclud[ing] certain types of evidence in all cases,’ nor did it discard facts solely because they were ‘insufficiently incriminating in isolation.’” Rather, according to R.W.’s brief, “it took each factor on which the District had relied in arguing for reasonable suspicion and looked at it in light of the full picture of events and evidence.” Such an approach satisfies Fourth Amendment precedent, because “[t]he totality-of-the-circumstances inquiry does not demand that a court limit its opinion to one unstructured paragraph that discusses every factor at the same time,” R.W.’s brief said. 

District of Columbia v. R.W. was considered for the first time at the justices’ Jan. 9 conference. It has since been relisted three times, and it will next be considered by the justices on Friday.

SCOTUS Quote

“The Constitution was adopted to preserve our government, not to serve as a protecting screen for those who, while claiming its privileges, seek to destroy it.”

— Justice John Clarke in Milwaukee Social Democratic Pub. Co. v. Burleson

On Site

From the SCOTUSblog Team

Supreme Court updates recusals process

The Supreme Court on Tuesday revealed that it has put new software in place to “assist in identifying potential conflicts” of interest for the justices. The new system “will be used to run automated recusal checks” by comparing lists of litigants in proceedings before the court to the justices’ investment portfolios.

Case Preview

Supreme Court to hear arguments on confiscations by Cuban government

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a pair of cases brought by U.S. businesses seeking to recover losses they suffered when Cuba’s communist government came to power and seized their assets more than 65 years ago.

Contributor Corner

The anticipated criminal law decisions and arguments for the rest of this term

In his latest ScotusCrim column, Rory Little offered an overview of criminal law (and criminal law-related) cases that are set for argument over the next two months and also provided a refresher on the criminal laws cases that were argued earlier this term and that should be decided soon.