Immigration Matters is a recurring series by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández that analyzes the court’s immigration docket, highlighting emerging legal questions about new policy and enforcement practices. Last month, the Department of Justice filed its brief with the Supreme Court in the high-stakes legal fight over birthright citizenship. According to the government, the justices should side with the Trump administration because the president’s executive order faithfully applies the intended meaning of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which states that all “persons born … in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” are U.S. citizens. Urging the justices to dive into the past, the Justice Department cites 19th-century books, letters, judicial opinions, and even a funeral speech in support of President Donald Trump’s attempt to narrow access to citizenship at birth. But in mining written texts from more than a century ago, the government’s brief plucks phrases that it favors while ignoring the political movement to dramatically expand citizenship in which the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution. Courts and executive branch agencies have customarily interpreted the citizenship clause as granting U.S. citizenship at birth to everyone born in the United States except for children born to diplomats, Native Americans, and invading military forces. Indeed, other than these three narrow exceptions, courts and past presidential administrations since 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified, treated as irrelevant the citizenship or immigration status of a child’s parents. (In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act, which gave U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States.) Despite this, on the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order narrowly interpreting the citizenship clause. According to the executive order, children born in the United States should not be treated as U.S. citizens if they are born to a father who is neither a U.S. citizen nor lawful permanent resident and a mother who was living in the United States – at the time of the child’s birth – under a temporary visa or without the federal government’s permission. The case before the Supreme court, Trump v. Barbara, challenges the legality of Trump’s executive order. Last July, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante of New Hampshire found that the executive order likely violates the 14th Amendment and an immigration law enacted by Congress. Laplante consequently blocked the Trump administration from implementing the president’s order. Now before the Supreme Court, the Justice Department’s defense of the president’s order frames the legal fight in historical terms. Specifically, the government’s brief urges the court to “restore the original meaning of the Citizenship Clause.” To do that, the brief argues that the justices should allow executive branch agencies to implement Trump’s executive order because it articulates the citizenship clause’s meaning as it “was understood when it was ratified, not how it was misinterpreted in the 20th century.” By grounding its legal position in its understanding of that era, the government opens the door to competing assessments of the historical record. And a close analysis of the sources that the government references illustrate the difficulty it faces in its attempt to revise the prevailing view of the 14th amendment. In its attempt to identify how the citizenship clause was understood at the time it was added to the Constitution, the Justice Department references comments by six senators, five members of Congress, one state judge, one historian, a general, and an unnamed reporter. Although some of these individuals played an important role in crafting the 14th Amendment, it is not obvious why the Justice Department discusses others. Senator Lyman Trumbull was a political ally of President Abraham Lincoln and lead sponsor of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, a law that served as a model for the 14th Amendment. But Thomas Cooley – whom the government cites favorably – was serving as a justice on the Michigan Supreme Court when the 14th Amendment was proposed and then ratified. Meanwhile, the government references historian George Bancroft, but not for his 10-volume “History of the United States” nor for his two–volume “History of the Formation of the Federal Constitution,” which was published 14 years after the 14th Amendment was ratified. Instead, the government quotes the speech Bancroft gave at Lincoln’s 1865 funeral – three years before the 14th Amendment’s ratification. Likewise, the government relies on a scandal-ridden Union general, Stephen Hurlbut, and an article in The Chicago Republican, an obscure, short-lived newspaper. In a country that numbered approximately 39 million people in 1870, other statements by these 15 – all white men, except perhaps for the unnamed reporter – reveal a remarkably more complex understanding of citizenship than what the government’s brief suggests. For example, to support the executive order’s claim that children born to mothers who are living in the United States lawfully under a temporary visa – of which there are currently approximately 22 types – are not automatically entitled to U.S. citizenship, the brief recounts an exchange between Senators Benjamin Wade and William Fessenden during debates over the 14th Amendment. According to the brief, Fessenden objected to Wade’s initial proposal of a version of the citizenship clause that “would have granted citizenship to ‘persons born in the United States’” and, Fessenden