The bruised Supreme Court returns to court with potential election cases looming – DNyuz

The Supreme Court’s new term, which begins when the justices return to the court Monday, already includes cases on transgender rights, untraceable “ghost guns” and whether Mexico can sue U.S. firearms manufacturers. The coming months could also bring voting disputes that could decide the presidential election.

Still, after three memorable terms in which the court struck down abortion rights, abolished admissions to race-conscious colleges, and created substantial immunity for presidential crimes, the docket has returned to a kind of normalcy for the time being, with promising decisions that are causing sharp divisions among the justices and ripples through American life, but fall short in causing the gigantic social shocks of recent years.

The lower profile of the court, however brief, may come as a relief to the judges, who have been bruised by the aftershocks of the recent decisions, by internal tensions over whether or not to adhere to the ethical guidelines laid down last years have been announced and by the approval ratings that are still being tested. modern lows.

In addition to the major cases involving transgender rights and guns, the court will hear a series of notable cases.

A First Amendment challenge to a Texas law aimed at protecting minors from online pornography will be decided. Another will examine a case in which Oklahoma is poised to execute a death row inmate despite the objections of its own attorney general.

Others will once again scrutinize the power of regulators, now in the context of the Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to discourage young people from using flavored e-cigarettes. The court will also hear a pair of major securities fraud cases against tech giants Facebook and Nvidia.

The court added more than a dozen cases to its docket on Friday, including cases involving DNA testing for death row inmates, the disposal of nuclear waste and the use of deadly force by police. In the coming months, judges are likely to agree to hear perhaps as many as 20 additional cases. These include Second Amendment issues and further attacks on the power of administrative agencies.

A lot can still change, says Jaime Santos, a lawyer at Goodwin Procter who specializes in appellate and Supreme Court cases.

“Remember that while the fall has been fairly sparse, collegial and relatively unremarkable, the spring grants and oral arguments in the spring have been quite explosive,” she said, referring to cases involving former President Donald J. Trump and access to abortion.

“So I don’t think anyone should sit back and relax anymore,” Ms. Santos said.

The slow start may be the result of strategy rather than chance, said Kannon Shanmugam, an attorney at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, who has argued dozens of cases before the justices.

“The court may have deliberately lightened its burden in anticipation of an election dispute,” he said. “It is difficult to know what form that lawsuit might take, but it could be a major distraction from the court’s regular work.”

The term’s largest case to date is United States v. Skrmetti, No. 23-477, a challenge to a Tennessee law banning certain medical treatments for transgender minors. More than two dozen other states have similar laws, which have opened a new front in the culture wars.

Tennessee law prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty blockers or hormones to treat the psychological problems caused by the inconsistency between perceived gender and the gender assigned at birth. The Biden administration says the law violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

This challenge is likely to prevail only if the court finds that the law is subject to heightened constitutional scrutiny, requiring states to demonstrate that their laws are substantially related to achieving an important state objective. Gender-based classifications are subject to such scrutiny, but the parties dispute whether the law discriminates on the basis of gender.

The government has also urged the Supreme Court to rule that discrimination based on transgender status should be subject to increased scrutiny, but this argument is unlikely to prevail. “The court has not added to the list of classifications that have prompted heightened scrutiny in recent decades,” said a report from the Supreme Court in Georgetown last month. “The chances of this court doing this now are less than zero.”

If Trump wins another term, his Justice Department could drop the case. Indeed, Mr Shanmugam said, “a change in administration could have a substantial impact on the court’s role this term.”

In June, the court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had exceeded its legal authority by banning bump stocks, devices that allow semiautomatic rifles to fire at speeds comparable to conventional weapons. machine guns.

On Tuesday, the court will hear a largely similar case, Garland v. VanDerStok, No. 23-852, which again asks whether the ATF went too far. The question in the new case is whether the agency can regulate “ghost guns” — kits that can be purchased online and assembled into untraceable homemade firearms.

But there’s reason to believe the court won’t divide along predictable lines this time. First, the contested regulation did not prohibit the sale or possession of the kits and only required manufacturers and sellers to obtain licenses, mark their products with serial numbers and conduct background checks.

