Civil Rights and Wrongs is a recurring series by Daniel Harawa covering criminal justice and civil rights cases before the court.

I have written before about the Supreme Court’s troubling habit of summarily closing the courthouse doors on those with the least power in our legal system. Just last month, I wrote about Klein v. Martin and Clark v. Sweeney, two cases in which the court summarily reversed (that is, reversed a lower court decision without full briefing or oral argument) grants of relief to prisoners. I explained how the back-to-back summary reversals risked sending a chilling message to lower courts about the costs of taking prisoners’ constitutional claims seriously. I argued then that a pattern was emerging that deserved attention.

Zorn v. Linton, decided last month, seems to confirm that pattern, albeit in a different context.

In early January, as the country eagerly awaited a tariffs ruling that – as it turned out – was still more than a month away, Supreme Court watchers raised concerns about the court’s pace. They questioned whether the justices had fallen behind on writing opinions in the 27 cases they had heard by that point, perhaps because of the Trump administration’s ongoing requests for emergency relief.

And the data seemed to bear this out: As The New York Times reported, this term was only the second in the past eight decades in which the court waited until January to release an opinion in an argued case; in “70 of the last 80 terms, the first merits decisions were issued in October or November.”

So, approximately three months later, where do things stand?

While I have written multiple posts for SCOTUSblog on birthright citizenship, a substantial part of my practice is litigating Second Amendment claims. In light of that experience, I was struck when listening to the Trump v. Barbara argument that the challengers’ counsel Cecillia Wang repeatedly insisted that the exceptions to birthright citizenship (such as for the children of ambassadors, tribal Indians, and invading armies) are “a closed set” – i.e., that the exceptions were set in 1868 with the adoption of the 14th Amendment and will always remain the same regardless of changed circumstances. This is a misunderstanding of originalism. As the court has explained in the Second Amendment context, the Constitution does not create “a law trapped in amber.” Rather, courts apply the original meaning of the Second Amendment to today’s circumstances, which can result in outcomes that are different from those at the Founding. A similar approach to the citizenship clause should be adopted in Trump v. Barbara.

Empirical SCOTUS is a recurring series by Adam Feldman that looks at Supreme Court data, primarily in the form of opinions and oral arguments, to provide insights into the justices’ decision making and what we can expect from the court in the future.

In Case v. Montana, which dealt with the conditions in which police officers may enter a home without a warrant to render emergency aid, Justice Neil Gorsuch arrived at oral argument with a specific legal theory already in hand. He pressed counsel on whether a private citizen historically could enter another person’s property to prevent serious harm. Gorsuch conveyed that law enforcement – regarding their ability to enter one’s property in an emergency situation – should have no fewer rights than a private citizen would. At the same time, he insisted that any emergency-entry is bounded – it authorizes a limited entry for law enforcement to deal with that emergency, not a general license to search the premises. When his separate concurrence appeared, it tracked those questions almost exactly: the Fourth Amendment’s emergency-aid exception for police to enter one’s home, he wrote, is grounded in the common law of necessity and the historic privilege of private citizens to enter property to avert serious physical harm.

A Second Opinion is a recurring series by Haley Proctor on the Second Amendment and constitutional litigation.

My previous column examined what it means for a gun control measure to fit within “the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” This month I want to focus on how the court has analyzed gun regulations that limit (1) who may possess a firearm, (2) what arms people may own or carry, and (3) where they may take them.