said, would thus extend citizenship to children of parents who were only present in the country temporarily. But the actual historical record is more complicated. Fessenden did ask Wade to consider whether it might not be best to exclude from citizenship some people born in the United States. But Wade promptly rejected the suggestion. “The Senator says a person may be born here and not be a citizen. I know that is so in one instance, in the case of the children of foreign ministers who reside ‘near’ the United States, in the diplomatic language,” Wade responded. “[T]heir children would not be citizens, although born in Washington,” he added. Wade did not mention any other exceptions to the rule that birth in the United States results in citizenship. Indeed, that is consistent with Wade’s explanation, in the same Senate session, that he had “always believed that every person, of whatever race or color, who was born within the United States was a citizen of the United States.” Rather than the constrained version of birthright citizenship that Trump’s executive order promotes, Wade embraced a broadly inclusive version. The Justice Department’s claim that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship only to the children of people who owe “primary allegiance” to the United States likewise builds on decontextualized quotations. Of the three members of Congress and two senators that the government highlights, four – Senators Justin Morrill and Philemon Bliss as well as Representatives John Broomall and Martin Russell Thayer – describe allegiance as deriving directly from birth in the United States. Morrill, for example, said that “every man, by his birth, is entitled to citizenship, and that upon the general principle that he owes allegiance to the country of his birth, and that country owes him protection.” The government’s brief quotes a comment from Morrill about allegiance and protection, but by not presenting this statement the brief ignores Morrill’s broader position: a man is a citizen of the country in which he is born because he owes it allegiance and it owes him protection. Independently, Bliss, Broomall, and Thayer express similar views. At no point do any of them qualify citizenship like the Justice Department claims. Senator Garrett Davis also does not neatly support the government’s position. While the Justice Department correctly asserts that Davis defined a “foreigner” as someone “who owes allegiance to another Government,” he does not appear to view allegiance as relevant to birthright citizenship. To the contrary, Davis describes as “preposterous and absurd” the suggestion that anyone born in the United States could be treated as a foreigner. The remaining legislator, Representative John Bingham, would actually appear to endorse a narrower form of citizenship than Trump. As the Justice Department notes, Bingham stated that he would exclude from birthright citizenship children born to parents who owe “allegiance to any foreign sovereignty.” In the same speech Bingham leaves no doubt that he believes that citizenship should turn on the immigration or citizenship status of parents. But he goes further than Trump in suggesting that children born to citizens of any other country would be denied U.S. citizenship. “[E]very human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural-born citizen,” he asserts. Because a person owes allegiance to their country of citizenship, anyone who is a citizen of another country owes allegiance “to any foreign sovereignty,” which, according to Bingham, would bar their children from obtaining U.S. citizenship at birth. Thomas Cooley – who, as noted, was a state judge in Michigan in 1880 – would likely have agreed. The Justice Department correctly explains that Cooley argued, in a book on constitutional law, that citizenship is unavailable to people who owe allegiance to another government. Cooley added, in the sentence that follows that line (which the government does not quote), that he would exclude from citizenship “aboriginal inhabitants” who “recognize the headship of their chiefs.” The dozen men whom the Justice Department cites to bolster its proposed understanding of the citizenship clause at the time that the 14th Amendment was ratified thus present complex views of citizenship that are sometimes at odds with one another. More importantly for the current legal fight over the future of birthright citizenship, they only partly align with Trump’s executive order; often, they contradict Trump’s position. Nothing less should be expected. In the late 19th century, when these men lived, citizenship was far from an esoteric idea. To people who had lived through the Civil War, citizenship was, instead, the stuff of political fights with flesh-and-blood consequences. That they would have strong, multifaceted views about citizenship that do not fit neatly onto our own debates more than 150 years later should not be surprising. The post In birthright citizenship fight, Justice Department selectively interprets the original meaning of the citizenship clause appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

