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

Please note that the views of outside contributors do not reflect the official opinions of SCOTUSblog or its staff.

In a recent investigative report, New York Times journalist Jodi Kantor revealed that there is growing friction among the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices. Specifically, her article describes a widening rift over how the liberal justices believe they should operate on a 6-3 conservative court. As Kantor tells it, Justice Elena Kagan favors restraint and internal diplomacy. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, on the other hand, has embraced sharper dissents and public-facing critiques of the court. Justice Sonia Sotomayor sits between them, balancing alarm with a commitment to maintaining working relationships with her conservative colleagues. With this term shaping up to be yet another consequential one for our foundational understanding of democracy, constitutional structure, and civil rights, Kantor’s reporting paints a picture of the liberal justices at odds over how best to use their voices in a moment defined by dissent.

The court will hear its big copyright case for the year during the first week of the December session, when on Monday, Dec. 1, it reviews a billion-dollar ruling against Cox Communications based on its failure to eradicate copyright infringement by its customers.

The Supreme Court on Monday morning sent the case of a Mississippi man convicted of abusing his daughter back to the state courts for another look. It also reversed, without briefing on the merits or oral argument, a ruling by a federal appeals court in favor of a Maryland man convicted of second-degree murder. The brief, unsigned opinions in Pitts v. Mississippi and Clark v. Sweeney came as part of a list of orders from the justices’ private conference on Friday, Nov. 21. 

The Supreme Court did not act on Monday on the challenges to President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20  executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship – the guarantee of citizenship to almost everyone born in the United States. The court will likely consider the cases again at their private conference on Friday, Dec. 5; if it does, it could announce as soon as that afternoon whether it has granted review. 

Please note that the views of outside contributors do not reflect the official opinions of SCOTUSblog or its staff.

Every year, students across the country learn the bedrock principle that under the Constitution the federal government is one of limited powers. Less often taught is that the Supreme Court has long rejected this founding ideal when it comes to Native Americans and people in U.S. territories. Instead, a principle known as the court’s “plenary power doctrine” gives Congress near-unlimited power to govern these communities as it sees fit – all without any firm grounding in the Constitution itself. Indeed, under the plenary power doctrine, Congress could go so far as to unilaterally dissolve a tribe or dismiss a territory’s local elected government and install (or re-install) authoritarian military rule, for any reason or no reason at all.