Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. As if there isn’t enough going on these days, the Supreme Court starts a new term Monday. The justices are coming off a busy summer, one in which the Republican-appointed majority backed the Trump administration in a series of shadow docket decisions that further empowered the Republican White House. The majority is poised to move the law even further to the right in the 2025-26 term.
Appeals over voting rights, campaign finance and transgender sports participation are among the cases we’re tracking this term. The court will also consider Donald Trump’s unprecedented tariffs and bid to control independent agencies, such as the Federal Reserve. Expect more law and precedent to be discarded or at least further mangled in the process.
And that’s just what we know about so far, because the court fills out its docket as the year goes on. Pending petitions still seeking review run the gamut from the legality of Trump’s birthright citizenship order (which the court will probably take up) to Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking case (which it probably won’t). The court just announced Friday morning that it’s adding a Second Amendment gun case to its already heavy slate of disputes to resolve this term.
The shadow docket will continue to play a role on top of the regularly scheduled cases. The court’s orders in these emergency appeals can be just as significant as decisions that follow more leisurely consideration by the justices, so we need to pay at least as much attention to those orders that sometimes come in the middle of the night and without much, if any, explanation.
Remember, the justices wield significant power in setting their agenda, not only in how they decide cases but in choosing which cases to decide and when. It takes four justices to grant review on the court of six Republican appointees and three Democratic appointees. The docket takes shape against that backdrop.
Procedurally, here’s how the term will go: The court holds hearings during two-week sessions from October through April and typically decides all the cases by early July. Sometimes the court adds special hearing dates — like it did last term in an earlier round of birthright citizenship litigation — and sometimes the justices decide to hear a case again the following term, as they did in the voting rights appeal from Louisiana that’s set for re-argument on Oct. 15.
The court’s first week features a hearing Tuesday on a big topic these days — free speech — in the case of a Christian counselor who argues that Colorado violated her rights with its ban on so-called conversion therapy for minors. Defending the law, state officials maintain that it only stops therapists from seeking “the predetermined outcome of changing a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity because that treatment is unsafe and ineffective.”
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