Cases and Controversies is a recurring series by Carolyn Shapiro, primarily focusing on the effects of the Supreme Court’s rulings, opinions, and procedures on the law, on other institutions, and on our constitutional democracy more generally. In the first weeks of 2026, we’ve seen two U.S. citizens shot and killed by federal Department of Homeland Security agents in Minneapolis. Anyone who follows the news has seen numerous videos and pictures of DHS agents knocking people to the ground, pulling them out of cars, spraying them directly in the face with pepper spray or other chemicals, arresting them with no warrants, demanding proof of citizenship from people of color (and sometimes then rejecting it), and so on. I detailed some of this conduct in late December. It has not abated. As a constitutional law professor, I am frequently asked versions of the following questions: “Is that really legal/constitutional?” “How can they get away with that?” and “Why don’t the courts stop them?” When the answer to the first question is no – as it often is or strongly appears to be – the other questions become even more urgent to ordinary people. And when we look at those questions, a big part of the answer is that the Supreme Court has, over decades, made it increasingly difficult – sometimes impossible – to enforce or vindicate constitutional rights and to redress, much less stop, widespread and systemic governmental lawlessness of the sort we are now seeing. That’s true to some degree even for state and local government officials, but it’s even worse when it comes to federal actors. Indeed, as Alex Reinert puts it, ironically, federal actors have even more leeway than state and local officials to violate the federal Constitution with impunity. The two primary ways courts can theoretically address constitutional violations are through suits for money damages after the fact and suits for injunctive relief to prevent ongoing or imminent harms. Both types of lawsuits have increasing obstacles. Suits for money damages Limited Causes of Action. One of the primary tools for redressing constitutional violations committed by state and local officials is through a statute known as 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Section 1983 is a Reconstruction-era law creating a cause of action for violations of federal rights by officials acting “under color of” state law. Section 1983 itself has numerous problems, including an overly expansive qualified immunity doctrine (about which, more below.) But it does allow some people whose rights have been violated to recover money damages from the perpetrators. By its terms, however, it does not reach federal actors. In 1971, in Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents, the Supreme Court nevertheless recognized such a cause of action. Specifically, the court held in Bivens that the plaintiff could sue federal officers for a search and arrest that allegedly violated the Fourth Amendment. In the decades since, however, the Supreme Court has held that Bivens does not apply “in a new context” or to “a new category of defendants,” including in some cases involving excessive force by Border Patrol agents. As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court in Egbert v. Boule, relative to Congress, “the Judiciary is comparatively ill suited to decide whether a damages remedy against any Border Patrol agent is appropriate.” Of note is that both Egbert and Hernandez v. Mesa, another case precluding a Bivens suit against Border Patrol agents, involved activity at the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico, respectively. We don’t know yet if this solicitude for immigration enforcement will extend to invading people’s homes in the middle of the night hundreds of miles from the border and arresting or detaining them without warrants – which is essentially what happened in Bivens itself. Qualified Immunity. Even where plaintiffs might be able to bring Bivens actions, they must also overcome qualified immunity. Qualified immunity, which also applies to Section 1983 lawsuits, protects officials from liability unless they have violated “clearly established law.” Under this judge-made doctrine, clearly established law has come to require “a case with nearly identical facts” holding that those facts give rise to a constitutional violation. Here’s an example reminiscent of recent DHS activity, described by Joanna Schwartz, a leading scholar and critic of qualified immunity. In that case, an officer who slammed a nonviolent, nonthreatening woman to the ground — breaking her collarbone and knocking her unconscious — was entitled to qualified immunity. Prior cases had held that “where a nonviolent misdemeanant poses no threat to officers and is not actively resisting arrest or attempting to flee, an officer may not employ force just because the suspect is interfering with police or behaving disrespectfully.” But, the court held, the officer was entitled to qualified immunity because this precedent did not clearly establish that “a deputy was forbidden to use a takedown maneuver to arrest a suspect who ignored the deputy’s instruction to ‘get back here’ and continued to walk away from the officer.” Qualified immunity has come under scathing and broadly cross-ideological criticism, but if anything, it has become increasingly rigid, and the Supreme Court regularly reverses appellate courts that deny such immunity. Suits for injunctive relief to stop unconstitutional law enforcement practices Suits for money damages, even when available, are inherently backward-looking. But suits for forward-looking injunctive relief to stop unconstitutional law enforcement practices face their own obstacles. Standing. In the 1983 case of Lyons v. City of Los Angeles, the plaintiff was subjected to a chokehold by the Los Angeles police during a traffic stop, and his larynx was injured. He alleged that the LAPD’s policies and training with respect to chokeholds were unconstitutional, and he sought an injunction to require the department to stop using them. The Supreme Court held that he had no standing – that is, a legal right to sue – to seek such an injunction. Although he had clearly been injured and so presumably could seek money damages, the court concluded that he could not