Supreme Court to hear cases on guns, government confiscation, and several other issues

The Supreme Court on Friday morning agreed to hear oral arguments this winter in a challenge to a Hawaii law that makes it a crime for someone who has a concealed carry permit to carry a handgun on private property without the property owner’s affirmative permission. The announcement that the justices will take up Wolford v. Lopez came as part of a short list of cases from the court’s “long conference” on Monday, at which they considered all of the petitions that became ripe for review during the justices’ summer recess.

In addition to the Hawaii case, the justices added four other new cases – on topics ranging from Cuba’s liability for its confiscation of property in that country in the 1960s to the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause – to the list of cases in which it will hear oral arguments during the 2025-26 term.

Hawaii passed the law at the center of the dispute in 2023 in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, in which the justices struck down a New York handgun-licensing law that required New Yorkers who want to carry a handgun in public to show a special need to defend themselves. Hawaii’s law bars anyone with a concealed carry permit from bringing a handgun on private property that is open to the public unless the owner of that private property clearly gives permission to do so. The law also prohibits guns in so-called “sensitive places,” such as parks, beaches, playgrounds, and areas that serve alcohol.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld the Hawaii ban on carrying a handgun on private property without permission, as well as the bans on guns in “sensitive places.” A deeply divided court turned down the challengers’ request for the full court to rehear the case.

The challengers – three Maui residents with concealed carry permits and the Hawaii Firearms Coalition – came to the Supreme Court in the spring, asking the justices to weigh in on two questions. First, they asked the court to decide whether the ban on carrying a handgun on private property is constitutional. “In holding the Second Amendment does not apply to private property open to the public,” lawyers for the challengers wrote, “the Ninth Circuit’s decision renders illusory the right to carry in public.”

The challengers also asked the justices to take up a second question related to the methodology that the court of appeals used in upholding the ban on guns in “sensitive places.” The Supreme Court’s Second Amendment cases have held that governmental regulations of firearms must be consistent with the country’s “historical tradition.” But instead of looking at regulations at the time of the country’s founding, in the late 18th century, the challengers contend, the court of appeals improperly relied on laws from the post-Reconstruction era.

In a relatively rare move, the Trump administration filed a “friend of the court” brief urging the justices to take up the case without waiting for an invitation from the Supreme Court to weigh in. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the 9th Circuit’s decision “conflicts with Bruen’s recognition that the Nation does not have ‘a tradition of broadly prohibiting the public carry of commonly used firearms for self-defense.” He added that “[f]ive States embracing more than a fifth of the Nation’s population have already adopted” a similar “Bruen-nullifying rule, and the decision below invites other jurisdictions in the Nation’s largest circuit to do likewise.”

The Supreme Court granted two other cases in which Sauer, although at the court’s invitation, had also urged the justices to weigh in. In Exxon Mobil v. Corporación Cimex, S.A., the justices will decide whether Exxon Mobil can bring a lawsuit against three state-owned companies under the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996 for compensation for the 1960 confiscation of property that its Cuban-based subsidiaries owned in Cuba. Title III of that law allows U.S. nationals who owned property in Cuba to sue anyone who “traffics in property confiscated by the Cuban Government on or after January 1, 1959.” 

The lower courts dismissed most of the claims, citing the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a federal law that generally bars lawsuits against foreign governments in U.S. courts. Exxon Mobil came to the Supreme Court last year, asking the justices to hear its appeal.

In a brief filed in late August, Sauer told the justices that they should “grant review and hold that Title III suits against Cuban agencies and instrumentalities can proceed without having to additionally satisfy one of the enumerated exceptions to foreign sovereign immunity under the FSIA.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Sauer wrote, “incorrectly superimposed the FSIA’s general framework on a narrow, Cuba-focused statute that clearly abrogates Cuban agencies’ and instrumentalities’ immunity.”

And in Havana Docks Corporation v. Royal Caribbean Cruises, the court agreed to decide whether a company that owned a right to operate and profit from the docks in Havana, which was confiscated in 1960, can bring a lawsuit under the 1996 law against four cruise lines for their use of the docks from 2016 to 2019.

A federal district court entered judgments totaling more than $400 million against the cruise lines, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that the lawsuit by Havana Docks, which had acquired a 99-year concession in the docks in 1905, could not go forward because the concession – and therefore the company’s interest in the docks – would have expired in 2004.

Sauer again urged the justices to take up the case, telling them that the court of appeals “limited the reach of Title III suits just when those suits have become an increasingly popular foreign-policy tool.”

In Pung v. Isabella County, Michigan, the justices will review a case filed by the estate of a Michigan man whose home was the subject of foreclosure because the county believed (incorrectly, his estate says) that he owed $2,241.93 in taxes. The county sold the property at auction for $76,008; the buyer then sold it for $194,400 – which, the estate says, was its fair market value.

When the estate went to court, the district court awarded it the difference between the amount it owed in taxes and the price that the country received from the sale – that is, nearly $74,000. But the estate contends that it should have received the difference between the taxes owed and the fair market value. The failure to pay that amount, it argued in its petition for review, violates both the Fifth Amendment’s bar on the taking of property without “just compensation” and the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines.

And in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, the court agreed to decide whether a federal law that supersedes state laws “related to a price, route, or service of any motor carrier” but carves out an exception for “the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles” bars a state-law claim against a broker for negligently selecting a motor carrier or driver.