On the other hand, the court temporarily revived the scheme in August 2023 after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans declined to stay a trial judge’s ruling. The Supreme Court vote was 5-4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberal members to form a majority.

Another decision by the Fifth Circuit, which has a reputation for making extreme rulings, is the subject of an appeal in the online porn case. The case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, No. 23-1122, concerns a Texas law aimed at restricting minors’ access to sexual material on the Internet by requiring age verification measures, such as the presentation of government-issued IDs .

A divided Fifth Circuit panel rejected a First Amendment challenge to the law and applied a relaxed form of judicial review. That ruling appeared to conflict with Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, a 2004 decision in which the justices blocked a federal law very similar to the Texas law that applied the most demanding form of judicial review, strict oversight, to determine to argue that the law impermissibly infringed on adults’ First Amendment rights.

Another Fifth Circuit case involving minors, this one involving flavored e-cigarettes, will require the justices to decide whether the Food and Drug Administration acted lawfully in rejecting the application of two manufacturers of flavored liquids such as “Jimmy the Juice Man Peachy Strawberry’. “Signature Series Mom’s Pistachio” and “Suicide Bunny Mother’s Milk and Cookies.”

The appeals court ruled by a vote of ten to six that the agency’s denials were arbitrary and capricious. In asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, Food and Drug Administration v. Wages and White Lion Investments, No. 23-1038, the agency’s attorneys cited another appeals court that had reached the opposite conclusion . The Fifth Circuit’s decision “has far-reaching public health implications and threatens to undermine the central purpose of the Tobacco Control Act, which is ‘to ensure that a new generation of Americans does not become addicted to nicotine and tobacco products,'” they wrote, citing from the other decision of the court of appeal.

Judges hear fewer state court cases these days. One exception is Glossip v. Oklahoma, No. 22-7466, a death penalty case the court will hear Wednesday. It is an appeal of an Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruling ordering the execution of a prisoner despite a plea from the state’s attorney general, a Republican, for a new trial after evidence emerged that the testimony of the state’s key witness.

Of the more than a dozen cases the court planned to hear Friday, one stood out: Smith & Wesson v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, No. 23-1141, in which Mexico wants to hold U.S. gun manufacturers accountable for what it says. their role in aiding the gun carnage of drug cartels.

On the morning after Election Day, the court will hear Facebook v. Amalgamated Bank, No. 23-980, a class action lawsuit over whether Facebook adequately disclosed a data breach that allowed Cambridge Analytica to steal the private information of millions of users collect.

A week later, the justices will consider another securities fraud class action, Nvidia v. E. Ohman J: of Fonder AB, No. 23-970, challenging Nvidia, now the dominant manufacturer of chips for artificial intelligence services accused of misrepresenting its reliance on the cryptocurrency mining industry in 2017 and 2018.

The amounts at stake in these two cases are enormous, but the disputes are routine by Supreme Court standards, which call on the justices to refine legal standards rather than lay out broad constitutional principles.

Jennifer Mascott, a law professor at the Catholic University of America, said the court would welcome such cases because it was “still reeling from significant breaches of confidentiality in recent years and public unrest and protests over court rulings.”

A study released last week by the Annenberg Public Policy Center documented what it called “a stunning increase in distrust” toward the Supreme Court over the past two decades. Only 44 percent of respondents surveyed in July and August expressed confidence that the court would act in the best interests of people like them. That’s the lowest level since the center started asking the question in 2005, when 75 percent of the public trusted the court.

A second Gallup poll released last week found deep polarization in public opinion about the court. While 72 percent of Republicans surveyed in September approved of the work, only 15 percent of Democrats did.

Against that background, the judges can appreciate a quiet period.

“The Supreme Court seems to be hitting the snooze button,” said Deepak Gupta, an attorney at Gupta Wessler who regularly appears before the justices. “We have gone from constitutional earthquakes to cuts in legal paperwork. It is as if the judges wanted to clear up a controversy in the run-up to the elections.”

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