show that he was likely to experience the chokehold again, in part, the majority intimated, because he could avoid this by not violating the law. Like the court’s rulings restricting Bivens claims and expanding qualified immunity, Lyons has long been strongly criticized. There are important differences between Lyons and current litigation seeking to enjoin DHS’s unconstitutional conduct, including that plaintiffs in many cases have “every reason to believe that they [will] encounter ICE agents repeatedly.” But Justice Brett Kavanaugh nonetheless relied (in part) on Lyons in his solo concurrence in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, in which the court paused an injunction of DHS’s racial profiling tactics in California. (The rest of the justices in the majority offered no explanation.) The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit also relied on Lyons in November of last year when blocking a district court injunction limiting federal agents’ use of tear gas, pepper spray, and other crowd control techniques on protesters and journalists. According to the 7th Circuit, “public reporting suggest[ed] that the enhanced immigration enforcement initiative may have lessened or ceased,” presumably reducing the likelihood of plaintiffs encountering the same tactics again. Trump v. CASA. In 2025, the Supreme Court further limited the possibility of injunctive relief by restricting the availability of what are sometimes called nationwide or universal injunctions. Specifically, as Mila Sohoni explained, it “held that federal courts may not give universal injunctions, which are orders that block the application of a law or an executive branch action to anyone who might be harmed by it, not just its application to the plaintiffs.” On its face, that’s a pretty dramatic restriction, which might allow significant and obvious unconstitutional conduct to proceed unchecked. At the same time, however, the CASA court “described several mechanisms that might lead to comparably broad injunctive relief, including class actions.” As a result, in various parts of the country plaintiffs have filed class action lawsuits seeking to enjoin unconstitutional tactics and conduct. In Minnesota, for example, plaintiffs obtained an injunction on behalf of a proposed class of peaceful observers and protesters. But the success of such class actions is hardly assured: In the Minnesota case, the U.S Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit stayed the district court’s injunction pending appeal, in part because it concluded that the plaintiffs were essentially doing an end-run around CASA’s restriction on universal injunctions. As that decision makes clear, we don’t know yet how meaningful the mechanisms for broad relief that CASA identified will turn out to be. The Shadow Docket. The court has repeatedly stayed injunctions against the current administration on the shadow docket, often without providing any reasons and often without regard for the well-established factors that would counsel against granting such stays. Vasquez Perdomo itself, as noted above, allowed DHS’s racial profiling tactics to continue. Two possible paths Nonetheless, at least two important avenues to accountability remain open and are consistent with the Supreme Court’s long emphasis on state sovereignty. First, in the face of the shocking lawlessness of immigration agents, some state and local officials are making clear their intention to investigate and, where appropriate, prosecute federal agents who violate state criminal laws. And they have every right to do that. As the Supreme Court explained in Drury v. Lewis over a century ago, state courts have jurisdiction even “over persons in the military service of the United States, who are accused of a capital crime or of any offence against the person of a citizen, committed within the state.” In response, federal agents may claim what is called “Supremacy Clause immunity” – the idea that legitimate federal policies preempt criminal law. But that immunity applies only when federal officials’ actions are both authorized by federal law and are “necessary and proper” to fulfill those duties. Each case will turn on its facts, but courts may well conclude that this immunity cannot apply when federal agents shoot someone in the back repeatedly, when they blast pepper spray directly in the face of someone already restrained on the ground, or when they not only fail to provide assistance to someone they have shot but prevent others from doing so. A second possible avenue towards accountability is through state laws that authorize lawsuits for money damages when government officials (federal, state, or local) violate people’s federal constitutional rights. A few states have such laws, sometimes called converse 1983 statutes, and more are considering them. Here, too, federal agents might try to claim Supremacy Clause immunity, but plaintiffs can argue that, by definition, if their actions are unconstitutional, they are not “necessary and proper.” The states, then, may be able to give a better answer to the “can they really do that?” question than the Supreme Court has allowed in federal courts. That would be the liberty-protecting promise of federalism in action, consistent with the court’s repeated admonition that “federalism secures to citizens the liberties that derive from the diffusion of sovereign power.” The post When the Supreme Court abets lawlessness appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

As we’ve noted many times before, we read a lot of news stories in the process of preparing this newsletter. But we’ve perhaps never seen a headline as memorable as this one: Educator Who Read ‘I Need a New Butt!’ to Students Wins Job Back in Court. SCOTUS Quick Hits On Thursday, the Supreme Court denied a request from a group of California Republicans to block the state from using its new map in this year’s elections. There were no public dissents from the court’s ruling. For more on the case, see the On Site section below. Chief Justice John Roberts is expected to be at George Washington University Law School today to judge the final round of the Van Vleck Constitutional Law Moot Court Competition. The court could rule at any time on an interim docket case on California’s policies for parental notification when public school students choose to use different pronouns or a different gender identity. The court has not yet indicated when it will next release opinions. If the court follows its typical pattern, the earliest the next opinion day may be is Friday, Feb. 20, when the justices are next scheduled to be in the courtroom. The court will next hear arguments on Monday, Feb. 23, the first day of its February sitting. Morning Reads First Circuit conflicted about deportations to ‘third-party’ countries (Thomas F. Harrison, Courthouse News Service) — A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit “telegraphed Tuesday that it’s inclined to give four immigrants additional safeguards against ‘third-country’ deportations,” but signaled that it’s unlikely to extend those protections to all similarly situated immigrants, according to Courthouse News Service. During the argument, the panel wrestled with the Supreme Court’s June decision to pause a district court order preventing immigrants from being deported to “third countries,” that is, countries not specifically identified on their removal orders, without first ensuring that they would not face torture there. “[T]he First Circuit judges repeatedly expressed concern that the immigrants weren’t being given adequate due process. But they also felt constrained by the Supreme Court’s order. … [T]he judges seemed to settle on a narrow jurisdictional argument that would allow them to affirm the injunction for the four individual plaintiffs but not for all other immigrants as a class.” Judge seems skeptical of legal justification for Pentagon’s punishment of Sen. Mark Kelly (Michael Kunzelman, Associated Press) — U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said on Tuesday “that he knows of no U.S. Supreme Court precedent to justify the Pentagon’s censuring of a sitting U.S. senator who joined a videotaped plea for troops to resist unlawful orders from the Trump administration,” according to the Associated Press. Leon is considering Sen. Mark Kelly’s claim “that Pentagon officials violated his First Amendment free speech rights.” During Tuesday’s hearing, a government attorney “argued that Congress decided that retired military service members are subject to the same Uniform Code of Military Justice that applies to active-duty troops,” while Kelly’s lawyers said that “they aren’t aware of any ruling to support the notion that military retirees have ‘diminished speech rights.'” Trump’s new ammo to toss hush money case conviction (Zach Schonfeld and Ella Lee, The Hill) — U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein heard argument on Wednesday on President Donald Trump’s effort to move a case on hush money allegations made against him from New York state court to federal court. In state court, a “jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records when he repaid his then-fixer, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 hush money payment he made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to keep her quiet about a years-old alleged affair with Trump. Trump denies any affair,” according to The Hill. Hellerstein has already twice denied Trump’s push to move the case, but in November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit instructed him to reconsider because it felt he had “bypassed important issues,” such as whether certain evidence used in the trial should have been treated as part of protected official acts. Trump contends that “the verdict was tainted by jurors seeing evidence protected by the Supreme Court’s subsequent presidential immunity ruling and prosecutors’ theory of the case was preempted by federal election law.” A Legal Tool for Holding ICE Agents to Account, Hiding in Plain Sight (Adam Liptak, The New York Times)(Paywall) — The nationwide debate over the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis and other cities has put a spotlight on “a 1987 law review article by a young law professor named Akhil Reed Amar,” according to The New York Times. In the article, Amar, now a leading constitutional scholar and SCOTUSblog contributor, contended “that state legislatures can authorize lawsuits against federal officials for violating the Constitution.” Although states such as California, Maine, Massachusetts, and New Jersey “have enacted laws along the lines that Professor Amar proposed,” these laws are “largely untested.” In an interview with the Times, Amar stood by the idea that “states can provide remedies against federal officials when federal officials violate federal constitutional rights.” Can AI Argue a Supreme Court Case Better Than a Human Lawyer? (Paul Detrick, Bloomberg Law) — In a new video project, Bloomberg Law explored how lawyers are using generative artificial intelligence and how such AI tools “could shape the future of legal advocacy.” The video features Adam Unikowsky, a partner at Jenner & Block who has experimented with using AI to test his own oral argument skills. Specifically, Unikowsky “fed briefs from one of his [Supreme Court] cases into a large language model and asked the AI to respond to the justices’ questions.” In the video and on his Substack, Unikowsky praised the computer’s performance. A Closer Look: Taylor v. Singleton In June 2024, the Supreme Court issued a major ruling on homelessness in a case that asked whether an Oregon city’s restrictions on public camping violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. A 6-3 court held that certain restrictions are permissible where they criminalize behaviors, such as camping, rather than the status of being homeless, and added that the Eighth Amendment generally has been understood to apply to methods of punishment, rather than restrictions on conduct. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch emphasized that homelessness is a challenging and complex issue, and that camping bans are just one of many tools that cities use to address it. Now, the court has an opportunity to weigh in on a different policy response to homelessness in a case that centers on the First Amendment, rather than the Eighth. In Taylor v. Singleton, the justices have been asked to overturn a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit holding that Alabama statutes prohibiting “a person … from ‘stand[ing] on a highway’ to ‘solicit[] employment, business, or contributions from the occupant of any vehicle’ unless otherwise authorized” and from “[l]oiter[ing], remain[ing], or wander[ing] about in a public place for the purpose of begging” violate free speech. Hal Taylor, secretary of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, contended in his petition for review that the 11th Circuit’s decision is out-of-step with history and tradition. “Begging was not constitutionally protected at the founding; rather, it was widely criminalized,” he wrote. For that reason, Taylor continued, it’s fair to conclude that begging is among the categories of speech that are “fully outside the protection of the First Amendment,” such as “child pornography.”   The Supreme Court has never before directly addressed whether begging is protected by the First Amendment. According to Taylor, now is the right time to do so, however, because (among other reasons) absent Supreme Court intervention, cities will lose a tool they have come to rely on to promote public safety while working to reduce homelessness. Jonathan Singleton, who brought the class-action lawsuit against Alabama’s statutes and who is described in court filings as a homeless resident of Montgomery, Alabama who “holds signs in public soliciting help,” initially waived his right to respond to the petition. But in November, the court called for a response. In his brief, Singleton contended that there is not disagreement between the federal courts of appeals or state supreme courts over this issue, a factor that the Supreme Court often looks for when deciding whether to take up a case. “The Eleventh Circuit’s rejection of Petitioner’s argument is consistent with established precedent in every circuit and state supreme court that has considered the issue,” he wrote. And the Supreme Court itself, Singleton continued, has held that “charitable appeals for funds” are a protected form a speech in a decision striking down certain restrictions on door-to-door or on-the-street requests for donations. “That is precisely the speech that the challenged statutes prohibit,” he wrote. This petition for review is scheduled to be considered by the justices for the first time at their private conference on Friday, Feb. 20. SCOTUS Quote “Judges do not sit on cushions of down while administering the supreme law of the land in this court.” — Justice Henry Baldwin in Ex parte Crane On Site From the SCOTUSblog Team Supreme Court allows California to use congressional map benefitting Democrats The Supreme Court on Wednesday afternoon cleared the way for California to use a new congressional map intended to give Democrats five additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. In a one-sentence order, the justices turned down a request from a group of California Republicans that would have required the state to continue to use the map in place for the last several federal elections in the state while their challenge to the map moves forward. There was a surge in executions in 2025. Here’s how the Supreme Court responded. Forty-seven people were put to death in the United States in 2025, the highest annual execution total since 2009. Several factors led to the surge, including the Trump administration’s embrace of the death penalty, a marked increase in executions in Florida, and the end of some state-level death penalty moratoriums. The Supreme Court also played a role by denying every request to postpone an execution that it fielded in 2025. Here’s a brief overview of those decisions and a look at what may be ahead for the court. SCOTUS Outside Opinions The Black Codes must not define America’s fundamental freedoms In a column for SCOTUSblog, Pete Patterson revisited the oral argument in Wolford v. Lopez, during which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned whether objections to using Black Codes (laws passed in southern states after the Civil War to prevent newly freed persons from possessing firearms) in order to defend modern gun restrictions signal a problem with the court’s Second Amendment precedent. Patterson contended that “rejecting reliance on the Black Codes is not only consistent with analyzing the history behind a law – it is demanded by it.” The post SCOTUStoday for Thursday, February 5 appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

Equal Protection Project Impact Reports – Year-End 2025

Ivy League professor warns elite schools are trying to ‘wait out’ Trump administration’s anti-DEI efforts